Size Matters
by Stephen S. Hall
Houghton Mifflin

If Randy Newman had written a song called "Black People Got No Reason to Live," it would have been a major professional setback. By contrast, his song "Short People," (Short people got no reason to live / they got little hands / and little eyes / And they walk around / Tellin' great big lies) is generally regarded as extremely clever and commercially shrewd.

Short people, of course, have always been fair game for ridicule. Being at the bottom of the "normal" curve for height opens you up for all manner of humiliation, particularly if you happen to be male. Nearly exclusively so, in fact; small women are "petite." Small men are shrimps.

One such hapless small guy — 5 foot, 5 3/4"-tall science writer Stephen S. Hall — set out to dig deeply into the history of his own childhood misery. The result is Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness and Success of Boys — and the Men They Become.

It's a far-ranging book about a rarely considered topic. In its 310 pages, Hall explores the history of modern height measurement, the ethics and economics of human growth hormone, the ecology of baboon bullies, and the King of Prussia's fetish for tall soldiers. He even recalls a vividly humiliating gym class beat-down for the benefit of his normal-sized readers.

Those of us who grew up small already knew where he was coming from.

Cherokee Heights Middle School, in Madison, Wisconsin, circa 1988:

A 6th grader — short and underweight — stands in the hallway during passing time. He is part of a circle of 10 or 20 kids watching two bigger boys wrestling in the hallway. Unlike so many of the scraps that dominate the hallways between classes, this isn't clowning around between friends — it's the beginning of a real fight, one of dozens of full-on brawls that the boy will witness during his three years at the school.

The squabble has gotten more frantic, and the wrestling has turned into a sloppy fist fight. One of the boys, the smaller of the two, decides to even the odds. He grabs a skateboard from an onlooker and swings it in a wide, glorious arc. The deck catches the other boy square in the face, and a plume of blood sprays across the floor.

The crowd scatters. The board drops to the ground. Teachers emerge from nearby classrooms. The scene ends.

That fight set the tenor for the next three years of my childhood. I had transitioned from a grade school where the main shared experience was a weekly sing-along to a middle school where the main recreational activity was the bouncing small kids' heads off of lockers during passing time.

In grade school, I had been considered a troublemaker; in middle school, I suddenly found myself a timid little blip amongst the background roar of day-to-day violence.

In "Size Matters," Hall spends a great deal of time talking about his own experience as an under-sized victim of bullies. He could've — perhaps should've — spent another 200 pages doing nothing but examining the large-bully-versus-small-prey relationship in painstaking detail, because it strikes for former victims an emotional chord that resonates like the first few bars of Beethoven's 5th.

But Hall isn't content to merely provide emotional catharsis for childhood punching bags; "Size Matters" is an ambitiously omnivorous romp through all aspects of human growth. Like any entertaining writer, Hall discusses the giants and dwarves who populate the margins of his topic, but he's (rightfully) far more concerned with trying to figure out what "normal" means — and trying to illuminate the path of those who have wrestled with the question before he got to it.

Every pediatrician's utility chest contains a growth chart among its standard-issue tools. Hall explores the history of the various charts' evolution (there are, after all, different approaches to the question of what "normal" growth means) and the impact that its judgments, rendered in icily objective percentiles, can have on small boys — and the families of small boys.

In one particularly luminous passage, Hall unpacks the modern chart in all its complexity. He explains that it is:

...a document 250 years in the making, [reflecting] in sequence the Enlightenment's zeal for scientific measurement; the birth of modern statistics; the use of measurement to promote eugenics in the nineteenth century; the culture wars between nature and nurture in the early twentieth century; the social definition of normal (or abnormal) height; and the increasing influence of commerce on the practice of medicine.

In one data-laden, relatively easy-to-read document, the growth chart spells out precisely how well you're doing. Naturally, those who fall toward the bottom of the curve aren't "failing" — you can't fail to grow through incompetence.

And yet, if you grow up small, you can't help but feel as though you screwed up somewhere.

That lingering sense of failure — which played itself out most dramatically in the knockdown fight, and coming in last in the pecking order of games such as basketball and tackle football — can alter your perspective as a kid. You worry about how you can make it academically, since sports are not really going to be your bag. And you worry about running with a crew of friends, because there's strength in numbers.

Getting through Cherokee was, according to my memories, a two-track process. On one hand, I found myself a tight mob of friends, and stuck close to them. Cemented by bonds of disdain for authority, love of video games, and a general concern about not having the crap kicked out of us unnecessarily, we hung out at lunch and watched one another's backs as much as possible.

On the other hand, there were always those times — heading out to or heading back in from recess, passing through the halls between classes, walking to school — where I was vulnerable. In a racially mixed school with a healthy gang presence, small white boys like myself were the lowest possible denominator when it came to violence. Beating us up was a no-risk proposition, so plenty of larger kids — regardless of race, culture, or creed — did exactly that.

There is a particularly beautiful section within Size Matters wherein the author, reflective and empowered, thinks back on all the important things that he learned from being tiny and enduring years of size-based hazing.

"I learned to talk fast and keep people off balance with jokes," he writes.

"I learned that there could be a price to pay for being assertive; then it convinced me to blend into the background but now I see that it encouraged me to be a good listener," he writes.

"I learned to keep a low profile and not attract too much attention; ... now it helps explain my outsider mentality — distrusting organizations and institutions," he writes.

Bing, bing, and bing.

The young male ideal — active, aggressive, even rampaging — has a powerful size component that Hall dissects at length in "Size Matters." In an effort to figure out what exactly small boys are running away from, Hall makes a valiant attempt to define the ideal that they're running toward. He traces the search for perfect human proportion — and the evolution of that ideal — from the ancient Greeks, who captured perfection with sensual statuary, to the Renaissance artists who wrestled with the numbers that would describe the ideal human form, to Italian immigrant Angelo Siciliano — better known today as Charles Atlas.

With the help of shrewd marketing, Atlas parlayed his body-building career into iconic immortality — he was the strongman with a heart of gold who could transform a 97-pound weakling from the target of sand-kicking bullies into an avenging giant. The comic promoting his Dynamic Tension system of body building has become a 7-panel codex of the insecurities that plague small kids, and the recommended method of overcoming them: sucking it up and becoming huge.

I didn't actually suck it up and become huge, but I did eventually leave Cherokee for the far more civilized world of Madison West High School. The change was largely for the better, but not everything changed overnight.

There was a particularly nasty kid named Brian who singled me out for an ongoing stream of abuse in Driver's Ed class — making that semester one of the longest in high school for me — and I remember feeling incredibly annoyed by how the rest of the class acted as Brian's audience and co-conspirators.

Hall writes about the "culture of silence" that surrounds bullying -- the idea that those children (and even teachers) not directly involved in the confrontation act as co-conspirators, enabling the violence to continue. Brian, however, wasn't particularly physical — he was just an asshole, and I was a conveniently small and awkward target. In retrospect, it's hard to feel too angry at him, but at the time, I would often leave Driver's Ed burning with a poorly articulated desire to commit murder.

It's pretty rare that you get anything resembling cinematic closure, and, in retrospect, I certainly wouldn't complain too much if I had never received it. But, as things worked out, I was given a free psychological pass to the next level at the end of my sophomore year.

Brian was, of course, a naturally talented baseball player, and one warm spring day, he decided to expand his hazing of me to the gym class playing field. I was standing in left field, not particularly interested in the game, when Brian stepped behind the plate. He waved his bat at me.

"I'm hittin' this one to Little Jimmy! Get ready Jimmy! This one's heading your way!"

Etc. etc. etc. — I remember his taunting as having gone on for about five full monotonous-yet-terrifying minutes of pre-batting banter.

The pitch followed thereafter, and, sure enough — CRCK. A high fly to left field. I ran to where the ball seemed to be heading. My glove went up — the ball descended from the bright blue sky — and, with a satisfying thwack, it landed in my glove.

The class, including my teacher, burst into applause. Brian was "out," and — for something like 20 seconds — I feel a little thrill of vindication. The audience of co-conspirators has revealed its true colors... they were with me all along!

Or something like that. In retrospect, like the masses at any good Christian-versus-lion show at the Coliseum, they were just easily entertained. Good and evil had nothing to do with it.

I took my newfound confidence back into the batting order with me, and Brian promptly struck me out with three consecutive strikes.

Ah well. Not as Hollywood-perfect as I'd hoped, but close enough. Brian faded into the woodwork at school, and, finally free of bullying I concentrated on the things that really mattered: publishing an underground newspaper and chasing girls.

For most readers, Size Matters will be an engaging read — a science book that uses a conversational writing style and vivid anecdotes to connect its readers to all the crazy behind-the-scenes hijinks behind the seemingly straightforward process of "growing up." But for those of us who lived on the stunted side of the growth curve, it's a revelation. It's a map to the overgrown wilderness of our childhood memories, the dark and shadowy place where much of our personality was forged amid a hailstorm of half-baked abuse, desperate social maneuvering and the occasional purple nurple.

It's probable, as Hall writes, that height says nothing about the character of an individual, and instead speaks volumes about the character and values of a society. But height does, in fact, say quite a lot to most people about themselves — and Size Matters goes a long way toward making the babble intelligible.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)