Geoffrey Becker’s short stories in Black Elvis have a tendency to leave me scratching my head—but that’s just the point. Becker’s characters are frequently left scratching their heads, too.

Winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, Black Elvis collects a dozen of Becker’s stories into a collection that could best be described as a handbook for people trying to find themselves. It’s no “How-To” guide, though; consider it more of a “misery loves company” companion because Becker’s characters find themselves as lost at the end of each story as they were at the beginning.

In the title story, for instance, a blues guitarist who goes by the stage name “Black Elvis” suddenly finds himself supplanted at the local club’s open mic night. Already strumming his way through an ungrounded existence, the guitarist suddenly wonders what the future holds for him. “Have I gotten it wrong all this time?” he asks the man who replaced him. “Should I be doing something else?”

The book is filled with musicians and artists, discontents all. The musicians don’t quite have perfect rhythm, and the artists must paint in other people’s styles. In “The Naked Man,” the artist can’t bring herself to part with her paintings and so confounds her own ability to make a living doing what she loves to do.

Many of Becker’s protagonists are traveling. Some are on vacation, some are on business trips, some are escaping from the real world, and some are wandering across Europe, guitar cases in hand. All seem to be on uninspired quests of their own, trying to find their places in the world or their reasons for being.

Even Lenny, the protagonist in “Iowa Winter,” is displaced from his own home because of his drinking. He’s a solid guy, still married, still stopping by to see his wife who still lives in their old house. She makes him dinner that he can take home with him, and he fixes things around the old homestead. “I had drunk myself out of this marriage ten years ago, but it didn’t mean we weren’t in love,” he says.

The characters inevitably come to minor epiphanies about themselves, but they never find The Big Thing missing from their lives. Some of them don’t even know what Big Thing they’re looking to find. They just have a general uneasiness that all is not right in their lives, a vague forlornness that nips at their hearts. U2 could be standing in the background throughout, playing “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”

That feeling of incompleteness is best exemplified in the way Becker’s stories end—usually in an awkward spot of some sort, in the middle of an action that doesn’t really relate to the main plot. In “Santorini,” for instance, the protagonist finds herself overrun by feral cats after she makes the mistake of feeding one on the balcony of her Greek villa. In “Man Under,” the protagonist’s musings on a subway car are interrupted when the subway accidentally hits someone. Such actions have nothing to do with the actual story, which can leave a reader wondering what the point might be.

Still, the stories are poignant and humorous, infused with an undercurrent of melancholy. They are also imminently relatable. Life seldom has neat, tidy endings, and neither do Becker’s stories. Instead, like his own characters, Becker leaves his readers scratching their heads—and with plenty to consider.

In the introduction to Last Chance – Preserving Life on Earth, author Larry J. Schweiger, the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, comes right out and says that he’s not trying to change minds with this book. Instead, it’s his hope that the book will motivate millions of people to transform their concerns over global warming into activism.

There are three sections to the book that can be summarized as follows. First, the latest science says that disruptions due to climate change will be worse and happen faster than the best estimates of even a couple of years ago. Second, there are a few global ecosystems that are more sensitive than even average, and there are people who don’t want you to know that and who actively work to keep you ignorant of the facts. And third, there are a few things we can do to help ourselves and the Earth.

People who are familiar with the state of climate science will not read much new in the first section of Last Chance. It briefly recounts key moments in the history of climate science – the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it’s four Assessment Reports, the discovery of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) by Scripps Scientist Charles Keeling, the concern over climate “tipping points.” As a result of global warming, Schweiger points out that we are likely facing an irrecoverable loss in Arctic sea ice, the potential for massive methane hydrate releases, and the loss of millions of acres of forests to insects like the pine beetle and to massive drought-induced forest fires. Furthermore, Schweiger points out that the increasing global temperatures are causing massive losses in Greenland ice and, as a result, raising the global sea level.

And Schweiger supports all his claims with references to peer-reviewed papers, sections of the NASA, NOAA, and EPA websites, and media reports.

In recounting the devastation that has already happened, and thus is representative of what will likely happen in the future, Schweiger focuses on invasive species in Lake Erie and the political machinations that polar bear supporters have endured in the process of trying to get the bears listed as an Endangered Species. And he calls out to the outdoorsmen in all of us with his descriptions of changes in the life cycles of horseshoe crab, sea turtles, and pronghorn antelope, all of which are seriously threatened by global warming.

But he doesn’t stop there. Schweiger fingers journalists and the mainstream news media as being complicit in the world’s unwillingness to address global warming. He believes that advertising dollars and short-term-profit hungry media companies are making editorial decisions about what stories to run based on perceptions of whether the ensuing controversy is worth the loss of advertising revenue. In addition, Schweiger suggests that newsroom cuts to experienced journalists and expensive investigative reporters are coupling with a loss of “public interest” reporting to essentially dumb down media just as global warming is heating up to a level that calls out for experienced communicators.

Schweiger wraps up his book with a detailed call to action. Support electric cars powered over a smart grid from renewable sources of electricity. Make your homes and workplaces as energy efficient as possible. And support those politicians who act on these issues with money and your vote. Schweiger also condemns industrial farming as being destructive to the topsoil and recommends that people support local, small and mid-size farms that farm using sustainable agricultural practices that keep soil nutritious and alive. And finally, he calls for the reader to educate themselves and those around them – family, friends, coworkers, media sources, even political representatives – about the real dangers of global warming.

Last Chance isn’t a catastrophe tale, even though Schweiger makes it clear that catastrophe will very likely be in our future if we don’t address global warming. Instead, it’s a call to action for those readers who recognize how much global warming will change their lives and the lives of their descendants for many generations to come. And Schweiger provides recommended action plans to ease implementing the various recommendations that he makes throughout Last Chance.

All in all, Last Chance is a good book for those readers who are already convinced of the seriousness of global warming, want to have their understanding reinforced, and who want to take more action but don’t know how. But it’s not a book to convince anyone to do something they weren’t already inclined to do.

The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson
by Chris Mackowski* and Kristopher D. White
Thomas Publications

*S&R’s very own Chris Mackowski

Reading The Last Days of Stonewall Jackson is like poring over a treasure chest of family relics as a wise uncle explains the contents. The wise uncles are the authors Chris and Kristopher. These two historians and writers have taken an amazing number of primary and secondary sources and woven a fascinating tale of the last week in the life of Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, accidentally shot by his own men at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. They report documented events with insights and an obvious love and respect for the topic.

This accessible volume can be read in a single sitting, but don’t, you’ll be rewarded by savoring the details. The story is told in words, selected art, maps, quotes and historic and modern photos. Each is selected to enhance important points in the storyline. The authors excel at filling in the small details that bring the story to life. The reader knows the weather, feels the confusion of battle, senses the fear when Stonewall is shot, and importantly the authors give us closure in knowing the calm certainty Stonewall Jackson felt in his final moments.

“Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.” – The last words of Stonewell Jackson.

The story has moments as diverse as learning Stonewall Jackson’s arm was buried separately from his body (it was amputated in the aftermath of his shooting, but some days before Jackson succumbed to complications of pneumonia) to a touching passage retelling the moment Jackson met his daughter Julia. There are handy timelines included and an appendix listing the fate of all the characters in this drama. When you finish the final chapter you will be very glad you opened that treasure chest.

Anyone who’s seen Guillermo del Toro’s recent movies—Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies (and a two-part The Hobbit on the way)—probably expect anything spawned by that mind to be boldly imaginative. Del Toro takes risks and he paints large while paying attention to the most meticulous details.

So when del Toro teamed up with Chuck Hogan to write a vampire trilogy, fans understandably expected something crazy, crazy, crazy good.

With the first part of that trilogy, The Strain, fans do indeed get something good—but it lacks the crazy, crazy, crazy.

The book starts with the arrival a transcontinental jet at JFK. The plane stops dead on the tarmac. Air traffic controls and emergency responders can’t figure out what’s going on, so everyone goes into terrorist-response mode.

Enter Dr. Eph Goodweather and his assistant Nora Martinez of the CDC. They arrive as part of the response team in case of any biological threats. Goodweather is the first to realize, after a series of inexplicable events (of course), that what they face is an infection far worse than any mere virus.

Think “Vampire Apocalypse.”

Yeah, instead of a plague of zombies taking over the world, the premise del Toro and Hogan set up is that a vampire plague will take over the world.

Vampire plague aside, kudos go out to the authors for taking a radically different approach to vampirism. It’s so radically different, though, that die-hard vampire fans may have a tough time reconciling the authors’ take with their own thoughts about what a good, old-fashioned vampire is supposed to be.

Love their vision or hate it, del Toro and Hogan have at least one thing going for them: These are no mamby-pamby cute, sexy vampires who live tortured, tragic lives. The vampire lord of The Strain, Sardu, is nasty, calculating, and cruel. Whereas even Dracula had a little charm, Sardu comes across more like Max Shreck’s walking cadaver, Nosferatu—but bigger and meaner. And no sexiness.

Sardu has a backstory that might lay the seeds for sympathy in one of the subsequent volumes, but for now, he’s The Big Evil.

And therein lies one of the problems with The Strain. The book tries—not especially hard—to rise above genre fiction and be more of a mainstream thriller, but it just can’t quite break free of the trappings of horror. Sardu, for instance, remains a one-dimensional horror. The book’s central mystery bedevils everyone until a wise old man, Abraham Van Helsing–er, actually, Abraham Setrakian–shows up deus ex machinas-like with the answers. No one believes the hero until it’s too late.

Fortunately, the book avoids gratuitous depictions of graphic violence and focuses instead on mood and tone, which are big plusses (and del Toro trademarks), and the book is paced exceptionally well. But the imaginative firepower that one might expect from del Toro never really explodes with full force, and that keeps the book from becoming crazy, crazy, crazy good.

Is it fair to judge the book that way? I’d say, “No,” except splashed right across the top of the book is the phrase “From the creator of the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth.” If the publisher wants to pimp that out, then del Toro has to live and die by the plug.

But judged on its own merits and not by the del Toro baggage a reader might bring to the book, The Strain certainly provides lots of chills, some believable characters, and an interesting premise. Those things alone make it a worthwhile read. The Strain doesn’t have to be crazy, crazy, crazy good to still be good.

Will del Toro and Hogan’s vision of vampirism catch on? I still don’t know if I’m sold (although, I admit, I’m looking forward to the next installment of the trilogy, slated for 2010). But one thing’s for sure: it sure beats teen heartthrob vampirism. These guys make the undead terrifying, just they way they should be.

Got zombies on the brain? Well, it’s better than having them eat your brain, so that’s a plus.

Zombies are a hot pop-cultural property these days. Woody Harrelson’s buddy movie Zombieland has been eating up theaters. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies brought Jane Austen back from the dead to become one of the year’s publishing phenoms. Marvel Comics is now on their umpteeth iteration of a Marvel Zombies franchise that, pardon the pun, doesn’t want to die.

While zombies don’t have the long literary tradition of, say, vampires, there’s been plenty of recent zombie-lit out there to feed your brain. Here are a few recent favorites:

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith—This really is Pride & Prejudice with random zombie mayhem inserted into the text, although the zombie stuff is more background noise than anything else. The story will be going along just like normal, someone will encounter a zombie and slay it in a demonstration of impressive fighting skills, and then the story will continue along as though nothing happened. There are lots of ninja references, too, because of course ninjas and zombies are like peas in a pod. If you go into it knowing the book’s a lark, you’ll do fine, although the joke does get old about two-thirds of the way through the book (or perhaps sooner).

Zombie Notes: A Study Guide to the Best in Undead Literary Classics by Laurie Rozakis—If Undead Lit is your thing, then this study guide is a must. “[M]any details about classic literature get hazy with the passage of time,” Rozakis explains. Her book looks at “the effect of the undead on great books,” such as A Zombie Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, Moby-Dick, Zombie Whale by Herman Melville, and A Tale of Two Cities Overrun with Zombies by Charles Dickens. Yeah, the premise is an obvious rip-off of P&P&Z, but like zombies themselves, some ideas just never stay dead.

The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks by Max Brooks, illustrated by Ibraim Roberson— The book’s teaser says it all, really: “They’re coming & they’re hungry.” A follow-up to Brooks’ seminal and deadpan-funny Zombie Survival Guide, this book puts the “graphic” in graphic novel. Ostensibly a book that recounts major zombie outbreaks through history, this book is really just an excuse for gruesome zombie carnage. Think axes, skulls, brains, and intestines in meticulously detailed black and white. (As a side note, Brooks’ novel World War Z is brilliant modern classic that recounts the world’s fall during a zombie apocalypse.)

Patient Zero: A Joe Ledger Novel by Jonathan Maberry—“When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, then there’s either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world,” says Maberry’s hard-knuckle hero. “And there’s nothing wrong with my skills.” So what’s wrong with the world? How about zombies as weapons of mass destruction? Maberry tries to do a little too much by tackling an ambitious premise and establishing characters for what he obviously hopes will be a new series. (“A” Joe Ledger novel? C’mon, it’s “the only” Joe Ledge novel!”) Still, it’s a thriller of the first order. Think Arnold Schwarzenegger’s strike team from Predator combined with Dirty Harry’s attitude, sprinkled with new, gritty James Bond sensibility. With zombies.

PLUS: Don’t forget about Zombie Haiku!

If you’ve been attacked by a werewolf and have survived, then you need a copy of Ritch Duncan and Bob Powers’ new book The Werewolf’s Guide to Life: A Manual for the Newly Bitten.

While lycanthropy is inconvenient at best and terribly dangerous at worst, Duncan and Powers contend that it’s something a person can successfully manage. Through proper precautions and care—including cages, restraining systems, and livestock—a lycanthrope can live a full, rich, successful life. Otherwise, without the advice offered in the manual, a lyc is doomed to be an object of scorn, attracting mobs of angry, pitchfork- and torch-wielding villagers.

The Werewolf’s Guide works as a humor piece because Duncan and Powers play it straight, with casual matter-of-factness: werewolves are real. “Unlike the rest of society,” they write, “werewolves happen to have a condition that, three times a month, causes their bodies to almost double in size, triple in strength and agility, grow a mass of tightly woven fur, and transform from an unremarkable human being into a savage, wild animal resembling (but distinctly different from) a wolf, whose behavior patterns are generally dictated by voracious hunger and rage.”

There’s no supernatural mysticism to lycanthropy. “The blood and saliva of werewolves contain a contagion that acts upon the pituitary gland,” the authors explain. “After you’ve been attacked, this contagion travels through your bloodstream and causes your pituitary gland to release a rare and normally dormant thyroid-stimulating hormone called lycantropin.”

Max Brooks’ 2003 The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead worked for much the same reason. People who’ve read both books will find it impossible not to draw comparisons between the two, right down to the cute little illustrations in each one. In that context, Duncan and Powers’ book feels derivative—it’s just different enough to be worthwhile, but it owes its very existence to Brooks.

That said, The Werewolf’s Guide is brain candy enough to stand on its own as fun escapism. Duncan and Powers are sophisticated with their werewolf construct, and they explore it with a surprisingly elaborate level of detail. They cover a gamut of topics that ranges from “romance and the modern lycanthrope” to “Of God, the Devil , and lycanthrope faith” to “keeping secret, keeping safe, staying alive.” The book includes interviews with werewolf hunters and with “fur chasers” (humans who have fetish-like obsessions with werewolves).

At 236 pages, the joke maybe gets old after a while, but kudos to Duncan and Powers for thoroughly thinking through their approach. The book is light enough that most readers can probably barrel through it in just a couple sittings, which should be enough to keep the humor fresh.

The Werewolf’s Guide offers plenty to like for lycs and non-lycs alike.

Well, confined to bed for a few days, trying to avoid anything that would tax my foggy and phlegm-filled head, I decided to tackle McCloud’s book.

Bad choice and good choice.

Bad choice because it looked deceptively light, but in fact, the book is a pretty heavy-duty, sophisticated look at comic book theory. Yeah, that’s right: “comic book theory.”

Good choice because McCloud is a brilliant theorist who explains a complicated theory in a lucid, engaging way. In particular, McCloud’s artwork continually refreshes itself in delightfully surprising ways throughout.

I learned a lot about art and a lot about comics. In fact, it was nifty to really deconstruct the craft and the art of comics, which I’ve always understood intuitively. I kept having lightbulb moments as McCloud explained the theory behind something that I recognized immediately from my own reading experiences. I knew it without knowing it, if you know what I mean.

The downside to the book is that it was written in 1993, and since then, comics have continued to undergo tremendous evolution, both artistically and in their writing. I would have been interested to know what McCloud thought of those changes and how they worked into his ideas about the medium. He’s since published two more books, so I’ll have to check those out to see if those books include responses to those changes.

Understanding Comics isn’t a book for everyone, but it is a book for more than just the comic book fanboy. Anyone with an interest in art theory would find something interesting in McCloud’s theories. It’s a serious work with serious ideas, told though a brilliant approach. Set aside the cough syrup and settle in for some serious thinking.

Yeah, there’s a book called Zombie Haiku, and it’s exactly what you think it is—and I bought it anyway.

Zombies have overridden some nameless city, and a hapless poet falls victim to the plague. As he transforms into the undead, the poet recounts his experience using haiku, three-line poems with five, seven, and five syllables:

Blood is really warm.
It’s like drinking hot chocolate
but with more screaming.

When dealing with zombies, one has to suspend disbelief to begin with, but Zombie Haiku takes that suspension to a whole new level. The basic conceit of the book—that a rampaging zombie can somehow write haiku as he’s rampaging—is a tough conceit to accept, even for readers eager and willing to embrace the humor the book offers.

But once a reader gets past that, the book is loads of fun.

The book replicates the poet’s journal, which he’d been using to chronicle “the earthly beauty which can be so overwhelming that I sometimes feel like I’m going to burst open.” The journal contains the kind of ridiculously sappy haiku one would expect from a single, middle-aged man who was probably teased mercilessly and called “Nature Boy” when he was in high school:

The bird flew away
with more than just my bread crumbs.
He took my sorrow.

Fortunately, the schlock doesn’t last. Instead of being a collection of bad nature poems, the haiku begin to recount the unusual events of the poet’s day, when radio stations stop playing music and 911 offers a busy signal. He eventually gets trapped by zombies and bitten, and he turns into a shambling nightmare—and the haiku continue to provide play-by-play.

Go along with the concept for a moment and forget that zombies can’t write or think. Seeing the world from a zombie-eyed view is darkly funny.

Getting trampled on
used to eventually kill you.
Now it just annoys.

The book never gets into details about why there are zombies or how big the plague is or anything like that. Ultimately, story doesn’t matter one single lick. It’s all about

brains, BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS.
BraiNs, brains, Brains, BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS.
BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS, brains.

The book is designed to look like the poet’s battered, blood-stained journal. Snazzy-looking Polaroids of shambling undead are taped to pages throughout. While professionally done, with excellent make-up and shredded costumes, the pictures still have the feel of a beer-infused weekend when author Ryan Mecum got together with a bunch of his buddies to take pictures for his zombie haiku book. Someone, right now, is looking at those pictures and saying, “It seemed like a good idea at the time….”

The haiku, the photos, the slick design work—it generally all holds up as a really good gag, which can be hard to do with a book-length work. The zombie haiku are of uneven quality, although most of the jokes are good and, on the whole, pretty amusing.

You might kick yourself for even buying something called Zombie Haiku—but if you nonetheless find yourself irresistibly drawn to the book the way a zombie is drawn to brains, then it’s likely you’ll find this a fun little feast.

It’s one of those days of American history that lives in infamy: April 20, 1999, the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, killing twelve students and a teacher, and inuring twenty-four others, before turning their guns on themselves.

Say “Columbine” today, and nearly anyone can tell you what it means. But as journalist Dave Cullen says in his new book on the tragedy, the real story of Columbine is only now starting to become clear. Media sensationalism, police cover-ups, scapegoating, and mythmaking have all distorted the story. Cullen’s Columbine, then, represents an important historical and journalistic effort to shed light on what really happened.

Cullen starts the book by recounting the massacre from the perspective of those who lived through it. He writes a gripping narrative, showing the confusion of events without falling prey to it. He finishes the book in a similar vein, but this time he recounts events from the perspective of the shooters. The result is a retelling of a story—twice—that many readers might think they already remember from the headlines and news clips.

But the real meat of the book comes in between in all the myth-busting Cullen does. For instance, media reports painted the shooters as two misunderstood high schoolers who’d been bullied to the point that they finally snapped. Cullen demonstrates that the two hadn’t been bullied at all, and that the shooters weren’t, for instance, targeting jocks or popular kids.

Nor did the shooters “snap.” Cullen lays out evidence suggesting that Klebold and Harris had been planning the attack for nearly a year. They’d already engaged in an escalating series of vandalism missions and acts of criminal mischief. Friends heard rumors that the pair had been shooting guns and making pipe bombs. The pair leaked other clues, including an explicit short story, which no one pieced together until everyone had the lens of hindsight to look through.

Cullen delves into the personal journals the two shooters kept as well as a series of “basement tapes” they recorded. Harris, in his journal—which he called “The Book of God”—expressed festering contempt for other people and frequently spoke about extinction fantasies. Cullen provides chilling details about the true extent of the duo’s plans, which would’ve made the actual outcome of their massacre seem merciful.

Harris and Klebold, says Cullen, wanted to perform an act of “performance violence” that would be seen as “mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater,” so stunning that it would top Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City. Harris and Klebold “didn’t have political agenda of terrorists but adopted their methods,” Cullen says.

While this all may seem straightforward, Cullen employs masterful storytelling techniques in his book that add powerful impact. For instance, he refers to the shooters throughout by their first names in order to personify them more vividly. He structures the book so that the story of their preparations leading to the attack is told in parallel with the stories of the community as it tries to recover and rebuild after the attack.

Cullen tells the story of Patrick Ireland, a student who crawled to safety from a second-story library window and overcame incredible odds to not only walk and talk again but to achieve his goal of being class valedictorian. He also tells the story of Cassie Bernall, who reportedly professed her faith in God to her killers just before they pulled the trigger—a story later proved false even after Cassie achieved international fame as a Christian martyr.

And there’s the story of Brooks Brown, a former friend of Harris’s. In the year prior to the shootings, Harris engaged in a campaign of harassment against Brown’s family because he thought Brown had turned on him. Despite numerous complaints against Harris, police did nothing until after the shooting—when they tried to implicate Brooks as part of the crime.

In fact, the Jefferson County Police Department comes off looking like a confederacy of fools and villains. Cullen details a decade-long cover-up by the department as it tried to hide the ways it mishandled the case.

Cullen at once captures the uplifting spirit of a community that pulls itself together after tragedy while also showing the sad, shattered pieces still left behind. The toll of the attacks aren’t just measured in lives lost but in marriages destroyed, in families broken, in public confidence broken and public anxiety heightened.

While some portions of the book are necessarily graphic, Cullen never gets gratuitous. He avoids sensationalism in an effort to show humanity. His book strives for insight and understanding—and that’s no small feat for a tragedy so hard to understand.

Life in the Wrong Lane: Why Journalists Go in When Everyone Else Wants Out by Greg Dobbs is a vivid time-travel dispatch from the heyday of big-iron network TV news.
iUniverse, 205pp

“Sadat has been shot. If you can get to Cairo, do it.”

Breathes there a real reporter who would not thrill to this flash, sent June 6, 1981 by ABC News to its forces across Europe? Got to ice that dinner date, honey. Here’s another chance to narrate history… and spend a fresh bucket of money.

In Life in the Wrong Lane, former ABC News correspondent Greg Dobbs speeds from London to Cairo within minutes of that terse directive, no doubt savoring the frisson of here-we-go adrenalin (I have no cash! No suitcase! Don’t know when or where I’ll sleep next! Let’s go, go, go!) that was once a basic fringe benefit of big-league TV news. Recounting stories in Egypt – or Libya, Belfast, Beirut, Gulf War I, pre-perestroika Moscow, you name it – Dobbs takes us inside the tense, addictive, free-spending, 24/7 subculture of global network news production as it used to be. In doing so he highlights its comparatively modest and curtailed state today.

Dobbs held down a gig at ABC News for 23 years, from the ‘70s to the ‘90s. He worked domestically, but the great stories in Life in the Wrong Lane are datelined overseas. Reading this breezy, fascinating memoir – the title points out that as reporters cover catastrophes, they plunge down the wrong side of the road towards the action, past sane people clogging the escape routes – is like bellying up to the hotel bar after a filing deadline for a night of literal and figurative war stories, funny and sobering, from a man at the epicenter of the newsgathering business in its heyday.

Epicenter? Greg Dobbs? You thought Cronkite, Brokaw, and Jennings were the epicenter. Of editing and presentation, yes. But Dobbs takes us along for the dusty, dirty, dangerous, crazy-making field work that gave the anchors something to present, and makes us appreciate the logistic miracles behind worldwide TV news.

The ride can be terrifying and infuriating. Dobbs is nearly shot to death taping a standup in Teheran during the 1979 Islamic revolution. Trying to contact renegade ex-CIA arms runner Frank Terpil in Beirut, he misses getting car-bombed by seconds. He rides into Uganda with Tanzanian troops toppling Idi Amin, sees horrific atrocities amid days of misery and filth, but his work is all but bumped from World News Tonight by the simultaneous Three Mile Island nuclear crisis. Two motifs recur: the struggle (now quaint-seeming) to transmit words and video in a pre-digital, pre-broadband era, and the fight to get his New York bosses to air the best stuff. (Covering the aftermath of a ruinous Italian earthquake, Dobbs gets exclusive, heartbreaking footage of Pope John Paul II kissing the head of a deceased victim, then fields complaints from New York, asking if he has some inoffensive shots to “cover the scene of the Pope kissing the dead guy.”)

While Dobbs never explicitly answers the question in his rhetorical subtitle – why do journalists go in when everyone else wants out? – it’s clear enough. Going in is a narcotic. Reporters have to see. It’s also, um, fun.

It would be nice to say Life in the Wrong Lane will make you a smarter viewer of today’s news. But so much has changed, it ain’t necessarily so. There’s an elegiac how-I-slew-that-mastodon quality to Dobbs’ yarns. Today the buckets of money for all-out coverage are mostly gone or underwrite expensive anchor talent, and much of our appetite for foreign news seems gone too. What Dobbs mainly did – travel; see; report – is done less often and more gingerly. In their parlous states the American networks have for decades assiduously hacked at their own newsgathering capacity. Today many ABC News foreign bureaus are one-person home-office outposts equipped only with a laptop and DV camera. ABC covers the entire African continent this way, off a single kitchen table in Nairobi. (NBC News bases no staff in Africa at all, and neither NBC nor CBS staff India.) Next time there’s a ferry disaster or terror attack in Malaysia, Manila or Mumbai, watch carefully: a reporter in London will likely “cover the story” from her distant desk, scanning wire dispatches to narrate video beamed in from “partner organizations.” Sending guys like Dobbs to faraway places used to guarantee the provenance of the reporting. It’s cheaper not to, and the American public doesn’t seem to mind, but that doesn’t make it right. (Reporters do keep taking heroic risks in Iraq and Afghanistan, but see much of their work spiked in New York by show producers bored with the wars.)

This book appears coincidentally with news of Diane Sawyer’s ascendancy to the ABC World News Tonight anchor chair. Jack Shafer at Slate wrote urging her to reject this tarnished, irrelevant prize – all the evening newscasts’ audiences are shrinking and increasingly doddering – and suggested that if Sawyer really wants to be remembered by her news peers, she can have her colossal salary redirected to hire “50 to 80 additional reporters to break stories.” That is, dozens of next-generation Greg Dobbses. This would indubitably be better for ABC News, journalism, and us; it is also indubitably not going to happen. So with Dobbs now laboring in relative seclusion on the little-seen HDNet channel with Dan Rather while the major networks collapse into dross, Life in the Wrong Lane makes the reader happy but wistful. Like an appreciation of Detroit muscle cars, it’s a resonant snapshot of an all-but-concluded era in which the product had more heart, soul and meaning.

Tom Farmer was a CNN supervising producer and executive producer of Larry King Live. He is managing partner of Solid State Information Design (www.solidstateid.com).

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

His adventures through idiocy take him, for instance, to a Creationism museum where dinosaurs have saddles. He visits a talk radio convention to listen to right-wing hosts pat each other on the back in the name of freedom. He looks at legal battles over textbook adoptions. He delves into conspiracy theories, Masons, and Templars. In an especially excellent chapter, Pierce explores behind the scenes of the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case from 2005, where emotional sensationalism and political grandstanding obscured the medical facts of Schiavo’s case.

“If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress,” Pierce says, “we have done so by moving empirical debate into the realms of political, cultural, and religious argument, where we all feel more comfortable, because there the Gut truly holds sway.”

The problem with trusting the Gut is that the Gut can’t always be trusted. “Good ol’ common sense is almost never common and it often fails to make sense,” Pierce says.

Pierce readily acknowledges the proud tradition America has for crack-pot ideas and cranks. In fact, such eccentricies are vital to the proper functioning of the Marketplace of Ideas. “Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece” Pierce says. “This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it’s the only country to enshrine that right in its founding documents.”

As one of the organizing conceits of his book, Pierce traces the career of great American crank Ignatius Donnelly—land settler, sometimes-politician, and believer of Atlantis and Ragnorak. Contrasted against that is the career of Founding Father James Madison, a disciple of the enlightenment who believed passionately in the protection of free speech. Both men thrived in America at opposite ends of the American spectrum; America had room for both.

But in Idiot America, Pierce says, the idiots have no patience for—and want to leave no room for—anyone with enlightened, educated minds. Nonsense rules, and Pierce says that’s a serious problem because it comes with “a dangerous denial of the consequences of believing nonsense.”

Whereas cranks like Donnelly peddled their ideas because they believed in those ideas, modern American Idiots peddle their ideas because those ideas move units or forward a political agenda. The ideas themselves don’t mean much so long as someone can make a buck or gain political leverage.

Pierce places the blame squarely on American conservatives. “If this book seems to concentrate on the doings of the modern American right,” he says, “that’s because it was the modern American right that consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and it succeeded very well.” Pierce does little to hide his left-leaning biases, which sometimes get to be a little much and too holier-than-thou. Perhaps it’s understandable, though, considering how palpable his frustration and anger are.

“It is, of course, television that has enabled Idiot America to run riot with modern politics and all forms of public discourse,” Pierce says, although he points a damning finger at talk radio as “the driving force in changing American debate into American argument.”

Pierce lambasts Idiot America for making a devil’s bargain, “exchanging (rather than mistaking) fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and believing itself shrewd to have made a good bargain with itself.”

Pierce doesn’t seem too hopeful that the problem will go away any time soon, but despite his obvious cynicism, the text carries an undercurrent of faith in the American system to eventually right itself. The alternative, he implies, would be an intellectual Armageddon that would cripple democracy itself.

Idiot America provides sympathetic audiences with the chance to vent alongside Pierce. Other readers will find well-researched investigation laced with snarkiness.

As for the idiots who won the culture wars—they will probably pick up Pierce’s book, look at the cover and get a Gut feeling that they wouldn’t like it. The people most in need of Pierce’s wake-up call will be the ones least likely to get it.

In his most recent collection of poems, Sestets, Charles Wright manages to capture more in six lines than most poets say in volumes.

The volume’s sixty-six poems, six lines each, read like dazzling meditations (believe me, if any poet is capable of such an oxymoron, it’s Wright). The six-line format gives each poem a haiku-like feel, although Wright doesn’t conform to the haiku meter. That sort of constraint would take away from Wright’s rustic charm—which comes across like a contemplative gentleman farmer sitting on the wide, wooden porch of his mountaintop home, looking out across uncut fields of hay toward the sunset at the far side of a valley. He takes a pipe from his mouth, and in a quiet, even voice, delivers a poem.

“There’s no way to describe how the light splays after the storm, under the clouds/Still piled like Armageddon/Back to the west, the northwest, intent on incursion,” he says in “Outscape.”

As ever, Wright’s poems find their power—subtle and sometimes sensuous—in description. Take, for instance, “Return of the Prodigal”: “Now comes summer, water clear, clouds heavy with weeping,/Tall grasses are silver-veined./Little puddles of sunlight collect in low places deep in the woods.”

From his poet’s porch, Wright describes “[t]he blank page of the sundown sky,” a half-moon “thin as a contact lens,” “the sundown light on that dog-haired lodgepole pine,” and a great blue heron with “huge head and cyclotron eyes focusing on the deep, slow currents of evening.”

Sestets swirls with its own deep, slow currents. He ruminates about death and about getting older. He writes about discontent and remorse—but he never sinks into despair or grief. Instead, he lets the melancholy sit lightly, like dew. “[The full moon is] not here yet, but give it an hour or so, then we,/bewildered, who want our poems to be clouds upholding the sour light of heaven,/Will pass our gray hair through our fingers and sigh just a little bit.”

Wright’s greatest strength as a poet has always been his ability to connect the things he sees in the natural world with his fears, doubts, hopes, and loves. Previous collections have also worked in allusions and references to classical and Eastern philosophy, which can sometimes make a reader feel disconnected from Wright’s poems. Sestets is largely devoid of such connections.

Instead, it couples the immediacy of observation with the resonating questions that come from deep reflection. The results are quiet and relaxing—and surprisingly comforting.

There was a time when abuse was performed with style, wit and elegance; and it came from a clear moral stance. The ancient Greeks raised it to an art form: it had a formal structure and it took risks by offending the powerful. Jonathan Swift’s savagely ironic A Modest Proposal, which urged that the Irish poor should sell their children to the rich as food, was a masterpiece of outrage and black humour.

But “snark” – the term is borrowed from Lewis Carroll – is something different. Denby refers to a tone of voice, which has spread far and wide thanks to new media technologies, that is content to spread casual calumnies without regard to whether they possess any sense of.

Snark is “free-floating contempt in a void”: it is the unchecked innuendo that can end a career, or the clumsy and overblown destruction of easy targets. Its purveyor-in-chief is the anonymous internet blogger, who has nothing positive to contribute to civic discourse other than “low, ragging insult with a little curlicue of knowingess”.

Denby, a film critic for The New Yorker, makes his case with wit – vital to avoid the obvious charge of humourlessness. He is at pains to rebut the accusation. To take a stand against snark is not to submit to self-importance and excessive earnestness; it is merely to call for greater care in the choosing of victims and the crafting of jokes.

There’s more, and it’s generally favourable. That’s the only review I’ve seen in the UK. I’ve also seen some reviews in the US, which seem to suggest that Aspeden’s enthusiasm is a bit misplaced. In New York Magazine, Adam Sternbergh had this to say:

You have to give David Denby credit for bravery: Writing a book titled Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation is like writing a book titled Keying My Car: It’s the Wrong Thing to Do or Why Flaming Bags of Dog Poop on My Doorstep Just Aren’t Funny. You invite the transgression even as you decry it; you loose the hounds on yourself. Given Denby’s age (65) and position in the firmament (film reviewer for The New Yorker), he could have written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark and still come off like an Internet-age Andy Rooney, wagging his finger from his rocking chair at the boisterous kids on the lawn. And he has not written the most concise, insightful, artfully balanced, and expertly argued book about snark.

I’m sorry, did that sound snarky? I apologize. Denby’s book invites—even begs masochistically to receive—a snarky response, but he won’t get one here. I enjoy snark. I practice snark. And I hope herein to defend snark. But it’s too easy to stamp this book with some snarky dismissal (EPIC FAIL) and continue on one’s self-satisfied way. Denby’s book is serious, and wrong, and it deserves an appropriate response. Moreover, the book is premised on a popular meme: that so-called snark, what he calls “a nasty, knowing strain of abuse spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation,” is both increasingly unavoidable and intrinsically corrosive. I disagree on both counts. Snark can be misused and misdirected. It can be mean, and it can be personal. It’s also not only useful as a form of public conversation but necessary, for reasons that Denby either ignores or fails to comprehend.

I thought this was a sensible, balanced and highly informed review, and it encouraged me to not read Denby’s book, unlike the sensible, balanced and highly informed Aspeden review, which made me think this book might be worth reading. Let’s see, can we get a third opinion? How about Walter Kirn in The New York Times?

In “Snark,” an earnest book-length essay of neo-Victorian public-mindedness that deplores the “nasty, knowing abuse” that the author would have us fear contaminates too much American humour lately, David Denby, a movie critic for The New Yorker, sets for himself what has to be one of the most quixotic projects that a moral reformer can undertake. He wants to correct and restrain, using scholarship and logic, perhaps the keenest, most reflexive, prehistoric and anarchic of simple human pleasures, short of eating or achieving orgasm. The act of laughter, this would be. Or, for Denby, the act of low, illicit laughter — laughter enjoyed for the wrong reasons and provoked by the wrong lines. Whether laughter for the right reasons is even possible, given humour’s subversive, corrosive history, is a difficult philosophical question, of course, but Denby feels that it is. This follows from his belief that the impulses to giggle, grin and cackle (and the various means for stimulating these impulses) can be, and ought to be, consciously aligned with civic virtues and literary standards, lest our society laugh for no just cause, at jokes that aren’t witty enough to laugh at and that may even be plain stupid and malicious.

The humour that stirs this wrongful laughter is “snark,” named for a fictional creature from the poem “The Hunting of the Snark,” by Lewis Carroll. As a species of vicious contemporary humour, it is defined by Denby in many ways — so many, in fact, that the creature never materializes as anything more than a shadow on a wall that Denby keeps shooting at yet never hits. In his opening pages he defines snark negatively — as a practice that certain famed comics are often charged with, but undeservedly and inaccurately because they actually trade in “irony” and also, one can’t help but gather from Denby’s remarks, because they’re politically virtuous in their japery, even when their words seem cruel and harsh. Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart are two of these unfairly maligned non-snarkers. Sarah Silverman escapes unscathed, while Penn Jillette, an avowed libertarian who entertains mostly in Las Vegas nowadays, and Sarah Palin, an avowed big-game hunter who’s safely tucked away up north somewhere, are portrayed as snarkers par excellence. So is John McCain, coincidentally, and pretty much everyone who ever tweaked Barack Obama for any reason — especially if they did so on the Internet and indulged in prejudice.

But “hate speech” isn’t snark either, Denby writes, because it aims to “incite,” not get chuckles, and because it’s “directed at groups,” not individuals. Denby finds such discourse loathsome, presumably, but he states early on that it’s no concern of his, first because it’s a constitutional right, and second, because he feels sorry for nuts who use it: “the legions of anguished, lost people on Web sites and the social networking site Facebook” who are “looking for a way to release fear.” In other words, vengeful morons can’t be snarky, only parties to bigoted violence now and then, which may be horrific and tragic but isn’t annoying. No, what really bugs Denby’s mandarin side is a much subtler species of expression: humour that celebrates “the power to ridicule” and is indulged in by semi-sophisticates who seek to sound clued-in and hip so as to soothe their feelings of “dispossession” and elevate their wounded self-esteem by sneering at folks like — get ready to be outraged! — the convicted insider trader Ivan Boesky, whose notorious taste in gaudy baubles was once satirized in the late Spy magazine.

And that, sir, is snark, society’s archenemy — making light fun of vulgar criminal robber barons who steal more in a month than Capone stole in a decade. This manner, this “snark,” and the motives he imputes to it, are treated by Denby as more ominous for our future prospects as a people than the invective of K.K.K. grand wizards. What he views as outbreaks of unacknowledged envy for the extremely wealthy and conspicuous by the comparatively poor and plain (masquerading as people of taste and virtue when, in fact, they’re merely climbers) is positively intolerable to him. And just as complicit in this grave offense (grave to Denby, but natural to the masses; see The National Enquirer and its routine photos of stars without their makeup) are the readers who laugh at such upstart snottiness. They should be bigger than that, somehow. Less petty.

Well, this is not at all helpful. It’s getting harder and harder to come up with a reason to read this book. Is there anyone in the US who liked the book? What about someone who represents everything Denby dislikes these days—Gawker, and intentionally snarky website? Well, I’m going to hazard a guess that they won’t like it. Bingo! In a review entitled Please Buy David Denby’s Book, So He Will Stop Talking, I learn that:

David Denby, the New Yorker movie critic (not the good one), continues to bait us in interview after interview so we’ll write something about his book Snark, so it will sell. Okay fine, here:

David Denby, can you present a short, clear, and meaningful definition of “snark,” that clearly delineates it from every other form of humour or criticism? Let’s see:

• “It’s not hate speech, it’s not trolling, it’s not simple insult. What I’m getting at is contempt, and a signal sent to a member of a club (which can be enormous or tiny) in which a certain kind of reference is understood, and stands in for an attitude that one wants to put down”…
• “’Snark is like a schoolyard taunt without the schoolyard,’ he writes. ‘Snark is hazing on the page.’” …
• “Denby, in a phone interview, defines snark as ‘the knowing nasty tone, the cheap shot.’” …
• “Snark is not original. It is essentially parasitic and lazy…Most people who are trying to be true use sarcasm or wit to speak the truth, but not snark”…
• “It is an adolescent tone. I think a lot of it is powerless…There are some heavy hitters of snark like Maureen Dowd, who I go after at some length, but most of it is sort of a confession of impotence and it does seem adolescent and it does seem like kids in a high school cafeteria or sitting around watching TV a lot of the time. But when older people do it, I think it’s because of the panic that’s setting in that we don’t know where journalism is going and we want to sound hip and we want young demographics and panic is not a good mood in which to write anything. You release that and it’s kind of juvenile sarcasm. It signals to readers that you’re up to date.”

No, you cannot. That’s because “snark” is not an actual, scientific term; it is a made-up word that means whatever the writer wants it to mean. Therefore your book, while perhaps eloquent (haven’t read), is, in the end, just a preposterously meaningless rant. A sort of “snark,” if you will.

Of course, Gawker is a blog, and blogs are the lowest of the low—even lower than Fox News, apparently—so there’s no point in looking at any other blogs either. They’re all going to hate it. Actually, as far as I can tell from a Google search, a lot more blogs have reviewed Snark than magazines or newspapers. I’m not sure what to make of this, and I guess I’m not sure what Denby will make of it either.

But wait—maybe I don’t have to read it. The Guardian had a whole post—no, I mean piece– by Denby, or a précis, or something, last Saturday. Denby is certainly doing his bit for book sales. So here’s the first bit.

What is snark? Abuse in a public forum of a particular kind – personal, low, teasing, rug-pulling, finger-pointing, snide, obvious, and knowing.

How does snark work? Snark is hazing on the page. It prides itself on wit, but it’s closer to a leg stuck out in a school corridor that sends some kid flying. It pretends to be all in fun, and anyone who’s annoyed by it will be greeted with the retort, “How can you take this seriously? What’s wrong with you?” – which has the doubly aggressive effect of putting the victim on the defensive. No one wants to argue with a joke, so this is shrewd as far as it goes. But some of these funsters are mean little toughs. Snark seizes on any vulnerability or weakness it can find – a slip of the tongue, a sentence not quite up to date, a bit of flab, an exposed boob, a blotch, a blemish, a wrinkle, an open fly, an open mouth, a closed mouth. It exploits – slyly, teasingly – race and gender prejudice. When there are no vulnerabilities, it makes them up. Snark razzes pomp, but it razzes certain kinds of strength, too – people who are unaffectedly serious. Snarky writers can’t bear being outclassed by anyone, and snark becomes the vehicle of their resentment and contempt.

Hmm. This does sound serious. But it also sounds really, really confused, hardly the sort of thing someone who read Great Books (twice, apparently)would write. Maybe he didn’t really read them–how else to explain the miasma above that’s supposed to pass for a paragraph? I mean, I’m as concerned with the debasement of modern discourse as the next guy. But that includes the debasement of language, and using sentences that make sense. Denby has lots of tips in the article on how snark operates—in fact, he counts the ways. But I’m not going to go into this any more–you can go read them if you want, but they read much like the quoted section.

In actuality, Denby has a point, but it’s the wrong one. It’s not that it’s easy to be snarky these days. There is, in fact, entirely too much snark around. It is all over the internet. But it’s also everywhere in the MSM, as Denby notes. It’s everywhere. But there’s a simple reason for that, and it’s not because people have become more, well, snarky. It’s because there are too many easy targets. At one time, there was a limited number of “celebrities” one could get snarky about. Now they are legion, and the success of Gawker and similar sites simply shows that they have multiplied beyond control. Ditto politics. The level of political discourse in the US has never been particularly high—snarky slurs against Washington and Jefferson were popular, and common, back then. But the political landscape now is so littered with easy targets that no one in their right mind could possibly resist being snarky, unless you’re totally devoid of any sense of humour whatsoever. Who could possibly make up the modern Republican party? People like Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay would at one time simply have been interesting characters in Pogo—now you can’t turn on the television without them shouting at you. The cultural landscape? Good lord, has anyone taken a look at The New York Times best seller list? Or what people watch on television? Or go to the movies to see? Really, the amount of effort being made on someone’s behalf to place all this dreck in front of us deserves nothing but snark.

So here’s my solution. Instead of trying to elevate the level of discourse about the culture around us, as Denby seems to want (although I haven’t read the book, so I can’t be certain), how about taking seriously the notion that a culture that gets as much snark as modern American culture does actually deserves it? And if we actually made some effort to improve the culture, that would be a big step in the right direction of making snark a bit less prevalent. Make better movies. Produce better (and fewer) musicals. Write better books. Engage in more reasoned political discourse. See? That’s not so hard.

Poet Ben Doller has all the answers.

The questions are a different matter.

Doller’s poetry collection, FAQ:, from Ahsahta Press, features fifty-one “answers” to unknown questions. Each poem, titled “FAQ:,” begins with the line “Thank you for your question,” but the question hangs in the air unknown—and sometimes, based on Doller’s answers, unknowable.

“I can’t trust myself all night with this question,” Doller writes.

Doller’s answers aren’t tidy, either. The poems are more like quests for answers than answers themselves. They feel fragmented, but intentionally so. It’s as if the unnamed question-asker asks for clarity, but in a world of confusion, clear answers are impossible. They are too much to expect.

But Doller’s poems contain bursts of brilliant clarity that come in the midst of the searching. Doller doesn’t use his poems to catch clear snapshots of a particular moment; instead, his snapshots come in phrases, like moments of elucidation: A stunt cyclist seeks “To bludgeon gravity with speed.” A narrator laments that “Endless imagination is scourge, is bane, bare, self-immolient and spark, is accepting your invitation to, to take it to nowhere, notime….”

Clarity bogs down into confusion, but with Doller, the confusion comes across as artful. “A cliché, forced patiently, violently enough through tortuous enough a tube may become something solid again. Maybe a saying,” Doller writes. “So I have tried to impel it through these wires to you, you know that I need some of you to set the alarm clock, to increasingly sing in chorus with whatever oldie crows that the day should be beginning that the day should be beginning….”

Confusion sometimes breaks further down into chaos, but once there, Doller can find more clarity. For instance, he writes: “It’s just not my job to make the earth again, to celebrate my astonishment at the leaf as it all goes wrong leaf by leaf…”

Confusion doesn’t always equate to gloom, though. Doller finds humor, too. “Performing a word-find in the arrivals area: just one example of admirable behavior,” writes a traveler in one poem. “I can’t recall now why I was in the arrivals area. It’s a secret.”

Most of the poems look like short paragraphs in a helpful little manual. The two most notable exceptions, the collection’s only named poems, “Daisy” and “Same Problem,” stand out because of their couplet structure.

FAQ: fits perfectly as the twenty-seventh volume in Ahsahta Press’s “New Series” of innovative poetry collections. As with other volumes in the series, FAQ: will challenge a reader’s ideas about what is and isn’t poetry, both in form and content. The poems in Doller’s collection fulfill a similar function: The rumination is as important as the answer.

William Forstchen’s brilliantly disturbing book, One Second After, takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The country has been brought to its knees by three nuclear missiles launched by unknown foes. The power of the attack comes not from the blasts themselves but from the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) it emits.

An EMP, Forstchen points out, could completely knock out America’s electrical infrastructure. Miles and miles of high-tension wires would absorb the power of the EMP, magnifying it beyond the ability of virtually any circuit-breaker to stop. Electrical systems would overload. Anything with delicate electrical circuitry—like cars, computers, and even calculators—would be fried.

And in Forstchen’s world, America without power would be hell on earth.

“We’re back a hundred and fifty years,” one character says.

“No, not a hundred and fifty years,” says another. “Make it more like five hundred. People alive in 1860, they knew how to live in that time; they had the infrastructure. We don’t. Turn off the lights, stop the toilets from getting water to flush, empty the pharmacy, turn off the television to tell us what to do…. We were like sheep for slaughter then.”

One Second After is not a cheerful novel, nor should it be. Forstchen wrote the novel as a cautionary tale against the threat of an EMP attack. Nearly every desperate situation a reader could imagine—and many that readers couldn’t imagine—unfolds in the book.

Forstchen unveils one small horror after another. How do you keep the water in your swimming pool potable? What do you do with the family dog when you’ve run out of food to eat? What do you do with the thief you’ve shot dead in the middle of the kitchen? What do you do for your diabetic daughter when all the insulin is gone?

What do you do when the strong begin to prey on the weak? How do you maintain law and order when civilization becomes uncivilized?

Although many readers would like to think the better angels of our natures would shine through in a time of national crisis, Forstchen draws from past historical situations—like the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad in World War Two—to show just how low mankind will sink in times of desperation.

The story never goes “Mad Max.” Forstchen wisely keeps events plausible, no matter how terrible they seem. He does create a nagging feeling, though, that things could get even worse than his story suggests.

The entire time, Forstchen beats the same drum: America is virtually unprepared to defend itself against an EMP attack. Communities are unprepared. Individuals are unprepared. Unprepared. Unprepared. Unprepared.

Although the book may be a warning first, it’s a compelling piece of fiction in its own right. The characters are well-crafted and add dramatic weight to the story. The novel’s protagonist, John Matherson, is a college history professor who works at a small, Christian liberal arts school in the western North Carolina mountains. He’s a fictionalized Forstchen who provides context and insights into events as they unfold, and he also serves as the moral foundation for the story, too.

Forstchen writes what he knows, so the entire community of Black Mountain, N.C., feels at once homey and heartbroken. He populates the community with people who could all be out of a Norman Rockwell painting—except Rod Serling starts to tinker with them as the story progresses.

The grim reality Forstchen shows in One Second After demonstrates the high cost of unpreparedness. He wants to spook readers into doing something—anything—whether they start stockpiling supplies just in case or they write to ask their Congressman to take an interest in the issue.

“This is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen said. “What I hope I’ve done is put a voice to it.”

One Second After makes that voice, and that message, worth listening to.

It’s an image most Westerners recognize immediately: A lone man standing in the middle of a five-lane street, blocking a line of tanks. Single-handedly, “Tank Man” prevented the tanks from advancing on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

Tank Man was one of more than a million Chinese students from universities across the country’s capital who converged on the square in April of 1989, demanding democratic reform. The resulting stand-off between students and the government lasted a month and a half and, eventually, led to a military crackdown. As many as 3,600 students died and more than twice that number sustained injuries.

The picture of “Tank Man”—taken by photographer Jeff Widener of the Associated Press—was one of the most famous stories captured during the confrontation. Now, issued to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, comes another compelling story: Lake with No Name by Diane Wei Liang.

Liang writes about her own experiences as a student during that tumultuous time, providing a first-person account of the political turmoil. Although not in the square at the time the military and police swept through, she was on hand as bloody, beaten survivors began to straggle back to Beijing University.

What makes Liang’s book so compelling, though, is the second plot that threads its way through the first, entangled with each other like a pair of long, magnificent Chinese dragons. Even as her country finds itself wrapped in tumult, so too does Liang find her heart in tumult. Lake with No Name is, at once, a first-person account of the student democracy movement, and it’s also a sad love story.

“Love without hope is the most miserable kind of love,” Liang writes. While hope seems to spring eternal for her, she still manages to seem plenty miserable.

There’s no “woa-is-me” to the book, though. It’s apparent Liang has a deeply romantic heart, but she avoids sentimentality and romanticism. Her relationship troubles stem from her own inability to communicate freely with the love of her life, Dong Yi, as much as they stem from the grand, unclear machinery of destiny.

The early part of the memoir recounts Liang’s childhood, an unhappy period marred by the notorious Cultural Revolution. The government relocated Liang’s family, and forced her parents to live separately. She was bullied at school. At one point, her home is destroyed in a massive earthquake.

Liang writes about these things with simplicity and honesty. Her personal story provides the political and cultural context that leads to the pro-democracy movement of 1989.

“I was excited to be part of life and renewal,” she writes, once the demonstrations erupt and she’s swept up by them. “I looked ahead and saw students marching in step, flags flying above their heads. I looked behind and saw tens of thousands doing the same. The enthusiasm of my generation shot excitement into my veins. ‘This will be a new world!’ I thought.”

Laing also has a talent for capturing beauty, which frequently reflects the love she has for her country. For instance, while on a mountain-climbing trip with a friend, she watches the sun rise over the plains below her. “On the horizon, the rich land of my ancestors fused into the sky, in golden rays of light, and I could see no border or limit. So this is China, my motherland,” she writes. “As the sun rose above the horizon, light exploded, radiating hundreds of thousands of rays to the earth, penetrating air, clouds, rocks, beings, everything seemed suddenly transparent.”

Liang’s memoir seems like an attempt at creating transparency, too. Lake with No Name provides an excellent glimpse of life inside one of the world’s most enigmatic countries during one of its most pivotal times. The literary face Liang gives that larger story is beautiful and sad—and ultimately wonderful.

It sits at the core of the American Dream: the idea that, through pluck and hard work, anyone can succeed. Horatio Alger called that kind of person the “self-made man.”

And according to Malcom Gladwell, it’s all a bunch of malarkey. 

In his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Gladwell explodes the myth of the self-made person. “No one makes it alone,” he says.

“We tell rags to riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds,” Gladwell says. While inspiring, such stories are deeply flawed because a person’s success has less to do with what they’re like than with where they’re from.

“The values of the world we inhabit, and the people we surround ourselves with, has a profound effect on who we are,” he says.

As has become a hallmark of Gladwell’s work, Outliers delves into unconventional stories in search of hidden truths that then illuminate the everyday world around us. Readers shouldn’t expect hard science or even the kind of rigor a social scientist might apply to these sorts of examinations; what readers can expect is the shrewd eye of a trained journalist guided by creative insight.

In the case of Outliers, Gladwell examines the notion of success and discovers that there’s something “profoundly wrong” with the way we define it. “Success follows a predictable path,” he argues. There’s “clearly a pattern, but people refuse to see it.”

To forward his hypothesis, Gladwell looks at amazingly diverse and eclectic examples. Why do the vast majority of Canada’s top hockey players have birthdays in the first three months of the year?

Having a birthday in the first three months of the year, close to the cut-off deadline for youth hockey leagues, gives a kid a competitive advantage in size verses kids of the same age born late in the year. At age eight, that difference in development is significant, Gladwell points out. So the older kids do better, which means they’re targeted for selection to the more elite leagues, which gives them the chance to play more than kids not selected for those elite leagues. The extra practice and playing time makes them even better, and so on, and they continue to rise to the top.

“Those who are already successful get the kinds of opportunities that lead to more success,” Gladwell explains. That sort of cumulative advantage means that people with a small leg up at the start end up having the impact of that advantage magnified tremendously over time.

Gladwell looks at the founding generation of the personal computing revolution, he looks at the Beatles, he looks at professional musicians, he looks at the communication styles of Korean airline pilots, he looks at schools.

In all cases, Gladwell points out the ways in which community affect individual development.

People who achieve success “are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot,” Gladwell argues. Such things “shape our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine.”

In many cases, there’s an element of being in the right place at the right time. But Gladwell contends that such lucky breaks only turn out to be lucky if a person is prepared for them, and that sort of individual preparation doesn’t take place in a vacuum.

Through his mythbusting, Gladwell isn’t trying to discourage readers from striving for success. He doesn’t advocate the abandonment of the American Dream. In fact, it’s just the opposite. “Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung,” Gladwell says. “We make rules to frustrate achievement.” By being aware of those rules and their impacts, society can redefine the way it nurtures young people and prepares them for the world. We can actually set more people up to succeed.

On one level, Gladwell isn’t talking rocket science: We’re all products of our environment. But his book becomes profoundly important when he explores the many implications of that idea. We can do much as a society to influence that environment so that the American Dream becomes easier to achieve for everyone.

That’s the basic question that drives Ben Sherwood’s book The Survivors Club. In a crisis, what determines whether a person survives? “Why do some people live and others die?” Sherwood wondered. “How do certain people make it through the most difficult trials while others don’t?”

The reasons, of course, vary—but they’re also quite surprising.

In The Survivors Club, Sherwood, a best-selling author and award-winning journalist, delves into the science of survival. He talks to survival experts, doctors, psychologists, training instructors, rescuers, and researchers in an attempt to find out just exactly what “it” is for a clearer sense of what it takes to survive.

For instance, Sherwood undergoes training at the Aviation Survival Training Center, run by the United States Marines, where helicopter pilots learn the skills they need to survive a crash-landing in the water. To learn about g-forces, he has the Navy shoot him out of a jet fighter’s ejection seat.

Sherwood writes about these experiences with deliberate attention to detail. After all, his account may be the closest any of his readers will come to experiencing the sorts of ordeals he puts himself through in the name of research. But by sharing his experiences with readers, Sherwood shares important insights into things that can help a reader improve his/her own “Survivors IQ.”

“When it comes to survival,” Sherwood writes, “there’s a whole lot you can’t control, and a surprising amount you can.”

Sherwood investigates whether “the will to live” makes a difference in survival. He looks at biological factors and genetic dispositions that affect survival. He looks at faith. He looks at preparedness. He looks at luck (and, importantly, whether an individual can manufacture his/her own luck).

But at its most compelling, The Survivors Club recounts some remarkable stories—a phrase I don’t use lightly—about some remarkable survivors. Sherwood finds people who have lived through a mind-boggling array of calamities and crises.

“[I]f you can conceive of a crisis,” he says, “I’ve probably interviewed someone who as gone through it and come out on the other side.” He sounds a little boastful, perhaps, but by the end of the book it’s apparent Sherwood was merely stating a fact.

There’s Anne Hjelle, who had her face eaten off by a mountain lion. There’s Ellin Klor, impaled on a knitting needle after tripping on a sidewalk. There’s Ken Hines, one of only twenty-eight people to ever survive a jump from the Golden Gate Bridge (Sherwood calls it “the world’s most exclusive Survivors Club”). There’s Vesna Vulovic, who survived a six-mile plunge to earth from an airliner.

There are well-known tales, too, like that of Trisha Meili, the “Central Park Jogger,” raped and beaten and left for dead by an unknown assailant. There’s Nando Parrado, a rugby player who survived a plane crash in the Andes Mountains by eating the remains of his dead teammates.

“After all these years,” Parrado says, “this is still the best advice I can give you. Savor your existence. Live every moment. Do not waste a breath.”

Indeed, Sherwood’s book is both cautionary and affirming. He offers practical tips for improving one’s chances of survival, and he talks about the mindset a person can cultivate to improve survival chances, too. The last section of his book includes a complex test that helps a person discover one’s own “survival personality” and the psychological tools one can draw on in times of crisis.

The survivors’ tales are both frightening and inspiring, but as compelling as those tales make the book, the additional research Sherwood pours into it, woven into well-written narratives, makes The Survivors Club endlessly fascinating.

The Survivors Club is not a book any aspiring backwoods survivalist would want to pack as a how-to bible, but it is a book for anyone else interested in improving their odds in a random, crazy world. The Survivors Club can give anyone a little extra “It.”

The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A wonderful analysis on the difficulty of knowing and the impossibility of predicting.

Brian Angliss:

The End of Faith by Sam Harris

I’m not done with this book, but it’s been an interesting read thus far. Harris chronicles a long list of atrocities committed in the name of faith, with an understandable focus on the three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. While it took me a long time to put aside my own biases (I’m an animist neo-pagan) and actually be able to read the book at all, I’ve found it an illuminating if occasionally frustrating read.

He’s spent almost no time on non-monotheistic faith thus far in my reading, and he’s said “the good things that religion has accomplished don’t matter” far too often. It feels too much like he’s saying “talk to the hand” when he should be spending more time explaining why the good stuff doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. And I say this as someone who generally agrees with Harris’ sentiment that religion has been a largely negative force over the course of human history.

Whythawk:

I am reading, with great dedication:

Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional, Magnus Lie Hetland

Essential SQLAlchemy, Rick Copeland

wxPython in Action, Noel Rapin and Robin Dunn

Programming Collective Intelligence, Toby Segaran

I heartily recommend them all to anyone hoping to become proficient at the Python programming language and, if I could just keep half of it in my head, I would much appreciate it, thank you.

Dawn Farmer:

The Logic of Life by Tim Harford (yes, at Whythawk’s recommendation — terrifically interesting book)

Why We Make Mistakes by Joseph Hallinan

Righteous Porkchop by Nicolette Hahn Niman (I’m curious to hear if anyone else is reading this book.)

In Righteous Porkchop Nicollette Hahn Niman recounts her work as the lead lawyer for the Waterkeeper Alliance’s Hog Campaign.  This campaign is designed to force factory hog farms into a more level playing field with the smaller farmer.  They have some important legal success using the Clean Air and Water Act, but the current economicclimate has made actual permits too expensive for the states to issue and enforce.  If you’ve never read anything about factory animal “farms” the book is an eye opener.  The author provides examples of well run farms and without being preachy offers suggestions to the consumer on the types of shops likely to have the products of these ethically run farms.  The author provides one more voice in a story that needs telling.

Just started:

The Gardner Heist by Ulrich Boser

Thumbs, Toes and Tears by Chip Walter

Chris Mackowski:

The Survivor’s Club by Ben Sherwood

Alexi Koltowicz:

The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels (actually a reread from years ago). An interesting alternative look at Christianity, though not deep enough to be called scholarly.

Bad Samaritans (The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism), Chang Ha-Joon. An excellent book from a Cambridge economist that pretty well tears down our idea of capitalism without attacking capitalism. Chang points out that the great economic powers like Britain and the US did not get to the top of the heap by practicing what they currently preach. He points out inconvenient truths like the US being the most protectionist country in the world up until the 1920’s, during which time the US was also the world’s fastest growing economy. With his intimate knowledge of Korea, he points out how both Korea and Japan became economic powers by not following the development prescriptions of the free-marketeers. This one is well worth any reader’s time; it’s deep enough to be satisfying and illuminating, but also short enough to be readable and briskly written.

Motherland (A Philosophical History of Russia), Lesley Chamberlain. A book that is probably long overdue. It brings together the narrative of Russian history with a new perspective and goes a long way towards explaining why Russia is so different than the West.

Russian Nights, Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky. A forgotten work of Russian philosophy presented as a series of short stories.

Street Gang (The Complete History of Sesame Street), Michael Davis. Behind the scenes and most concerned with the personalities that made the show possible, as well as their motivations. For someone who’s only allowed television was Sesame Street and who’s still a Sesame Street YouTube junky, it’s an indispensable volume.

For the Common Good (Redirecting the economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future), Herman Daly and John Cobb Jr. This is an Agonista book club read, and I’m not far enough along to speak with any depth about it.

Truck, Michael Perry. A year in the life of Mr. Perry as he works on semi-restoring his his 1951 International Harvester pickup truck, plants a garden, falls in love, and ruminates on life from the view of his small, Wisconsin town. Somehow farms, deer hunting, NPR and green tea come together naturally. He’s an outstanding writer who manages to speak both intelligently and plainly; moreover, he can turn a phrase and make you laugh.

Roads to Quoz (An American Mosey), William Least Heat-Moon. An impulse buy fueled by a gift certificate burning a hole in my pocket. I cannot refuse a beautifully made book with a collection of words on the cover that include Least Heat-Moon, Quoz and mosey. The jacket blurb says “Heat-Moon is a travel writer the way Faulkner was a county historian” and that sums it up pretty well. An extraordinarily literate account of seeking out the local flavors, idiosyncrasies and stories that make travel a spiritual experience.

Mike Sheehan:

On my nightstand: I was at the comic shop not long ago and picked up a couple of Bad Planets and some old issues of Creepy and Eerie, favorites from my youth. Also got the recent issue of MAD about Obama’s first 100 days (surprisingly, MAD’s still quite funny, has talented new artists, and some of the legendary old 70’s crew is still around). Also re-reading the classic Y no se lo tragó la Tierra (…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him) by Tomás Rivera for the zillionth time. It’s a story of survival and acceptance from the point of view of a migrant workers’ son. The last pages always get to me… in a positive way. Also reading Machiavelli’s Il Principe (The Prince) for the first time. Watch out, world.

Russ Wellen:

His Excellency George Washington
Joseph Ellis
Knopf, 2004

When I was a boy, my most cherished book may have been The Golden Book of the American Revolution. Intended for early adolescents, it was illustrated with period paintings and prints, which served to imprint me on the era. But I don’t recall actually reading the text. In fact, it’s only in recent years that I’ve read about the Revolutionary War and learned about its causes, battles, and what life was like for the soldiers, as well as the colonists.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that George Washington was not someone to take for granted just because we overdosed on him in school or because he looks stiff and imperious in paintings and statures. However, I was unwilling to invest my time in a 500-page or two-volume biography. I especially avoid those authors who insist on kicking off their bios by chronicling the subject’s ancestry and dragging the reader through his or her parents’ lives. They lose the reader before he or she even gets to the subject of the bio.

I considered a popular bio of Washington similar to John Adams by David McCullough. However, I’m leery, though, of popular bios, especially since the late Stephen Ambrose, author of books like Band of Brothers, got caught plagiarizing. (Not that I mean to imply that of McCullough.) Another popular “brothers” history book was Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation by Joseph Ellis. But when I noticed that his Washington bio, His Excellency George Washington (Knopf, 2004), drew strong reviews, I checked it out of the library.

It immediately became apparent that Ellis deserves to be widely read: How many historical bios have you read that are page turners? Neither do the liberal insertions of Washington’s own writing slow the book down. However contained, Washington always made his feelings known. In fact, even though his life was scandal free — no children by slaves, no apparent affairs — Washington was one of those rare figures who kept bumping up against history at every turn, from the French and Indian Wars to the Revolution to the Constitutional Convention to his presidency.

Because he kept slaves, singing the praises of Washington is seen as less than politically correct. He eventually felt guilty about it, but, a businessman before he was a humanitarian, the only option he saw open to him wasn’t freeing his slaves but selling them. In the long run, he did neither. But, as with many planters, his slaves became a money-losing proposition.

As they populated his farms, he couldn’t bring himself to break up their families by selling them. Furthermore, he was caring for those too old to work. In essence, many of his slaves were in a state of forced welfare, complete with teenagers with too much time on their hands. In other words, Washington was torn between benevolence and business.

The central paradox of his life, however, is that a man as ambitious and obsessed with his personal legacy as Washington resisted overweening power. Perhaps the only American who received as much open adulation as him was Elvis Presley. Yet, once president, Washington disregarded the public’s urging that he reign like a king. He was that rare man who realized his ego and his ethics could be on the same page, that by doing what was right for the country — ratifying separation of powers, limiting the power of the executive branch — he was ensuring his own legacy.

Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the U.S.
Trita Parsi
Yale University Press, 2007

Though the author is Iranian-American, the book, which I’m halfway through, is a dispassionate account of relations between the three countries. Most Americans have no idea that Iran and Israel, however reluctantly, were on good terms until the first Iraq War. They needed each other as buffers against rising power Iraq, though for the sake of the Arab world, Iran publicly denigrated Israel. In fact, while Israel sought a long-term commitment, Iran acted on a case-by-case basis.

To give you an idea of how important Israel viewed Iran to its security, Israel actually provided Iran with arms during the hostage crisis. Further courting U.S. ire, while the United States was supplying Iraq with arms during the Iran-Iraq War, Israel continued to sell them to Iran. Until the Iraq War, Israel appeared to be a beat behind Iran when it came to diplomacy, even, at times, in denial of how little regard in which it was held by Iran. One can’t help wondering if the years Israel spent as what amounted to a spurned suitor helped fuel its present-day bitterness towards Iran.

The United States, as well, often fumbled its dealings with Iran. As for Israel and the United States, we forget, but the United States often kept Israel at arms length. The author quotes a phone conversation in 1991 when President George H.W. Bush told Israeli President Itzhak Shamir, “I’ve just read the wire story quoting you about a confrontation with the United States. If you want that — fine.” During the same period, Secretary of State James Baker sent Israel this public message: “When you’re serious about peace, call us.”

Even though Treacherous Alliance is exclusively about diplomatic dealings, with little in the way of anecdote or character, thanks to the author’s gift for narrative, it too fairly flows.

Despite that, the book still requires concentration and when I started it I soon rediscovered why it was the first ambitious book I’d embarked upon in a while. Most of my book reading (as opposed to keeping up with events and research) is done while commuting to work on the train. But, interrupting my concentration, passengers speaking to each other or into cell phones became a source of frustration.

Thus, a few months ago, I swore off ambitious books and plans to renew that vow once I finish reading Treacherous Alliance (okay, and one or two others). Whenever I hear about the latest tempting (to me, anyway) tome, it’s hard to resist the impulse to check it out of the library.

The Peter Macklin Series

Fortunately, reading less taxing books on the train doesn’t present the same problems. In previous Nightstands I beat the drum for author Loren Estleman. Though, come to think of it, his signature series, featuring “hardboiled” detective Amos Walker, is challenging in its way. This is especially true of the later novels in the series, where his writing has became honed and, in places, dense.

But the only challenges most crime-fiction readers want from the genre is puzzling the out who, how, and why of the crime. They lack both an eye and the patience for the literary. Between the dialogue, action, interior life, and description — Estleman was once an artist and has no qualms about halting the proceedings and lovingly describing a scene — he’s the only crime novelist besides James Lee Burke whose work I’d classify as literary. (I’m sure there are crime-fiction aficionados who’ve drawn up their own lists.)

To keep from depleting the supply of Amos Walker books, I just finished another series of Estleman’s: the five-book Peter Macklin series. Far from solving crimes, this character commits them. Macklin, in fact is a hit man. But he describes himself as simply a killer, just as he uses workmanlike guns of modest caliber. Nondescript in appearance, killing’s just a job to him and while his work excites him, it’s neither pleasurable nor repellent to him.

Wait a minute — what is someone like me, who not only shuns excessive violence in books and movies in books, but comes dangerously close to being a pacifist, doing reading books about a hit man? Chalk it up to the power of Estleman to beguile the reader, no matter what he writes.

Though, of course he’s not the first author to make you care for a violent offender, Estleman further tempts you into rooting for Macklin in the last two books of the series when he’s ostensibly out of the game and trying to start a new life with a young wife. But when his old life comes back to haunt him, he has no qualms about killing again to protect his new life.

To what extent have I fallen for Estleman’s work? I just started reading one of his Westerns. Wait — what self-respecting reader reads Westerns? Overexposed to Westerns on TV as a kid, I became indifferent to the genre. But, as with George Washington, I guess I was destined to come full circle and find out just why they matter.

What, Scholars & Rogues readers, are you reading?

After eighteen years, I finally got around to reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—the novel that literally defined my generation.

In a way, that makes Generation X sort of like the Moby Dick for Gen X-ers—one of those novels that one should read because it’s a Classic-with-a-capital-C. It’s Important. It’s defining. It’s about me.

Right?

Published in 1991, Generation X tells the story of three unfulfilled, uninspired twenty-somethings who float through life, tell stories to each other, and experience a nagging sense of being adrift in their own lives despite their best efforts to ground themselves. You can almost hear U2 belting out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in the background.

Being young means getting old, and middle class means boredom. “You see, when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you,” Coupland writes. “It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile….”

Because the characters are so unfulfilled, the story itself felt unfulfilling. It left me wondering “What’s the point”—although that, in itself, is the point. Twentysomethings in the early nineties were wondering what the point was to their own existences even as they felt both smug and dissatisfied in their own hipness. They wanted less in life yet they wanted more out of it, too. (I wonder if twentysomethings today feel the same way.)

“What’s the point?” sounds like something straight out of Beckett, but Coupland doesn’t seem to think life’s absurd. He’s not asking a rhetorical or unanswerable question. He characters really do want to know what the point is. They don’t like feeling as unmoored as they do.

The book managed to tap into that zeitgeist, which I partially identified with, but there was much more to the book that I could not identify with. The characters felt too disenfranchised, too resentful of the baby-boomers, too intellectually superior. I thought the book did a better job of labeling my generation rather defining.

Or, perhaps the book really just defines the older half of the Gen X generation. In 1991, cubicle farms and corporate America and disposable marriages meant nothing to me. I didn’t feel resentment toward baby boomers who’d suddenly turned into The Man whom they’d railed against in the sixties. I didn’t feel angst about my own unrealized potential or disconnected from my own dysfunctional family. I’d not made my way in the world long enough or far enough to have those struggles. Hell, back then I was even a die-hard Conservative.

All that aside, Coupland is a helluva of a writer. He turns a phrase and captures a sentiment as well as any of the best writers of his (my) generation. The book was endlessly quotable, and Coupland packed it with plenty of worthwhile ideas to chew on (in my mind, always the hallmark of a good book). The epilogue was as beautiful a thing as I’ve read in a long, long time.

But after years of listening to the hype about Generation X, I felt a little underwhelmed. That’s my fault, I guess, for expecting a mirror instead of a book.

What have others seen when they’ve read it?