Like other psychoactive drugs, methamphetamine provides a powerful form of escape from what may be a grim reality, acting on our neurotransmitters to make us feel happy, even euphoric. Long overlooked by the media and a law enforcement community preoccupied with fighting the “war” on crack cocaine, and stereotyped as the drug of bikers, truckers, and blue-collar workers, it finally grabbed headlines in the middle of this decade amid evidence of a meth epidemic in the United States. Congress passed the Combat Meth Act in 2006, cracking down on distribution of pseudoephedrine, a precursor chemical for meth production, and the George W. Bush administration’s drug czar confidently declared that the United States was winning the “war” on meth.

But as journalist Nick Reding graphically shows in Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town, an exhaustive study of the meth epidemic in the United States, the drug has sunk deep roots, particularly in the rural heartland of the nation, where it has moved into the vacuum left by the decline of the farm economy, shredding the social fabric of communities from Iowa to Idaho. The “real story” of meth, Reding says, “is as much about the death of a way of life as it is about the birth of a drug.”

Reding’s first book, The Last Cowboys at the End of the World, explored the fading rural culture of Chilean gauchos. In Methland, he zooms in on one particular small town — Oelwein, Iowa (population: 6,700) — as a “metaphor for all of rural America and its problems.” There, as elsewhere, he says, the meth epidemic has evolved “in lockstep” with the rise of Big Pharmaceuticals, Big Agriculture, and the major Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs), which have, to a large extent, taken over meth production from “Beavis and Butthead” producers cooking up meth in their bathtubs.

In Oelwein, Reding views the meth epidemic through the eyes of several citizens, including a doctor, a prosecutor, the mayor, and the police chief, who are all battling in their own way for the town’s survival. Mayor Larry Murphy, for example, embarks on an ambitious economic redevelopment initiative, while Chief Jeremy Logan cracks down on local meth cooks. But Reding’s encounters with long-term local addict Roland Jarvis, who burned off his much of his skin when the meth lab in his home exploded, are the most haunting.

“At thirty-eight, Jarvis had become a sort of poster boy around Oelwein for the horrific consequences of long-term meth addiction,” he writes. “… He was always cold, he said, and hadn’t slept more than three hours at a time in years. His skin was still covered in open, pussing sores. He had no job and no hope of getting one.” Through Jarvis and another woebegone addict named Major in nearby Independence, Iowa, Reding suggests that meth is not so much a form of escape, but of imprisonment. “[W]ithout meth, Major found it impossible to feel, as he put it, ‘happy,’” he observes.

Other notable characters include Lori Arnold, the sister of comedian Tom Arnold and at one time a major meth dealer in her home state of Iowa. Arnold’s original suppliers were a pair of Mexican brothers in Southern California and, after getting a job at a meatpacking plant in Ottumwa, Iowa, she used illegal immigrants from Mexico to distribute meth supplied by the DTOs. In the illegals, Reding observes, the DTOs “had a built-in retail and distribution system that, because it is so hard to track, is all but impenetrable by law enforcement.”

Reding also finesses his way out of trouble when, in a chilling scene, he is confronted in an Oelwein bar by a paranoid meth user who suspects him of being a narc. “He said he’d be honest with me: he hated DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration],” he says. “Nor, he said, would it be any skin off his teeth to make sure I never came back to town again.”

Ultimately, Oelwein — which Jay Leno once called “possibly the worst place in the world” — is the key character in Methland, the resourcefulness of its inhabitants in the face of the meth scourge a tribute to the human spirit. Reding is less effective when he pans away from the town and discusses the macroeconomic forces behind the meth epidemic. He gets tangled up in the theories of post-Cold War thinkers Thomas P.M. Barnett and Moisés Naím, and indulges in a rather aimless detour to Algona, Iowa, simply because his father grew up there. “Earmarks” and “pork barrel spending,” he says at one point, are catchphrases that express the “depth and unhealthiness of the relationship between the federal government and major corporations” — when they are usually associated with the unhealthy relationship between lawmakers and their constituents.

But by the end of the book, Reding has circled back to Oelwein and makes it very clear that no matter what Bush drug czar John Walters said, the war on meth is not being won. “[C]learly there was still a lot of meth around town,” he says in describing his last visit to Oelwein, reporting that prosecutor Nathan Lein has not noticed a drop in meth-related cases. Local meth production may have fallen, but when asked what he’d do about the DTOs, Police Chief Logan replies, “Who knows?” As for the Combat Meth Act, Reding says, Congress made it “more of a guideline than an actual mandate, leaving specific interpretation to national governments.”
   
“Meth truly will never go away,” a former DEA agent tells Reding. “It can’t. It’s too big a piece of what we are.”

Matthew Jonathan Heller

Amid the relative warmth with which China embraced the outside world during the 2008 Olympic Games, it was easy to forget what travel within that country used to be like. Just a couple of decades earlier, China was about as welcoming to foreigners as a Florida swamp full of half-starved crocodiles.

The country’s impenetrability, of course, made it appealing to adventure travelers, many of whom turned their experiences into books. One online bibliography published before the Olympics lists no fewer than 14 titles, ranging from Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster to Colin Thubron’s Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China. Now comes Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, a quirky addition to the genre by a writer who, unlike a Theroux or a Peter Hessler (River Town), was neither a seasoned adventure traveler nor a Sinophile when she visited China in 1986.

In fact, Susan Jane Gilman didn’t speak a word of any Chinese tongue, was armed with only a Lonely Planet guidebook, and she and her equally clueless travel companion, Claire, had dreamed up the trip during a less-than-sober 4:00 a.m. meal at an International House of Pancakes (IHOP).

“Neither of us had ever traveled independently before or been to a country where we couldn’t speak the language,” Gilman recalls. “The farthest west I’d ever been, in fact, was Cleveland. Nonetheless, we became convinced that we should not only embark on an epic journey, but begin someplace incredibly daunting and remote, where none of our friends had ever set foot before … At that point, Communist China had been open to independent backpackers for about all of 10 minutes.”

Undress Me is a follow-up of sorts to Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, Gilman’s best-selling memoir about growing up with eccentric parents on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in which she displayed a streak of self-deprecating, tongue-firmly-in-cheek sassiness. There’s plenty of sassiness in Undress Me too, albeit tempered with a sense of the grotesque as Gilman plunges ever deeper into the chaos and unfamiliarity of China.

She gets a nosebleed — and a dose of reality — as soon as she and Claire step off the plane in Hong Kong. “The reality of how utterly alone we were was starting to hit me; the loneliness of it was sonic,” Gilman writes. “We could disappear or die here — who would even care? It was, I realize, a Copernican moment. For perhaps the first time in my life, it became viscerally clear to me just how little I mattered, just how much I was not in fact the center of the universe. It was a swift kick to the gut.”

The book goes on to describe menacing Communist officials, life-threatening illness and disease, lack of nutrition, a language barrier as large and imposing as the Great Wall itself (“All the signs, of course, were in Chinese … It was as if a computer glitch had converted everything into dingbats, squiggles, and glyphs … It made me feel brain damaged”), and ultimately, a Heart of Darkness-type descent into madness.

Food is always a challenge: “[I]n the poor nation of one billion, the Chinese ate things we average Americans found repulsive. At the Pujiang Restaurant, ‘chicken’ consisted of feet, necks, and chopped-up spinal columns; ‘pork’ meant bone shards with strings of fat clinging to them; ‘beef’ was tendons, joints, and gristle.” As for sanitation, Gilman spares no details for those of us who’ve always wondered what it’s like to use a public squat toilet.

The better travel memoirs, though, are as much about the writer’s self-discovery as about the discovery of a place. And Gilman does “find” herself through the reflective, red-tinted gaze of China. She shows her inner resourcefulness in an encounter with Chinese officials who come to her hotel room after Claire, stricken with mental health problems, disappears into the Chinese wilderness.

“When a stranger arrives announced on your doorstep in the middle of the night accompanied by the military police, many people, I suspect, would get nervous and demand to contact their embassy,” she writes. “I am smack in the middle of a communist country known for its human rights abuses and political torture. Amazingly, in my fatigue and disorientation, I simply wave them inside like the hostess at a Tupperware party.”

There’s also a hint in the book that Gilman’s progression from frightened foreigner to resourceful heroine mirrors China’s transition from dark and gloomy authoritarian stronghold to emerging free-market competitor. When she visited the country, reform policies were improving the standard of living, especially for urban workers and farmers. In December 1986, students, taking advantage of the political thaw, protested the slow pace of reform. The backlash that came three years later in Tiananmen Square could not stop the momentum of modernization.

In an epilogue, Gilman evokes the extraordinary pace of change. One woman named Lisa, whom she meets on her 1986 backpacking adventure, was a picture of abject misery, apparently condemned to “endlessly washing dishes for her husband, serving beer to foreigners.” But 20 years later, when Gilman revisits China, the same woman “has gone from being a young waitress with a pink hair ribbon to one of Yangshuo’s preeminent entrepreneurs. Today she owns and runs two guesthouses and a restaurant, and she and some American business partners are finalizing a development deal for a four-star hotel. When President Bill Clinton came to Yangshuo in the late ’90s, Lisa was not only part of the delegation who welcomed him, but the proprietor who served him what he declared to be ‘the best coffee in Yangshuo.’”

Emma Kat Richardson

Every expatriate in Asia has known this guy. He is the one that cultivates a patch of marijuana in the hills near Lake Biwa. He smuggles condom-wrapped ecstasy tablets up his ass from Ko Samui. He buys magic mushrooms in a Cambodian bar for resale in Singapore, or horse-trades cheap methamphetamine in a Seoul nightclub. And now and then you hear of these guys getting busted, and later you wonder what ever happened to them.

While teaching English in Seoul in 1994, Cullen Thomas made a plan to visit a remote mountain village in Luzon, buy bricks of hash on the cheap, mail them to himself in Seoul, and to sell them to the expat crowd. The first brick arrived safely, and he was a 23-year-old cosmopolitan outlaw: “Like many of the other foreigners, I fooled myself into thinking that I could operate alongside Korean society and yet not have to answer to it.”  He signed for the second brick poste restante, and was quickly surrounded by drug agents. 

Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea’s Prisons (Viking) is his memoir of prison life and his journey from youth into manhood. The early chapters are a cautionary tale for any foreigner sucked into the South Korean criminal justice system. In a Kafkaesque scenario, he deals with a con artist Korean lawyer, bratty and bungling translators, and a prosecutor that uses him to practice his English.

South Korean police work often depends on forced confessions rather than investigative work to make a case. He recalls a “short, fat man who still has the grease of lunch on his face and the smell of liquor on his breath” approaching him with a cattle prod-like device:  “All I can think is What the hell? before he casually presses it against my upper right thigh and triggers it again with a smile. A painful blast of electric current shoots through me, shoots me right out of my chair into the middle of the room.”

Thomas was sentenced for three and a half years with no appeal. During that period he served his time in three different prisons, and his compatriots were Pakistani killers, Peruvian thieves, an American child murderer, smugglers, and Korean draft dodgers. Inside his cell and inside his head, he rages at his shame and predicament, he worries for a girl he left behind, and he gains wisdom into his own nature and human nature.

He adapts with a monk-like acceptance and finds work in the prison’s shoe factory to pass the time. In the prison yard, he becomes a basketball hero and earns some respect in no-rules dirt court games organized by gangsters. Back in his cell, he bides his time by keeping a surreptitious diary with a stolen pen. He learns of friends that are denied visits and of confiscated care packages from family members. He is not allowed to write about the prison, so he learns to write letters in a roundabout narrative to avoid the censors.

Some of his observations of Korean society are so accurate they could be equally applied to life in Korea outside the prison walls: He describes an unappetizing diet that is not much different than what most Korean day laborers eat everyday. The drab, cold cement walls in unheated buildings could be any rural Korean elementary school. The petty prison bureaucrats are equally contemptible as those at city hall, and throughout his story, Thomas describes the inane pissing contests of Confucian hierarchies.

It is important to note that Thomas harbors no animosity for Korea from his hardening prison experience. Back home in New York, he eats bibimbap and is asked by Korean acquaintances if he will ever return. He writes, “I had a lot of love and appreciation left in me for Korea. She had taken me to the edge and let me look over, but she never let me go and didn’t leave me there too long. She didn’t feel the same about me. I don’t know if I can ever go back.”

In The Fray Contributor

After selling millions of books worldwide, penning an Obie Award–winning play with his equally well-noted younger sister Amy, and cultivating the kind of sweater-vested, lefty politico audience that must keep the suits at National Pubic Radio (NPR) waist-deep in spicy tuna rolls, how exactly does David Sedaris manage to keep himself fresh and culturally relevant? At the top of his game, Sedaris has always been the thinking man’s humorist — the kind of literary lothario that even your grandmother has heard of (and adores, naturally). Now, with his sixth collection of witty, observational-styled essays, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Sedaris has reached a crossroads in his epic career: either grow with your core base, or fade into pop cultural obscurity.

When You Are Engulfed in Flames, along with its accompanying global book tour, can best be viewed as an ongoing case study in misfit dysfunction — a natural continuation to Sedaris’ trademark genre of wry, autobiographical narration. Whereas his previous collections have revolved primarily around the outrageous hijinks of his thoroughly unpredictable Greek family, the stories presented in Flames display a heightened sense of maturity and confident self-awareness, the sort of which that courses breathlessly through every page and every chapter. If Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris’ 2000 release about moving to France with his partner and his struggle to cope with learning a foreign language while thriving in a foreign land, stood as his literary adolescent years, then Flames represents full-fledged adulthood: a coming-out party for a now-seasoned world traveler; an awkward pupil of culture now especially skilled at the unusual art of adaptation.

As its inflammatory title suggests, Flames spends more than 300 pages highlighting emotions of fear and discomfort and the many perils of frequent travel, and no one recreates the outsider experience quite as vividly as Sedaris (in classic, peak form) does. There’s a reason why he is able to affix the title “noted humorist” to his business cards, and in Flames, the humor is no less sharp or wryly observant than in prior works. The difference here is that Sedaris is writing from an interloper’s perspective more frequently than he has in the past, and his descriptions of third party discomfort play as well as the book’s more personal elements do.

An early chapter entitled “Keeping Up” finds Sedaris watching vacationing American couples arguing loudly outside of his apartment window, taking desperate stabs at figuring their way around Sedaris’ adopted home of Paris, while concurrently mangling the French language as though it were a garbage-bound piece of paper. (One woman even mistakenly believes that her meager Spanish skills will suffice for the trip.) Still another story brings Sedaris to the doorstep of his father’s neighbors in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he makes acquaintances with a flamboyant 15-year-old, whose own Southern-fried parents proudly proclaim to be a homosexual. Odd, Sedaris sniffs in his biting narrative. In his own Southern childhood, identifying oneself as gay would have been nothing short of a death sentence; you’d have to find yourself a girlfriend “who was willing to settle for the sensitive type.”

The best story in Flames, however, is the memoir’s last: a multipart epic about the author’s two-decade-long love affair with smoking cigarettes and subsequent decision to give them up for good. It’s an arduous undertaking that has Sedaris and his partner, Hugh, relocating to Japan for a three-month excursion, steeped in the fundamental principles of cultural misfit-hood. Broken up into three distinct sections — “Before,” “Japan,” and “After,” respectively — the story offers an inside man’s perspective into Sedaris at his very best and most introspective, and indeed, the entire account reads as though the passages were copied directly from the pages of his diary. “The Smoking Section” is equal parts poignant and melodramatic, altruistic and self-serving, all at once. It is here that Sedaris demonstrates his remarkable ability to spin seemingly mundane scenes into funny and interesting lifestyle pieces, with no shortage of heart. By its conclusion, one can’t help but wonder why moving to Tokyo wouldn’t be just as, if not more, effective a method for kicking butts as attaching an endless parade of nicotine patches to one’s forearm would be.

As a performer, Sedaris’ star shines equally as bright, but in a radically different manner than his comedic persona radiates when regulated to the page. Currently underway on a multicity North American book reading tour, Sedaris has taken to reading out loud from works by other authors, a few of his as-yet unpublished essays, and even a smattering of excerpts from his personal journal, offering a rare glimpse of the author when he is unfiltered by the bounds of the editing process.

It’s fun to watch Sedaris relay his unique brand of offbeat, awkward humor to the audience in person, and listening to the introductory origins of each story provides the kind of elated enhancement that is more often applied to the most cherished of fantasy fiction, but rarely to the kind of observational memoir writing of which Sedaris has repeatedly proven himself a master. Robbed of the protection of editors and literary distance, many equally capable writers would more than likely find themselves foundering onstage. In his public readings though, Sedaris demonstrates that, on paper or off, he’s able to use his biting and keen sense of humor to make pathways into his audience’s hearts; put quite simply, he’s just a funny guy.

Converting humor from the page to the stage is no easy feat, and many fine nuances are often sacrificed in translation. The fact that Sedaris has been able to consistently maintain a long-lasting relationship with his avid readers stands as an overwhelming testament to his genius and talent as both a writer and a performer. The trick to remaining relevant is to grow and mature with one’s audience — a difficulty that has seen many gifted artists forfeited in its wake. Sedaris, conversely, continues to regenerate the kind of radiant humor and spark in both his writing and his performing that has simultaneously drawn in younger readers while keeping his core base unwaveringly interested. Upon reaching the summit of Flames, one gets the sense that this isn’t Sedaris’ zenith; rather, it’s something of a new beginning.

Emma Kat Richardson

The religion of Barack Obama has become a matter at the forefront of the 2008 American presidential race, from the media storm surrounding his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, to assertions that the democratic nominee harbors a closeted Islamic faith. In his latest volume, The Faith of Barack Obama, Stephen Mansfield attempts to trace the arc of the Illinois senator’s spiritual development, casting it as a paradigm of contemporary faith with potentially profound political resonance.

Beginning with the admission that the book is "written in the belief that if a man’s faith is sincere, it is the most important thing about him, and that it is impossible to understand who he is and how he will lead without first understanding the religious vision that informs his life," Mansfield frames his work with an exceptionally honest recognition of the writer’s worldview. He regards spirituality as the imminent force of one’s life, identity, and behavior.

With an atheist mother, a stepfather practicing folk Islam, and educations at Catholic and Congregational schools, Barack Obama was not raised with unified religious influence. His faith today is one that he selected as an adult, not one that he received osmotically through his rearing. Mansfield implies Obama to be a man fortunate to have risen from the spiritual mishmash which his mother, Anne Soetoro, allowed. Mansfield somewhat disparages her as he writes, "She paid the price for her [religious] detachment by ultimately having no belonging, no tribe, no people to claim for her own," and, "Only through a steely shielding of the heart, only through a determined detachment, could a child of Barack’s age be exposed to so much incongruous religious influence and emerge undamaged."

Yet Obama’s early introduction to diverse forms of spirituality informs his belief that various religions may act as vehicles to the same objective Faith. Though later he chose to worship via the United Church of Christ, he refuses to view it as a denomination holding a monopoly over religious truth. He can appreciate pluralism despite his particular affiliation with the sect, saying in 2006, "Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers."

Obama did not commit to a particular church until adulthood, when he began attending the Trinity United Church headed by Reverend Jeremiah Wright in Chicago’s South Side. Seeking what he called a "vessel" for his beliefs, Obama chose it as his own. It was a church that permitted close intellectual examination of the spiritual, a method not unlike the textual deconstruction he practiced as a student of political science as an undergraduate at Harvard. It was a church in which sermons often conflated religious life with fighting oppression, much as Obama did in his job as a community organizer. It was indeed a vessel for him to enter as himself without needing to excessively remold himself. Mansfield infers that Obama did not immediately abandon the Trinity United Church after incendiary remarks, such as "God damns America," were made by Wright because of this newfound sense of belonging.

Still, Obama did not leave everything of the Trinity United Church behind, retaining a conviction in that religion and civic life need not be always divorced. In 2006 in a speech at a conference called "From Poverty to Opportunity: A Covenant for a New America," he deviated from the norm of secular liberalism by saying, "Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square…to say that men and women should not inject their ‘personal morality’ into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality."

Mansfield depicts Obama as the ultimate example of this generation’s spirituality, one not of rigid dogma but one of plasticity permitting interfaith fluidity, integration with civil life, and most of all, doubt. Though the senator has expressed belief that faith will lead him to eternal life, he has also confessed that when asked by his daughter what happens upon death, he vacillated between telling her he was uncertain or simply providing a comforting answer. Obama has professed his belief that Christ is the Lord’s son but does not believe Christianity is the sole path to God. He has attended church regularly for twenty years and staunchly supports women’s rights in Congress, yet has admitted that someday he may realize error in his pro-choice sentiments. To Mansfield, Obama is a model of this generation’s believer, that is, a believer who does not always adhere to dogma, does not always sever church and state, does not always insist that he knows but permits doubt into his faith.

This new religion is one that Mansfield compares to three other kinds of faith typified by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and George W. Bush. The difference to Mansfield is not so much the doctrinal as narrative. While Clinton has experienced faith as the exercise of social decency, McCain has kept a quietly personal religiosity separate from his position as a senator, and Bush has felt an evangelical call which provided a sense of destiny to his foray into politics. Mansfield asserts that Obama, by choosing his religion yet tolerating the religion of others, by refusing to allow faith become the sole possession of Republicans, and by allowing morality a place in public life, may heal recent wounds of partisanship, class stratification, and racial or religious rivalry to move towards an improved nation. His is a faith that today could change America.

Though certainly Mansfield often makes overly broad statements without providing evidence of their veracity, proclaiming that we live in a "faith-fixated age" and that "brilliant dresses, hats, and fashionable suits [are what] one expects of a black church in America," he offers a detailed study of Barack Obama’s spiritual development. At times it is evident that he must fight his own prejudices of what religion is, such as when he rather dismissively writes that Obama epitomizes "a new, postmodern generation that picks and chooses its own truth from traditional faith, much as a man customizes his meal at a buffet." Yet Mansfield is not so myopic as to miss that a man such as Barack Obama, who has defied so many preconceptions of what it means to have belief, may indeed help Americans have the faith to change.

Next month: A review of Free Ride: John McCain and the Media by
David Brock and Paul Waldman

In The Fray Contributor

The cultural universals of food and love take on subtle hues of meaning in Lara Vapnyar’s new collection of short stories Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love. In these half dozen tales of Eastern European immigrants comes a cornucopia of emotion, from the wry and the sad, to the hopeful and the poignant, as each character tries to find a place in this new world. Vapnyar’s immigrants’ hopes and dreams and despairs are framed through the lens of food. In these stories, immigrants become more — or sometimes less — settled as their perspective and proximity to familiar and foreign dishes change, as they settle into new lives while still at times grasping for little bits of home. Vapnyar’s book concludes with recipes annotated with a pleasant but strikingly personal voice that loosely corresponds to the collection of stories.

Lara Vapnyar, author of the novel Memoirs of a Muse and the short story collection There are Jews in My House, has created a compact and emotionally charged collection of work in which the stories are thematically very similar — a tight array focused on identity and community as experienced by immigrants to America. Four of the six stories have been previously published in magazines like Harper’s and The New Yorker; “Puffed Rice and Meatballs” was one of the O. Henry Prize stories in 2006.

In Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, it’s all about assuaging loneliness — physical and emotional — and finding that salve in unexpected places and ways. Vapnyar’s characters strive to be happy with their new lives, and end up with consolations far from what they originally had in mind. For example, in “A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf,” Nina finally gets to the cook the vegetable that she so faithfully and optimistically buys every Saturday, only to let it lay forgotten in her refrigerator; however, it isn’t a dish for her husband. In “Borscht,” Sergey goes off in search of a touch of home, but finds it in the culinary rather than coital experience he expects. Luda and Milena, the eponymous pair in “Luda and Milena,” are dueling students in an English class for adults, who vie for the attention of the same man, with a result that is opposite — and catastrophic — from their original hopes and intentions.

The dominance of food as a theme is an effective entry point for the reader, as just about everyone can relate to these experiences. Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love swings from a familiar dish being reminiscent of home, to the discomfort of trying to order something unpronounceable from a menu, from the fluidity of a recipe passed on from family to family, to the competitive streak that can ignite between one cook and another. Vapnyar’s short stories allow for a peek into the hidden lives, the secret desires and regrets, and the expression or repression of the same, in everyday people.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

Reconciling the chasm between identity and action in the context of the Vietnam War and the Iraq War is the tight focus of Janis Hallowell’s new book She Was.

Thirty-five years ago, Lucy Johansson was a Kansas-raised young adult living in California. She believed the war in Vietnam was wrong and actively pursued nonviolent protest with fellow students. When the group decided to take its resistance a step further and target buildings after hours, Lucy joined an effort to detonate an explosion at New York City’s Columbia University. Despite her diligence in making sure no one would be harmed by the bomb, there was someone in the building after hours, and Lucy’s offense suddenly bloomed into murder charges.

Fearful and alone, Lucy decided to go underground along with her Vietnam vet brother, who provided food, shelter, and support, thereby sealing his own fate irretrievably with hers. They each took up new identities and new lives. Lucy became “Doreen,” attended dental school, married, and had a child.

But now Doreen’s days on the run are numbered. A fellow student radical has set her sights on her, hoping to trade what she knows about Doreen — one of the last ’70s student radicals still in hiding — to mitigate her own husband’s jail sentence. As the FBI closes in over the course of a week, Doreen realizes her days as a suburban wife, mother, professional, and community volunteer may be over. It’s time to tell her husband and son the truth about who she was.

Woven within Hallowell’s book are several critical subplots, each of which adds to the prism through which the reader is invited to view Doreen.

Her beloved brother Adam, who gave up everything in support of his on-the-lam sister, is haunted by his own memories of service in Vietnam and his life thereafter: from atrocities to lost friends and his father’s high expectations on “being a man,” to enduring the first wave of the AIDS crisis, only to be felled by multiple sclerosis (MS) years later.

Doreen’s family — husband Miles and son Ian — know nothing of her activities in the 1970s and her fugitive status, and find it difficult to judge her for things she did before she was part of their lives. Brief appearances by a couple of Doreen’s fellow radicals illuminate some of the influences that had been at work in persuading Lucy’s involvement with the group. Doreen’s mother, who’s never forgiven her daughter for causing her to lose a son, makes her own judgments crystal clear regarding her daughter and what she’s done.

These perspectives are helpful in developing Doreen as a fully realized character while continuing to allow the reader to draw his or her own conclusions on what Doreen would like to believe about her being a fugitive from the law: that more than three decades of good citizenship somehow mitigates her role in the death of one person at the hands of another.

To her credit, Hallowell’s examination of the roots of identity teases out numerous questions. While she reveals Doreen’s perspective on the idea of identity — that is, will she always be Lucy Johansson, judged by what she did 30 years ago, or can she be Doreen Woods, responsible wife, mother, and upstanding member of her community — at the conclusion of the novel, readers are, for the most part, left to determine for themselves the nature and solidity of an individual’s identity. Through the lens of each character surrounding Doreen, Hallowell weighs whether identity is what is conferred upon a person by others or created by what one becomes through one’s actions, and whether identity is static or fluid over the courses of time and action.

Drawing strong parallels between the 1970s and today, Hallowell juxtaposes Doreen’s antiwar bombing at Columbia with her son Ian’s participation at an antiwar rally protesting American intervention in Iraq. Young Ian, headed off to college, contrasts sharply with his uncle Adam, who more than 30 years earlier felt a heavy civic burden to enlist with the Marines. Likewise, the contrast is vivid between Doreen’s two old friends — one who still clings to her college ideals, while the other wholeheartedly lives what the group used to call the “bourgeois life.”

Hallowell deftly sets up one deeply flawed character against an ever-changing backdrop of American history, and through it, prods the reader to examine the ephemeral ideas of identity and responsibility.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

In her lively and engaging book Party Crashing: How the Hip-Hop Generation Declared Political Independence, Keli Goff asserts that America’s political parties ignore the new reality of the post-civil rights generation black American voter at their peril. Citing economic and social influences that have shifted dramatically in the last 40 years or so, Party Crashing explores how a once-unified voting bloc of African Americans that may have been loyal Democrats has evolved into today’s generation of young African American adults who refuse to allow either party to take their votes for granted. While Democrats may assume they’ve got the African American vote locked up, Republicans assume the same, and the result is a population that remains disenfranchised.

Surprised by the results of a 2001 Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies poll, which showed 35 percent of African Americans aged 18 to 35 identified themselves as politically independent and 62 percent self-identified as Democrats, Goff worked with the Suffolk University Political Research Center to conduct another study in 2007. Curious as to whether the strong showing of independents in the original survey was a fluke or a reflection of real change within the black young adult community, the new poll queried 400 randomly selected African Americans, aged 18 to 45 (expanding the upper limit to include those who would have been eligible for participation in the first study). Among those asked, 35 percent of respondents 18 to 24-years-old self-identified as independent voters, and  41 percent of respondents self-identified as registered Democrats, but would not call themselves “committed Democrats.”

Intrigued by these results, Goff took her research directly to young African American adults for their thoughts on the relationship between skin color and voting preferences, and how and why it may have changed since their parents and grandparents’ generation.

Chapter by chapter, Goff examines the role of churches in African Americans’ historically strong ties to the Democratic party; the concept of black leadership in America and what that means, both within and outside the African American community; and Democratic and Republican political missteps in national, state, and local elections past. Goff complements her research study with a cultural analysis of Chris Rock’s stand-up comedy and Bill Cosby’s The Cosby Show, conversations with post-civil rights generation African American voters, and additional interviews with General Colin Powell, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, Bakari Kitwana (author of The Hip Hop Generation), Republican and Democratic Party officials, and more. The result is engaging, entertaining, and eye-opening.

Throughout the book, Goff returns time and again to the argument that the social and economic influences that supported young black Americans’ parents’ and grandparents’ allegiance to the Democratic Party have evolved. This generation of African Americans, born within the last 40 years, does not have the same first-hand experience with the civil rights era that their parents and grandparents had. There has been, in general, a generational shift that reflects increased tolerance of social issues, such as gay marriage. Also, the growing number of African American families in the middle and upper classes of American society has influenced their voting interests to weigh economic factors like tax policies more than ever before.

The end result is the fragmenting of a once-cohesive voting bloc. Independent-minded young African American adults are more likely to carefully question what a candidate and his or her policies can do for them instead of voting along party lines. Goff’s book demonstrates clearly that young African American voters firmly believe that candidates and parties must actively court their vote, and not just in the weeks before an election.

As with most politically oriented books, especially those published during an election cycle, the time is of the essence, and that’s true with Party Crashing. A few of the details Goff explores in her book have been resolved. For example, the contest between Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been resolved, with Sen. Obama the presumptive Democratic nominee. However, the big picture — the fact that the votes of young black Americans, either as a group or individually, cannot be taken for granted by any candidate of either party — is a valid one, worthy of discussion for the 2008 election and beyond.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

There’s no denying it — those iPods and their ubiquitous white earphones have had a strong influence on the business, entertainment, technical, and cultural landscape many of us grew up knowing. The adventure of the innovative iPod, from conception to consumer, is an exciting and enlightening story, chronicled by Steven Levy, senior editor and chief technology correspondent for Newsweek, in his book The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness.

Levy explores the impact of these personal digital music players on the music industry and on Apple Inc. He also delves into the idea of cool (namely, what is “cool” and how does an object get to be cool) and culture (what does it mean when we all “check out” with earphones). Levy’s affection for the object is clear — even to the point of writing each chapter as a standalone, enabling a shuffle of the book’s content in true iPod fashion, replicating the gadget’s feature that plays loaded songs in random order.

Levy’s fascinating inside look at how the iPod came to be is richer because of Apple’s cooperation with the project. The book includes numerous interviews with the people who made the iPod possible, including forerunners like Michael Robertson, the proprietor of MP3.com, one of the first efforts at legally selling music online. By covering how revolutionary the iPod was to the music industry (now selling individual songs a la carte instead of tied to albums only) and Apple (guiding the computer-maker’s foray into iPod-maker and then music-seller through iTunes), Levy sets the stage for turning the reader’s eye from the commercial to the cultural implications of the iPod.

Does putting on the white iPod earphones equate with tuning out and withdrawing from the world, or to being a more active listener? Levy’s book demonstrates that these are questions that have been asked since the dawn of the personal music device. Since 1972, when Andreas Pavel hooked up open-air headphones to a Sony cassette player, the implications of aural withdrawal from the surrounding world have been discussed, as the Sony Walkman took hold, then MP3 players in general, and the iPod in particular.

Levy presents both sides of the argument: that people are missing out on social connections versus fully enjoying their music by focusing on it. He builds on the idea of proactive enjoyment of music by citing that iPod users are now free of the restraints once placed on them by artist or record label limits via albums and CDs. The shuffle feature means the locked-in order of CD tracks no longer governs listening; the ability to buy songs individually from iTunes frees listeners from having to buy whole CDs when they want only one or two songs.

Levy further demonstrates this consumer-centric entertainment model by discussing the evolution of the podcast — digital media files, usually audio — that are distributed by syndication feeds and played on personal media devices like the iPod. No longer do people have to hope there’s something appealing being offered by a media company of any kind. People can make it themselves and get it out there via RSS feed. Plug in your iPod and download your podcasts for easy listening on your own schedule. Like zines and blogs before it, iPods make content delivery easier, another development in DIY (do-it-yourself) culture, leveling the cultural playing field and offering niche-creators access to a broader audience than they might have otherwise had.

This freedom — to enjoy your personal music library and digital files when, where, and how you like — is the crux of Levy’s examination of the ideas of culture and the iPod. 

The Perfect Thing is a compact yet broad view of the iPod’s impact on business, entertainment, and culture in about 250 pages. Levy weaves his narrative with lots of quotes and references to academic work on the subject. The book is never dry, however; Levy’s writing style is engaging and humorous (he refers to the record companies’ instruction to listeners to not download music illegally as akin to an etiquette lesson from the Green River Killer). He reports, interviews, and provides commentary in his examination of the ideas and issues surrounding widespread use of the iPod, although it is clear his book is only a measure of the iPod’s influence to date.

As popular culture continues to be distributed in an a la carte model (as witnessed by iTunes’ current offering of television series and episodes, film rentals and purchases, and audiobooks), and since acknowledgement of the iPod’s influence cannot be denied, it is anybody’s guess how future generations will view the iPod.

Amy Brozio-Andrews

While nature versus nurture may be one of those perennial questions, for people like Pippa Dunn, the protagonist of Alison Larkin’s new novel The English American, it’s not just academic. Pippa is the eldest daughter in a stiff-upper-lipped British family; she knows how to make a proper cup of tea, likes Marmite, and so on. However, where the rest of the Dunn family is neat and orderly, quiet, and focused, Pippa is outgoing, messy, artistic, and spontaneous. She’s always losing her things, forgetting to scrape the bowl clean before putting it in the sink, and she secretly hates Scottish dancing. She’s not happy at just any old job — she wants to follow her bliss and write plays. Pippa’s sure that her personality traits reflect those of her birth parents; she’s known that she was adopted since she was a small child. Now, as an adult, Pippa learns her parents are American — Southerners to be exact.

Feeling rudderless and out of place in England, Pippa tentatively reaches out to her birth mother in the United States, hopeful that she will measure up to the ideal that Pippa’s carried with her all these years: “She was beautiful, and delicate, with red hair, like mine, only hers wasn’t springy … The sight of her filled me with warmth and made all the fear go away.”

Her reunion with Billie, a flighty and exuberant redhead, is at first validation for Pippa — here is the woman from whom she inherited her enthusiasm for life, her creativity, and her relaxed attitude toward tidiness. Pippa also reconnects with her father Walt, a Washington, D.C.–area businessman who is actively involved in international affairs.

Joy and relief at finding her appearance and personality reflected in the people who gave her life soon turn to the cold realization that while Billie and Walt may be her parents, they don’t behave like family. Billie’s manipulative attempts to make Pippa reciprocate her neediness in the relationship and Walt’s hesitance to divulge Pippa’s existence to his wife and children leave Pippa feeling as out of place as she did before.

The English American is threaded with a romantic subplot that expertly and subtly evokes Pippa’s assumptions about other people’s identity as she struggles with her own. It provides a nice twist to the main storyline, save for when it involves Nick, a tortured artist type whom Pippa thinks she loves from afar, and who appears in the book almost exclusively via email messages. Where the relationship between Pippa and Nick is concerned, the storyline goes off the rails a bit, since so little about Nick is revealed until the final chapters, and the only communication between him and Pippa is through email; he’s a comparatively flat character.

Alison Larkin’s take on the issue of identity, while couched in a fast-paced contemporary novel, infuses the subject with realism, humor, and compassion. Larkin’s writing is at her finest when she is plumbing the depths of Pippa’s psyche. The novel echoes elements of her one-woman show, The English American. Larkin’s own life aligns with Pippa’s somewhat, as Larkin too is an American-born adoptee raised by a British family.

From the red tape and bureaucratic delays Pippa encounters in trying to obtain the names and contact information of her birth parents, to introducing herself (albeit with a posh British accent) in a bar as a “redneck,” Larkin’s ability to know just when to use a light touch buoys the darker, more emotionally powerful scenes in which Pippa’s self-reflection takes her to the depths of acknowledging who she is, who she wants to be, and how much she may or may not owe her parents.

Pippa comes to realize it is up to her alone to reconcile her roots and her upbringing. Until she can navigate the rocky boundary between genetic and environmental influences, she can never feel comfortable in her own skin. And while people may continue to argue about the influence of nature versus nurture for as long as they’re able, at least Pippa Dunn finds peace as she settles the question for herself.

Amy Brozio-Andrews