Bobos in Paradise The New Upper Class and How They Got There By David Brooks Simon & Schuster; 276 pp.; $25 For a half a decade it has been evident that the old classist epithets cannot hold. "Die Yuppy Scum," while still imbued with a nice bumper-sticker ring, has lost its precision as well as its sting as it becomes more and more difficult to tell just whom it refers to. Conspicuous consumption, at least of the particularly conspicuous style popularized in the Eighties, has been left to combed-over hacks like Donald Trump, even as American wealth grows like never before. Anti-capitalistic bumper stickers, meanwhile, are equally at home on Volvos as on VWs and ratty-clothed urban artistes can regularly be seen sipping, and insisting on, the most expensive beers and coffees available. According to author David Brooks, all of these apparent paradoxes are part of a cultural revolution that has brought to power a ruling class that simultaneously values both money and anti-materialism, a class that is equal parts bourgeois establishment and bohemian revolt against that establishment. We are living in the age of the Bobo (or Bourgeois Bohemian), Brooks says, and the evidence is compelling. In the brave new Bobo world, a person's presitige is calculated by multiplying his or her net-worth by his or her anti-materialistic values, which explains why Bill Gates -- who forever talks about "innovation" but not about money -- is an icon, but Donald Trump -- who talks about money -- is a hack. One need only look at commercials touting Internet companies to see that here we have a new capitalism that speaks, at least, in the language of individual freedom and unfettered human expression. Corporations are no longer cumbersome monoliths but chaotic centers of creativity, at least according to their press releases and the public's corresponding perceptions, and never has it seemed so easy for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Brooks' description of this new "hip" capitalism is not entirely new. For more than a decade, the Chicago-based journal The Baffler has detailed how corporate America has recast itself as the keeper of continuous rebellion and revolution. But never has this movement seemed more obvious or commonplace than in Brooks' sharp descriptions. He describes how the synthesis of '60s rebellion and '80s greed have finally come to pass in places like Restoration Hardware and five-figure Bobo-equipped kitchens. How once conservative towns are now decked out with all the coffee shops and organic groceries they can handle, while, conversely, once liberal towns, like Berkeley and Madison, have become the birthplaces of skyrocketing IPOs. His descriptions are at once right on and hilariously funny, as when he describes the Bobo code of "Financial Correctness," which dictates that it is crass to spend money on luxuries, but okay to spend outlandish amounts on so-called necessities. "It's decadent to spend $10,000 on an outdoor Jacuzzi," he writes, "but if you're not spending twice that on an oversized slate shower stall, it's a sign that you probably haven't learned to appreciate the simple rhythms of life." His book is no "Die Bobo Scum" screed, however. Brooks is a self-described Bobo himself and does not think that all of this, while often silly, is all that bad. He does, however, point out the fundamental tension in the Bobos' supposed freedom as it synthesizes even pleasure and play with a staunch work ethic and an almost puritanical sense of purpose. Vacations must be mind-expanding, pastimes -- such as jogging or in-line skating -- are rigorously self-improving, and even sex must be vindicated as somehow useful and productive. As Brooks observes: Bobos "don't just enjoy orgasms; they achieve orgasm." Most disturbing here is how the new ruling class has been able, again and again, to co-opt values that have traditionally opposed the establishment into the establishment itself. In effect, the Bobos represent a resilient super-Establishment against which resistance may well be futile. As for understanding this new establishment, however, one need look no further than the pages of Bobos in Paradise. -- Jim Hanas Crazy By Benjamin Lebert (with English translation by Carol Brown Janeway) Alfred A. Knopf; 178 pp.; $17.95 Benjamin Lebert's Crazy reads as fast as it took the 16-year-old to lose his virginity at boarding school: The deed was done on his second day, to the green-eyed Marie with the blood-red lips. Pretty remarkable for a rather shy and self-described cripple -- he's partially paralyzed on the left side since birth, prompting his parents to write a letter to his teachers explaining his limitations. " This means that he cannot perform or has difficulty performing such fine motor tasks as tying his shoes, using a knife and fork, drawing geometrical figures, and using a pair of scissors." His debut work, Lebert's autobiography about his semester at the German Castle Neuseelen, the fifth boarding school to try its hand at raising his math score, opened to smashing success even before it was translated for the rest of the non-German-speaking world. While it sports all the cliché antics a 16-year-old boy would unquestionably find important -- beer, cigarettes, and raiding the girls' dorms -- Lebert's story is more about his search for meaning in life and the friends who show him everyone has his own load to bear, whether it's dealing with a lame leg or feeling like the oddball who only gets invited to parties to carry the beer. While it's hardly ground-breaking literature, it's fascinating to ride shotgun into a world where few teenagers extend invitations to outsiders. In fact, that honest here-I-am-there's-no-holding-back attitude is what makes Crazy such a page-turner. Lebert doesn't even hold back as he gets mushy about missing his bickering parents. " I'm so glad I've got them both for support. As friends. As family, in fact. It's all so much crap, but it gets to me; I can't shake it. Doesn't matter where I am. I love my parents." At Neuseelen, he finds new support from a gang of friends who become as thick as thieves and just as mischievous. There's Janosch, Lebert's roommate and the group's girl-savvy ringleader, Fat Felix, Skinny Felix, Toby, and Florian a.k.a. Girl. The most well-developed of the characters is Janosch, who doesn't let his pal Benni get down about his disability. "Chill out, we're all disabled. Just because your left side's a mess is no reason to shit in your pants." In fact, Janosch lends his favorite adjective to the book's title as he comforts Lebert: "As far as I can see you're not disabled and you're not normal. As far as I can see you're crazy." The tale takes on a Stand By Me feel when the boys sneak away from school to visit a Munich strip club. But instead of singing "Lollipop, Lollipop" along the train tracks, the Neuseelen gang gets weepy inside the train as Lebert reads aloud from The Old Man and the Sea. "Literature is where you read a book and feel you could put a little mark under every line because it's true," Lebert explains, taking the mushy honesty thing a little too far. But what it lacks in depth, Crazy makes up for in wit. It makes you wonder where the young Lebert will take you next. -- Tanuja Surpuriya Experience By Martin Amis Talk Miramax Books; 240 pp.: $23.95 Martin Amis loves a good bragging. As the offspring of one of England's most lauded novelists, Kingsley Amis, Martin also inherited a funny, captivating writing style that propelled 14 books to the New York Times best-seller list. If a writer's personal life has achieved post-Kerouac celebrity, it's Amis. Known for his philanderings and boastful, tan studliness, the possibility that the writer was finally going to speak about some unflattering aspects of his life filled the English tabloids with speculation of Daddy Dearest confessions. Although the hype surrounding Amis' memoir, Experience, is deserved, it does not have anything to do with literary coat hangers. First, the glossy image of Amis is expunged in the first few chapters. As the creator of characters best known for being hopeless, sexless dorks, he makes it clear that although he is well-bred, he does not wear a velvet smoking jacket and write with an ostrich quill. Once called "the Mick Jagger of literature," Amis knew he would not have trouble getting published. He was afraid, though, that if his narrative wasn't always a hit, no influence from daddy would save his writing career. At the center of this memoir is also just a guy who's recently lost his father. Clearly using this memoir as an exploration of memory, the reader understands Amis for the first time as a child whose father's shadow loomed over his every endeavor. Simply, Amis explains that Experience "commemorates" Kingsley, warning up front that he will indulge in name-dropping but that he's been doing that ever since he first said, "Dad." It's no mistake that The Letters of Kingsley Amis and Experience were published about the same time. In fact, the younger Amis quotes frequently from his father's memoirs. "Little shit," Kingsley pens after Martin publishes his first book, The Rachel Papers. The old man is down on his son's financial and cultural success when Britain embraces this diary-like story of a young Oxford geek obsessed with an unattainable campus babe. Of course, this is Kingsley Amis, not your dad who might be pissed if you didn't buy him a new car with your advance money. No, Kingsley goes on about how Vladimir Nabokov is to blame for his son's new-found fame. Hating the author of Lolita with the same passion that good writers hate Soup for the Soul books, Kingsley screams Nabokov "fucked up a lot of fools here, including my little Martin." To his father's dismay, Martin has "gone all lefty ... really, a fucking fool." Amis takes his own potshots at Kingsley, bringing forth revealing anecdotes about the crotchety elder writer's anti-semitism and his career's descent into sentimental writing. Ironically, Amis also slams his old man for being a borderline gigolo -- apparently inherited behavior that led to his own string of notorious love affairs and divorces. The memoir also airs some ties Amis hasn't before acknowledged, such as his Oxford days with a then very boring, bland-as-crumpets Tina Brown, former New Yorker editor-turned-Miramax publishing queen. It also has its fun finally addressing the rumor that $30,000 of the author's astronomical advance for The Information paid for his dental reconstruction. Nor does Experience ignore the headline-making drama he experienced throughout the '90s. For the first time, Amis sets it straight about why he dumped his longtime agent Patricia Kavanaugh and why, in effect, that led to the end of his friendship with Kavanaugh's husband, English novelist Julian Barnes. The rift is far too juicy to spoil in a review. Perhaps the Barnes factor is what got England's knickers in a knot, but the memoir is largely about Amis and his father. Despite their digs -- and there are plenty in Experience -- they are transparently either in jest or expressed out of a desire to watch the other succeed as an artist. Two monster brains expect nothing short of monster reactions from everyone. When that doesn't happen, they naturally pontificate rather nastily to and about each other. As a tribute, Experience is a biting meditation on mortality, loss, and familial pressures. Amis explains that his father is part of his "missing" the people who filled his life experiences directly or indirectly. As a novelist, his addiction is to draw parallels between those people and what they have taught him. He tries to do the same in his memoir. Ultimately, Amis decides that life is too amorphous, too "ridiculously fluid thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental, and ineluctably trite. " In other words, he knows that lending ornamentation to a life already celebrated more than most would ruin his apologia. And considering the number of sentimental Oprah-esque memoirs on the shelves, we should all be glad that Amis chose instead to focus on the main events, as he calls them, the ordinary miracles and disasters of life everyone hurdles. Even a man of such high pedigree realizes the simplicity is often depth in brief. -- Ashley Fantz Eyewitness Reports from an Art World in Crisis By Jed Perl Basic Books; 330 pp.; $35 In his latest book of essays, Eyewitness, New Republic art critic Jed Perl bemoans the plight of the "real art world" -- working artists devoted to a personal vision and continuous growth. He posits that the educational institutions, galleries, collectors, curators, and publications, which in the past fostered the incremental development of artists' careers, are foundations on the verge of collapse. The author establishes early on what he considers the heart of the crisis: the championing of context at the expense of content. Perl takes it for granted that a work of art must have what he calls "freestanding value," that it be evaluated on its own internal logic. But he states quite clearly that this is a viewpoint out of step with those in the upper echelons of the art world. They would contend that, rather than existing on its own terms, value is predicated on the context in which one views the work. An otherwise unremarkable work gains appeal when "promoted by the right collector, dealer, curator or critic," and Perl laments the role that market forces in particular have had on creating that context over the last 20 years. The 1980s is designated as the decade of the (now mostly forgotten) "art stars," and the '90s as the decade of the "deal makers." He cites 1998's "The Art of the Motorcycle" at the Guggenheim Museum, in which over 100 bikes were displayed in the museum designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, as the "apotheosis of the art of the deal." He characterizes the exhibit, which broke all prior attendance records, as "bottom feeding," a dumbed-down extravaganza designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator. And speaking of museums, another bone of contention for Perl is the fact that while the number of artists has exponentially increased, major survey exhibits that ostensibly represent an overview of contemporary art, such as the Whitney Biennial and Carnegie International, showcase only a fraction of the number of artists they did in the past. Such surveys, he asserts, are a "big lie, snow jobs that distance the audience from what's going on." As for the art stars of the '80s, the author says that much of their energy is now directed toward keeping their names in the limelight. He believes, "One of the most depressing developments of the '90s has been the insistence with which reputations that not even the trendies care about are pointlessly sustained." It has always struck me as unseemly when I open an art magazine and the artists reviewed or given feature articles also happen to be the very ones who show up in the advertisements. Perl states bluntly that the magazines have acquiesced and become "publicity machines" for art stars and wannabes. He further complains that the short reviews, extremely vital historically as a "reflection of the dialogue that's going on among artists," are becoming rarer even as the number of galleries has swollen. Among the 26 essays in the book, Perl goes to bat for relatively unknown artists such as painters Barbara Goodstein and Stanley Lewis as well as some of the big names in the art world, including Balthus, Brancusi, and Jasper Johns. What is required to deal with the current malaise, he emphasizes, are artists, galleries, collectors, and curators willing to eschew the hype in favor of preserving "uncompromisingly independent contemporary art." Amen! -- David Hall Home Truths By David Lodge Penguin; 115 pp.; $11.95 (paper) Home Truths, a slim (but not scrawny) prose version of a 1999 play by prize-winning British author David Lodge, is quick with its characters and just as quick to read. The Londoners we meet are entertaining, and the villain they meet is one you'll love to hate: a sleek journalist who uses and bruises the inflated egos of authors. If Lodge is thinking we need to be blaming the media more often -- a not-so-original idea -- Home Truths is original and funny, though it begins blandly enough. A semi-retired writer, Adrian Ludlow, shares an isolated cottage with his wife Eleanor, who reads the newspaper wearing gloves "to stop the ink of the newsprint from soiling her hands" (a revelation, given Eleanor's adventurousness in bed). The Ludlows currently spend their days making pottery, writing anthologies, and mulling the question, "Did you know that corn flakes are eighty-four per cent carbohydrates of which eight per cent are sugars?" Snore. Things start sparking for the quiet couple, however, when an old college buddy and successful screen writer, Sam Sharp, drops by on his way to L.A. Sharp, who is less the flagrant merrymaker you may be hoping for, is fuming over a newspaper profile by the cut-throat Fanny Turrent. Adrian and Sam reunite to plot vengeance by tricking Fanny into another interview and beating her at her own game. It may be no surprise that this plan backfires -- Eleanor walks in on Adrian and Fanny admiring each other in bathrobes -- but it is not what you think. Although Lodge's basic idea here -- of good and evil writing worlds overlapping; of solitary writers forced to meet the demands of a media circus -- isn't fresh, Lodge's presentation is. Full of wit and tension, Home Truths is worth a laugh trying to figure out if that tension is only sexual. The ending is a little sneaky, with the Ludlows, Patti LaBelle-style, getting a new attitude when British headlines blare the unexpected. They, like the rest of the world, wind up stupefied. But the bottom line on Home Truths is it's a good short read, not to be toted around but indulged in, perhaps before bed, with crumpets and tea. -- Jamie Schmidt Let It Blurt The Life & Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic By Jim DeRogatis Broadway Book; 331 pp.; $15.95 The Nick Tosches Reader By Nick Tosches Da Capo; 593 pp.; $18.95 By its very nature, the finest rock criticism is driven by equal amounts of fervor and ego, a rock-solid assurance in one's opinions and ideals, and a white-hot belief that those opinions and ideals not only are right, but worthy of a reader's time and interest. Sadly, rock criticism -- born in the late Sixties, reaching its zenith in the mid-Seventies, and reeking of death by the Eighties -- is currently at an all-time nadir. Once-formidable publications such as Rolling Stone and the Village Voice are now clogged with puffball profiles and impenetrable prose, while the pages of Spin and Details are smeared with hipster babble and criticism that, more times than not, is muddled, wrongheaded, and incoherent. Even the alternative newsweeklies that have spread like brush fire in the wake of the Voice have relegated actual criticism to the back pages of their record-reviews sections; lead pieces inevitably are built around artist interviews and are bereft of anything approaching the insightful or the incendiary. Jim DeRogatis' fine if cumbersomely titled biography Let It Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America's Greatest Rock Critic offers both a well-researched chronicle of Bangs' brief but influential career and the backslide of rock criticism over the last two decades. Given that Bangs' milieu has all but died, Let It Blurt is a tale laced with journalistic tragedy; given that Bangs basically drank and drugged himself to death in 1982 at the age of 33, the bio is also a tale of rock-and-roll excess that recalls such tomes of decadence as No One Gets Out of Here Alive and Hammer of the Gods, histories of the Doors and Led Zeppelin, respectively. The Bangs saga parallels the rise of rock-and-roll as a wildly profitable commodity and the music press that first covered it -- not with the usual celebrity profiles but with evocative, passionate essays by first-string critics such as Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau, Dave Marsh, Peter Guralnick, and, in short order, Lester Bangs. Of them all, Bangs was the most unlikely to succeed. While Marcus and Christgau approach the music with one hand in academia and the other in the music, and Guralnick covered only his favorite artists with an almost persnickety penchant for simply letting the subject tell the story, Bangs -- along with his aesthetic brother Marsh -- was a zealot fueled with as much passion as the music he covered in the early Seventies for the Detroit-based Creem magazine. Bangs, the son of a Jehovah's Witness, began his career at Rolling Stone writing record reviews that skewered the upper echelon of pop music while touting the searing sounds of rock's underground, from Alice Cooper and Black Sabbath to the Count Five and the Godz. Then-reviews editor Marcus loved Bangs' caustic work, but Rolling Stone publisher/celebrity sycophant Jann Wenner hated it just as much, and soon Bangs hung his shingle at Creem, the irreverent home of Marsh, R. Meltzer, and Nick Tosches, among others. Where his work at Rolling Stone was somewhat shackled by the confines of Wenner's mainstream rock-press ideology, Bangs went nuts at Creem, turning the art of the review/essay into something confrontational, autobiographical, confessional, and almost uncomfortably intimate. His early-Seventies writing for the magazine -- much of which was compiled in 1987's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung -- shattered boundaries as it built new ones, and in the process provided the groundwork for what would become, for better or worse, the tone of most rock writers to come. That Bangs was able to actually publish some of those expoundings was a feat unto itself. That they hold up so well so many years after the fact -- better, in most cases, than even the music he was writing about -- is a testament to the man's genius. That, as DeRogatis points out, they would never see the light of print in today's rock-crit climate is a pathetic commentary on the depths that Bangs' forte has plummeted. Bangs' genius, unfortunately, dissipated as he spiraled into a black pit of booze, pills, and his longtime favorite, Romilar cough syrup. On the surface, Bangs was as much a victim of rock-and-roll excess as any of his favorites of the CBGB's crowd (Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders, et al.), and his early trumpeting of the nascent growl of punk rock underlined his love of rock's dark side just as much as his celebrated early rants about such noise anticlassics as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and the canon of the Stooges. But unlike his wordsmith minions, Bangs quickly saw the dead-end of punk's cynical razor's edge and wasn't ashamed to say as much. His classic late-Seventies piece on the Clash and his tear-jerking eulogy for his friend Peter Laughner signaled a change in Bangs' writing, ethos, and -- for a while, at least -- his lifestyle. More importantly, it showed his newfound love and embracement of life, of humanity: a love of the things that punk decidedly eschewed. Bangs' vulnerability served him well on the page, but it made his life a calamitous, often pathetic mess. His attempts at maintaining romantic relationships were all colossal failures, the substance abuse inevitably impaired his work, and the necessity to actually be Lester Bangs -- i.e., a brilliant man with a hard-on for destruction -- killed him. Ironically, one of Bangs' contemporaries, Nick Tosches, has spent most of his career as an antithesis to Bangs' compassionate, heart-on-sleeve writing. Where Bangs only seldom lapsed into the braggadocio and machismo of rock criticism's boys' school mentality, Tosches embraced it, and fancied himself as a hard-boiled, hard-drinking, tough-shit journalist cut from the same soiled cloth as Harry Crews, Pete Hamill, and pulp-fiction writers such as Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. He did some good work for a while, most notably his seminal 1977 book Country and 1992's Dino, one of the finest biographies of the last 10 years. He's also been responsible for some of the most self-important, egomaniacal, and loathsome prose of any writer produced over the last two decades, rivaled only by his close friend (and fellow Bangs acolyte) Richard Meltzer. The Nick Tosches Reader is a compilation of that loathsome prose, encompassing his Seventies work at Creem, later pieces written for Esquire, Vanity Fair, and the Village Voice, as well as excerpts from dreadful novels and journal entries that find Tosches wallowing in the sordid joys of getting bombed, getting laid, and getting paid for yammering about it like a macho shithead with a way with words and the conscience of a flat-broke drunk about to pick your pocket for another shot of Maker's. The influence of Bangs is prevalent throughout Tosches' work, but what's missing is the passion for the work at hand, a passion for the subject that can eclipse Tosches' massive infatuation with self. There's some good stuff here, but finding it requires a long swim through Tosches' sewer of sexist self-indulgence -- a swim that's hardly worth the effort. -- John Floyd Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man By Joseph Heller Simon & Schuster, 233 pp.; $23 This transparently autobiographical book is not so much a novel as it is a series of short meditations by an aging fictional author trying to find a subject worthy of writing a novel about. If that sounds confusing, well, it is. If it sounds like a flimsy stick to lean a novel on, well, it is. That the author is Joseph Heller, whose first novel was the seminal anti-war tome, Catch-22, is small solace. Eugene Pota is a septuagenarian novelist whose first book, many years before, made him a literary icon. In the intervening decades he has written several other novels, each less successful than the one before. Now in his twilight years, Pota is wearily desperate to find the magic one more time. He talks to his long-suffering wife, Polly; he talks to his editor, to his friends, tossing out -- then rejecting -- one goofy idea after another. He proposes novels based on Biblical characters, on Greek mythology, on Kafka, on the Iliad, on Tom Sawyer. He even considers a novel called The Sexual Biography of My Wife, the title of which wins the approval of his agent and several friends, but which doesn't exactly please the proposed subject, wife Polly. With each of these, Pota begins, writing a chapter, then rejecting it. Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man skips between these chapters -- some of which are mildly amusing -- and back to Pota as he endlessly ponders his mortality, chats with his wife and agent, searches for his muse, and obsesses about his place in literary history. There is little doubting the genuineness of Pota/Heller's emotions, as the following passage from an early chapter makes clear: "This is a book about a well-known, aging author trying to close out his career with a crowning achievement, with a laudable bang that would embellish his reputation rather than with a fainthearted whimper that would bring him only condescension and insult. " Would that this book had accomplished those goals. Unfortunately, Heller died in December of last year, still polishing the pages of this, his last published work, a sketchy novel about a writer who's unable to write a novel. Catch-22, indeed. -- Bruce VanWyngarden Some Ether By Nick Flynn Graywolf Press: 85 pp.; $12.95 (paper) Memories of childhood come in fragments and in dreams, in Nick Flynn's first collection of poetry, Some Ether. The chalky outline of his youth takes shape in nearly every line. He has been called Sylvia Plath without the angst. Flynn, like Plath or a young Rick Moody, is on the brink of an obsession with tragedy in his subject matter: a mother's suicide and a son's misunderstanding. His poems are children compelled to confess to strangers the truths about an alcoholic, suicidal mother and an absent, homeless father. Perhaps writing is Flynn's therapy, perhaps he knows no better, or he's tired of withstanding his pain alone. In "My Mother Contemplating Her Gun," Flynn writes, "One boyfriend said to keep the bullets locked in a different room/Another urged clean it or it could explode./Larry thought I should keep it loaded under my bed, you never know." The subject matter alone could stun a reader into silence, but the lyrics are too lyrical to be considered depressing. "They fuck you up, your mom and dad," wrote Phillip Larkin in "This Be The Verse." Flynn's poetry echoes this belief, but like squeezing light from a black hole, Flynn still believes there is beauty even in a jaded childhood. In his poetry, there are no pretty little horses; people move through tombs of love, perhaps through black-red roses and shadows of e.e. cummings and Larkin's portraits of parents. Flynn is tired of measuring out his mother's life. "I'm sick of God and his teaspoons. I don't want to remember her reaching up for a kiss, or the television pouring its blue bodies into her bedroom." Before publication, Flynn's collection won The Nation/Discovery Award and the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. He is currently a member of Columbia University's Writing Project, where he serves as an educator and consultant in New York City public schools. -- Jamie Schmidt Somebody Told Me The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg By Rick Bragg University of Alabama Press; 344 pp.; $24.95 If phrases like "white hot cuss'n" is your cup of literary mint julep, thumb through Rick Bragg's Somebody Told Me, a collection of The New York Times reporter's newspaper stories. Best known for his memoir All Over But the Shoutin' about his dirt-poor upbringing in the rural South, Bragg is at his best here, artfully capturing characters with expert feature writing which earned him a Pulitzer in 1996. Thankfully void of the cliches that riddled his overly aw-shucks sentimental memoir dedicated to his hard work'n momma, Somebody Told Me is an entertaining addition to the Bragg milieu. Bragg's stories take him from Haiti to Mississippi. Vibrantly describing people that society passes off as too dull to notice, the reporter known for his affection for the marginal class is at his best. Visit Piedmont, Alabama, where "grandmothers hold their babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven where the song 'Jesus Loves Me' has rocked generations to sleep, and heaven is not just a concept but a destination." In the same story, Bragg talks about the storms -- specifically the devastation caused by a deadly tornado that ripped through not only the land but quite a few residents' faith in God. Frequently assigned stories reported ad nauseum around the country, Bragg gets to the point originally and eloquently. The day Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh is convicted, Bragg takes the focus away from the courtroom and spotlights the victims' pain. "After the explosion, people learned to write left-handed, to tie just one shoe. They learned to endure the pieces of metal and glass embedded in their flesh, to smile with faces that made them want to cry, to cry with glass eyes. They learned, in homes with children, to stand the quiet. They learned to sleep with pills, to sleep alone." Rather than cover the story of Susan Smith, the mother who sent her two young boys to their death by pushing a car into a lake, Bragg opts to profile the sheriff to whom she confessed. The reporter spent much of the 1997-1998 school year on small airplanes visiting one small town after another to write about children who had turned their schools into killing fields. Knowing that a school shooting affects everyone in a town or suburb, Bragg devotes paragraphs like vignettes to paramedics who go from throwing darts every slow work day to reviving a blood-soaked school child already in death's grip to a wisecracking radio jock who becomes a counselor to his listeners. Specializing in oddball characters, Bragg dines with a Rikers Island con. "Every now and then, Gangaram Mahes slips on his best donated clothes and lives the high life. He is a thief who never runs, a criminal who picks his teeth as the police close in. To be arrested, to go home to a cell at Rikers Island, is his plan when he unfolds his napkin." This "serial diner" story colorfully addresses the serious problem of the poor committing petty crimes so they can have health care, a roof over their heads, and three meals a day. The psychology of the prisoner is craftily mapped in the story about Hayes Williams, a man held for almost 30 years in Louisiana's Angola Prison for a crime he didn't commit. His new freedom is as frightening as the day the guards locked his cell. His fiancée is always coming home to find cabinets and drawers open because "he is just a man who knows what the inside of a box looks like, when it closes shut." Faithful to his trademark, Bragg doesn't spare the reader sentimental outlooks on God and country in this collection. The writing is strong and faithful to the truth of the events he covered. Somebody Told Me is a worthwhile purchase for off-and-on summer reading. -- Ashley Fantz The Water Radical By Gordon Osing Iris Press; 78 pp; $13 You might think I'm being disparaging when I say The Water Radical is poetry for the common man, but it's meant as high praise. Several words come to mind when I think of poetry: pretentious, impenetrable, overwrought, clichéd, insipid. Friendly isn't among them. However, the plain-spoken manner of Gordon Osing's poems -- the way they reveal their intent, the care with which he strings his words together into a single, lyrical thought -- gives them a refreshing emotional accessibility to which even a thug is vulnerable. The Water Radical took shape during Osing's three years in China, first as an exchange professor in Wuhan, China, then as a Fulbright Fellow in Hong Kong. His experiences wandering through China form the book's skeleton, so it's no surprise that a third of the way through, I found myself reading it as a sort of travelogue written by a veteran reporter, one with a keen eye for detail and a willingness to become culturally opaque in order to properly explore the validities and inevitabilities of a culture not his own. A cynic might accuse Osing of manufacturing a calculating naivete, even a cultural eavesdropper, in order to catch the Chinese off guard and unaware. "When one is a stranger, one sees only perfections/and you are a bridge for the strangenesses, both sides," he writes in "To My Chinese Interpreter." "You see the foreigners gone away in their faces/ordinarily and I tell you it is mutual. You study/us, we study you, who live in a quotidian practice/of our religion." The willingness to immerse oneself in another culture also carries a mandate that we bite our tongues when faced with the politically incorrect world beyond our borders, where the tenets of Darwinism, social and otherwise, haven't been vetoed by the vague pieties of civilization. "At the Hubei Provincial Zoo" describes a grey wolf "caged in one and a half/meters by one, so he can only turn and run/nowhere, so he can break into a run almost/always, so that his heart only remembers/running, goes now into nothing but/memory, into wolf madness beyond/the sameness of his nights." He later draws us into a contract as witnesses, as if sharing it might lift the weight of being the only one there who didn't get it: "Reader, I must tell you this right/now because I can feel him trying, caught/always a moment before escaping, to go/another way, and I need for there to be the two of us who can't get rid of it./Why else is the soul's talk the heart's song?" That same contract between poet and reader is implied throughout The Water Radical as Osing leads us through ancient temples, Midwestern American missionary festivals, posh Asian cocktail lounges, and provincial government checkpoints, and it frees us from the bonds of reality, if only temporarily. -- David Lyons White Teeth By Zadie Smith Random House; 448 pp.; $24.95 There is a photograph of Zadie Smith making the press rounds. Her wild hair is at odds with her bored demeanor, which is offset by a slight smirk and square, black-rimmed glasses. This is the the portrait of a 25-year-old writer given a six-figure advance from Random House to pen White Teeth, a novel that has sent literary critics around the world into a tizzy of praise and moved Salman Rushdie to give his approval on a jacket blurb. It is the portrait of a writer who downplays the lavish praise by saying in a recent interview that her first novel, "is like 100 other novels I could pick up." That, at least, is true. Smith would have been critically bagged for taking on minefield subjects such as race and class politics in White Teeth if she hadn't done it with an expertise of a much older, wiser writer. But Smith, who finished the novel's rough draft at 21, is the real thing, a prodigy, a probable literary genius. In short, she makes Bret Easton Ellis look like a spoiled snot and Dave Eggers look like a babbling fluke. A quick read, White Teeth is a noisy hybrid of ethnicities in modern London. Described with biting humor, Smith introduces Archibald Jones, a typically pasty white Englishman, slumped in his car anxiously waiting for carbon monoxide to put him out of his misery. From that central springboard, the story of two families -- the Joneses and the Iqbals -- emerge. Archie and his best friend Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim, meet each other during the final days of WWII. They were not combat heros, missing most of the action. The following decades prove that Archie and Samad were never cut out for much. Archie fails at marriage after the war, but gives it a second shot with an Amazon-tall Jamaican women with no upper teeth. They bear a daughter, Irie, who comes to symbolize the story's key cultural tensions. Irie is torn between embracing her Jamaican roots or living as an English woman. Samad has twins. Millat is a pot-smoking punk turned Muslim militant. A professed atheist -- much to his father's horror -- the boy quotes from Goodfellas and The Godfather and belongs to the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation. The group is otherwise known as KEVIN. Millat's brother Magid is a bookworm with little life outside his science books. Irie, Millat, and Magid become White Teeth's principals just when Smith dangerously begins to saturate her narrative with too many characters. It's amazing that Smith feels comfortable later introducing yet another family. White Teeth is an ambitious 448-page endeavor, not just for its cultural commentary, but for its classical attempt to leave the reader with a great moral. Compared to Dickens, Smith subtly toys with conflict in obeying one's patronage but maintaining one's individual personality. Samad and Archie are boring, but secure in their pragmatism. Their children are idealistic, talking like kids who wear their Malcolm X products as if they truly understand the meaning of freedom. Smith doesn't leave it at that, but takes on the absurdity of pop culture's invasion of homes protected with even the strongest religious or cultural steel. Without beating the reader over the head, she ultimately leaves an impression that her young characters aren't any closer than the most experienced people to understanding if cultures can truly meld or are destined -- and perhaps better off -- being slightly self-segregated. Like Salman Rushdie, Smith is a fan of lending irony to history. In an obvious tribute to Rushdie, the militant Millat demonstrates against the exiled writer in 1989 for his explosively controversial The Satanic Verses. As in the author's photograph, White Teeth has a bit of smirk to it. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but smart-ass and sharp. She has emerged as no one thought she would. One of her grammar school teachers threw a book at her when she announced that she wanted to go to Cambridge and she didn't get one call from English newspapers when she applied for journalism jobs. But literature is better off having her. Any writer who can deliver White Teeth's bite, especially at 25, deserves to be known as the freshest voice in fiction. -- Ashley Fantz The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook By Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht Chronicle Books 175 pp. $14.95 (paper) What is The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook? Is it sincere, or is it a joke? The tips, which range from the practical to the fantastic, are written in a simple, straightforward manner, free from irony's winks and nudges. But I can't stop giggling. The illustrations have more than their share of kitsch appeal, but that's because of their super-serious attempts to illustrate some rather bizarre, and for the average Joe, highly unlikely situations. The most confusing matter of all is that the authors' motto, "Learn to return," is at odds with their strict warning not to use any of the valuable information they have compiled. Why bother with a warning at all? After all, it is a guide to "worst-case scenarios," right? In such circumstances, what have you got to lose? The WCSSH does misrepresent itself on occasion. Some of the situations it dishes up are merely "bad" and not worthy of the superlative "worst." For instance, the tip for escaping from quicksand is entirely predicated on the use of a large stick. In a truly "worst case scenario," there would be no large stick available. The guide for hot-wiring a car likewise seems a bit silly in this AAA world we live in. Additional information on how to crank the engine while dodging flying bullets would make much more sense. We are told how to recognize letter bombs, but we are not told how to cope with the detonation of said exploding epistles. And that's not the half of it. There are various hints on how to survive when lost in the desert, adrift at sea, or caught in an avalanche, etc. But these all assume that the unfortunate so-and-so will have access to certain items. The important information that should be provided for these dire circumstances ought to include advice for the following, fairly common, moral quandary: When faced with starvation, is it okay to eat my friends, or should I first consume my own more extraneous body parts? Recipes would likewise be appreciated. Of course, any encounters with bears and mountain lions may always be considered "worst-case," and as such the concise directions for executing a perfect 180-degree turn in a large American car come in real handy. Regardless of intent, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook is an extremely fun piece of sound-bite (read: bathroom) reading, if ultimately only useful for would-be criminals, the congenitally adventurous, and, of course, fiction writers. -- Chris Davis The Year of Jubilo A Novel of the Civil War By Howard Bahr Henry Holt; 376 pp.; $25 The former curator of William Faulkner's Oxford home, Howard Bahr, follows up the success of his first novel, the award-winning The Black Flower, with another Civil War tale in The Year of Jubilo. The Black Flower's critical acclaim resulted from the author's imaginative and perceptive appraisal of the aftermath of battle -- how men are changed by war, by killing, by living with those memories and visions -- and this theme is intensified here. A violent, brutal scene dated June 1864 serves as prelude to The Year of Jubilo's first chapter, where Solomon Gault kills a husband and wife and abandons their blind son in a pasture. The entire novel is framed by this event until scores are finally settled. Gault, a renegade Confederate and former planter, refuses to consider the war over, and infuriated by the presence of Union Colonel Burduck and the Federal troops, Gault manages to stir up a few former Rebels for an insurrection. Gawain Harper, an earnest, likable protagonist who is trying to re-establish his prewar life in Cumberland, Mississippi, in 1865, together with his friend, Henry Stribling, stumble into this fray. What they encounter is a hometown changed by a strict curfew and a tavern frequented by Federals and Confederates alike. The tavern serves as a site for establishing a tenuous bond between veterans from both sides -- a chance to see one another as men rather than as enemies. Those sick of war welcome this opportunity, but Gault threatens the healing when he orders random Federal soldiers shot. Yankees and Rebels unite to tackle Gault, a man who is not so much anti-Union as he is anti-human. Gault, clearly mad, sees himself as a deity and cares nothing about the men who die under his command. They are, he thinks, "Peckerwoods" and "Yellowhammer trash." One of the novel's strongest scenes features an accidental meeting between Gault and Burduck. Burduck, haunted by images of a captured slave vessel and the men and women trapped below in chains, is as fully drawn as Gault. The two men engage in banter, Gault describing himself as a mere private, and Burduck thinking, "If you were a private that horse there was a Major General." Gault defines their relationship in terms of victor and vanquished, and as Burduck turns his back and rides off, Gault's decision not to shoot him means he had "taken a lien on the Colonel's soul." While most of the characters in The Year of Jubilo are remarkably well-drawn -- including Molochi Fish, a man known for tracking runaway slaves with his dogs, and Old Hundred-and-Eleven, a semitragic, semicomic figure with a pivotal role to play -- Bahr falters with Harper's love interest, Morgan Rhea. Though a young widow, Morgan retains her former identity, complete with the title "Miss," her maiden name, and, one presumes, her maidenhood. Such traditional trappings, however, clash with her headstrong nature, resulting in a character who is out of period. All the novel's characters share in a sense of hauntedness -- the deceased are practically characters. Molochi Fish, for example, suffers from nightly visits by specters: his mother, an Indian mistress, slaves, dogs. Peace eludes him: "Molochi Fish was awake; he could never sleep when his mother was in the yard. She was out there now, howling, stalking back and forth with her winding sheet dragging behind, tearing at her hair ... . He could hear the dogs moving in their pen, made restless by the old woman. But there were no children tonight ... . That was good." Or consider Morgan Rhea, who looks out her window across Holy Cross Cemetery to see a woman, all in black, moving along the cedars: "Someone calling on the dead, moving slowly, remembering. Squinting her eyes, Morgan could see that the woman carried a basket over her arm, and in the basket a white blur -- daisies, Morgan thought ... . Now came the old, familiar tingle under the bridge of her nose, and in a moment Morgan Rhea was crying, but easily, without pain. 'Long remember,' she said to the woman yonder on the hill. 'Long remember.' Then she turned away, and passed into the cool hall where the sunlight slanted." This hauntedness, of scores settled and unsettled, is Howard Bahr's triumph in The Year of Jubilo. -- Lisa C. Hickman The Comeback of Verse A woman wearing a black cocktail dress stands near the edge of a lake. She is holding a fishing rod with a man dangling from the hook. Instead of fish, the lake is full of bankers, doctors, and lawyers. Her father asks her what she's caught. "A poet," she replies. "Throw him back," he orders. It's a classic New Yorker cartoon, published at a time when Ogden Nash received top-dollar for his verse. Later, poets Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell appealed to America as much for their private lives -- every martini downed, every illicit love affair pursued -- as for their award-winning collections. Poetry reveled in popular culture throughout the Beat '60s and then mysteriously disappeared. Whether it was perceived too abstract or time-consuming for an America interested in drive-through fiction, it was apparent that poetry was no longer alluring, didn't speak to readers' everyday lives. Poetry was what their distant nephew at Yale was taking. Though it's a generalization to say that the '80s produced very little impressive verse, it's hard to name even one poet who embodied the decade. But the black cloud may be lifting. Last month, The New York Times ran a front-page story profiling poet Billy Collins and his recent trysts with a small university press. This summer C.K. Williams, Derek Walcott, Thom Gunn, and Charles Wright -- winner of 1998's Nobel Prize for poetry -- will release new collections. Deborah Garrison's hugely successful A Working Girl Can't Win will soon hit shelves in paperback. Though these established poets don't need to feel the love within literary circles, they could always reap the royalties from a little Barnes and Noble window-front whoring. Speaking of which, Sonia Sanchez has lent her bluesy rhymes and throaty voice to Ford Motor Company. Tune into any FM radio station for her cooking like a 900 harpie about one of Ford's new cars hugging the curvvvveessss. The Sanchez radio ad revives the argument that art loses its integrity when it is sold on a massive scale. U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky -- who resigned in May from his post after an unprecedented three terms -- constantly dismissed that narrow view. His Favorite Poem Project, an audiovisual archive of regular people reading their favorite poem on camera, is remarkable assurance that people still find verse relevant to their everyday lives. A construction worker with a deep Boston accent reciting from memory Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" could not have greater ironic meaning. The news hour with Jim Lehrer airs program segments on WKNO. As Pinsky asserts, poetry must be spoken aloud to maintain its vibrancy in the public consciousness. Rap-flavored spoken word gained more respectability among writers and audiences in the mid-'90s, much to the credit of the country's first spoken word enclave, The Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York, which turned 25 this year. This dark bar ignited the commercially successful careers of poet Reg E. Gaines -- who wrote the prose poem book to Tony Award winning Bring on Da Noise, Bring on Da Funk -- and short story author Maggie Estep. Although it took two decades for Joe American to catch on to spoken word, interest in the form helped create hype for poetry-heavy films like Slam! and LoveJones. Poetry slams, competitions in which poets' recitations are rated, are a common fixture in many cities. Memphis' five-member slam troupe will compete in the regional slam contest in Georgia this week and hopefully make it to the finals at Lincoln Center this summer. Miraculously, poetry is thriving again. Rap shook hands with academia, writers jumped in bed with major corporations, established poets published fresh collections, and the news media gave the attention to verse it has survived too long without. -- Ashley Fantz