Also this issue: Easy as (Pizza) Pie Nancy Heller comes up with a new, and delicious, approach to art appreciation. -Lori Hill Clothes-Minded Paul Fussell explores why how we dress is how we are. -Meredith Broussard Beauty Is... Big books from two very different area museums have more in common than you might think. -David Warner Consumption Junction Thomas Hine on the future of shopping, and why the malls days are numbered. -Maura Johnston Children's Books -Harriette Behringer FICTION -Debra Auspitz, Justin Bauer, J.B, Elisa Ludwig and Alex Richmond

December 5-11, 2002

cover story

NON FICTION

by A.R, Nancy Armstrong, Brian Howard, Sara Marcus and Andrew Milner

The Lion's Grave: Dispatches From Afghanistan

By Jon Lee Anderson Grove Press, 256 pp., $24

Perhaps it took a country as disorganized as Afghanistan to revive the art of war reporting. The post-9/11 conflict in Afghanistan was waged against enemies in caves, with ever-shifting battle lines; the complete lack of infrastructure made travel treacherous and keeping tabs on reporters nearly impossible. Jon Lee Anderson, correspondent for The New Yorker, was one of the first Western reporters on the ground in Afghanistan after Sept. 11. (An American based in Europe, he arrived, via Tajikistan, by the end of the month.) In The Lion's Grave, a collection of his New Yorker dispatches, Anderson infiltrates northern Afghanistan as the U.S. bombing campaign begins; he diagrams the convoluted strains of power within the much ballyhooed anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, which he depicts as a loose conglomerate of local warlords at best.

The titular lion is Ahmed Shah Massoud, the charismatic leader of the Northern Alliance, called the Lion of the Panjshir. His memory haunts each page as Anderson explains that his killing -- two days before Sept. 11, at the hands of two al-Qaeda operatives posing as journalists -- was orchestrated in anticipation of U.S. reaction to the World Trade Center attacks. Massoud had been fighting in Afghanistan for decades, first with the mujahideen (holy warriors) against the Soviets, and against the Taliban since its rise. He knew the hostile terrain like no other, but with U.S. bombing support, Massoud's deputies proved capable stand-ins tracking Taliban and al-Qaeda forces.

Anderson -- who reported from the country during the Soviet invasion -- brings a sense of cultural understanding to the Afghanistan dilemma missing from most outlets' coverage. But perhaps even more intriguing are the between-dispatch, edited-for-clarity e-mail missives filed via satellite phone (the only way to keep in touch with the outside world from the ground) between Anderson and his editors. He reveals the risks, aggravations and harrowing moments journos there encountered daily. It makes you realize that in a time of high-tech warfare, the people who are covering the action are at more risk than those waging it.

The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War

By Gioconda Belli Knopf, 304 pp., $25

How'd a nice upper-class girl get mixed up with a bunch of armed militants? That's the story of this romantic and engaging memoir, the first ever published by a Sandinista woman. In 1970, Gioconda Belli is 21 years old and Nicaragua's dictatorial Somoza dynasty has gripped her tiny nation for nearly four decades. Hatred for the autocratic regime spreads to the elite social circles of her pampered existence, but her proper compatriots stop short of supporting the guerrillas. Gioconda's fiercely independent spirit leads her to a pack of left-wing intellectuals, and through them she initiates both a celebrated career as a poet and a 15-year involvement with the Sandinistas.

The Country Under My Skin details the covert tasks she performs for her beloved Organization as her country lurches toward revolution. Initially a small-time fundraiser and courier of notes, her responsibilities gradually escalate to running midnight weapon-delivery trips over the Costa Rica/Nicaragua border and even higher-up positions in the new Sandinista government. She describes finding in her revolutionary activities a focus to her life that high society, with all its shallow pretensions, never offered her: "Life acquired unequivocal meaning, purpose, and direction. It was ... an intimacy of multitudes in which any feeling of loneliness or isolation simply evaporated."

Alongside the revolutionary narrative runs another, equally fiery story -- that of Belli as a woman and a lover. These identities of rebel, female and lover are inextricable. To her, both politics and love are passionate expressions of her womanhood, which for her is deeply rooted in her body. For years she celebrates the mythical idea of woman as wily seductress, until she finally realizes how constricting the Helen-of-Troy tropes of femininity (and the men in charge of the Revolution) really are. In so doing, she sets the stage for the second great liberation of the narrative -- her own.

The Hipster Handbook

By Robert Lanham Anchor Books, 196 pp., $9.95

Can you define what's cool? Don't answer that. People who are really cool don't have to categorize such trivialities as hats and shoes and haircuts and phrases into what's cool and what's not. But if you really, really care about such things, The Hipster Handbook might be for you.

Modeled closely after '80s classic The Preppie Handbook, THH is a thorough overview of all things cool, from pick-up lines to modes of transportation to hairstyles. Loaded with great illustrations and line drawings by Jeff Bechtel, the book breaks up the minute detail with chapters dedicated to different types of hipsters, including the "Underemployed Trust-Funder," or "UTF," the "Polit" (middle-class suburban literary types prone to political rants and rages), the "Teeter," or skater, and the "Bipster," or blue-collar hipster who has aversions to hipster staples such as IKEA, Belle and Sebastian and "looking like a spoiled rich kid."

The Hipster Handbook's author has his cred in order. Author Robert Lanham is based out of the capital of American hipsterdom, more commonly referred to as Williamsburg, Brooklyn -- in fact, parts of the book previously appeared on Lanham's website, freewilliamsburg.com (also named as a website hipsters should read regularly, along with online staples like Nerve and the Onion).

Generally, The Hipster Handbook is right on target, but sometimes it comes across as a little five minutes ago. Like, Olde [sic] City? No longer hip. (For the second edition, look to points a little further south or north.) And the illustrations that ask you to describe a certain look as "deck" or "fin" seem a bit incongruous. There's even a quiz in the back. I'd prefer that the book just dictate, instead of asking or attempting to measure the hipness of its readers. Not everyone who buys this book will be hip -- maybe they'll think they are, or wish they were, but the heart of being cool is appreciating that some people just aren't. Maybe it'd be cooler to get this as a gift from a with-it relative than, say, to pick it up for yourself at Urban Outfitters. Either way, it's good for a laugh, and even for the occasional momentary shock of recognition. Shake it off; it's not cool to flinch.

American Normal: The Hidden World of Asperger Syndrome

By Lawrence Osborne Copernicus Books, 224 pp., $27.50

Asperger Syndrome was only officially recognized as a mental disorder in the mid-1990s. People with AS -- believed to be a variant of autism -- usually have high IQs, an obsessive focus of interest on one subject, poor motor coordination and a lack of social skills, reason enough it's called the "geek syndrome." (Full disclosure: My mother had Asperger students while a grade school teacher, and several members of my family actually have AS). Most of the Asperger literature so far has been diagnostic, aimed at Asperger children or their parents, with little written for the general reader.

Lawrence Osborne, who writes for The New York Times Magazine, attempts to make AS understandable to the public. Unfortunately, American Normal is a major disappointment, at its best patronizing towards those with the syndrome, at its worst dishonest. You finish this book knowing less about Asperger Syndrome than when you started.

Osborne treks across North America, interviewing people with AS. While there's an entire spectrum of Asperger behavior, he focuses only on the most eccentric and borderline pathological people with Rain Man-like mental abilities and disturbing behavior. We meet Darius McCollum, whose obsession with New York City subways drove him to repeatedly impersonate Transit Authority engineers (he eventually went to prison) and Marla Conn, a despondent Montreal woman ("I love numbers. Numbers for me are a replacement for people. I hate people"). Parents of AS children are shown at a St. Louis conference frivolously throwing around euphemisms, what Osborne dismisses as "corporate lingo whose vocabulary [is] relentlessly technical ... the child is seen simply as a machine that has gone wrong." We don't see the legions of AS parents who battle school districts to ensure even minimal support for their kids.

Not only does Osborne write about AS people condescendingly, he can't even be trusted on matters of fundamental accuracy. He quotes Asperger poet Dave Spicer as saying "My dad was an alcoholic," which Spicer has since denied. Osborne writes that Spicer works at a library, while Spicer in fact lives on disability benefits. And Osborne also misquotes the fiction of Asperger writer Jonathan Mitchell; given that Mitchell's stories are online, the misquoting is even more pathetic. When he gets so many basic facts wrong, he forfeits his right to have his overall thesis (i.e. "If Asperger's is partially a culture-bound syndrome ... then the curing of it must also entail a great effort of the culture itself") taken seriously. With friends like Osborne, Asperger Syndrome doesn't need enemies.

Only the Strong Survive: The Odyssey of Allen Iverson

By Larry Platt Regan Books, 260 pp., $25.95

It goes without saying that Allen Iverson's story -- the old rags-to-riches yarn all done up in cornrows and jewelry -- is gripping. Philadelphians adore the scrappy underdog saga of the 76ers' 2001 Eastern Conference Championship in part for the way Iverson, all heart and resentment, personifies Philadelphia itself; that the hero is a little guy from the wrong side of the tracks only increases the love. Likewise, few would argue that the media maelstrom that Iverson by turns fell into, created and rallied against was warranted or savory. In his biography of Iverson, Larry Platt explores in minute detail the coming up of, as Will Smith dubs him, "basketball's rock star," in a way that is stilted, soap-opera-like and, yes, riveting. Iverson's story, from his impoverished childhood to his high-school prison term to the tragic "eight friends killed in one summer!", seems to be one that doesn't benefit from melodramatization. But Platt wants to hook his reader, and that is no crime. It becomes apparent in the narrative that subtlety is not Platt's strong suit (but then, neither is it Iverson's); however, the constant denunciation of the "anti-Jordan's" objectification doesn't ring true when our storyteller wants to make his subject a symbol, whether it be of triumph over adversity, black power realized or tormented, fatherless victimization. These are certainly the ways Platt would like us to view Iverson, and he does an expert job of crafting this opinion by painting the star in the most complimentary light, reducing most of Iverson's detractors' comments to parentheticals and siding almost entirely with the latter in the "Larry and Allen psychodrama" that became a media circus. Platt lauds Iverson's immature "me against the world attitude," comparing him to everyone from Tupac Shakur to Muhammad Ali to Martin Luther King Jr., all the while wondering, "Why couldn't people let him be himself?" By the time we reach the fall of 2001, the reader wishes Platt had taken the advice Iverson was given then: "Stop wasting pages complaining ... and gossiping." Still, it is satisfying to read such an exhaustively well-researched tribute; Sixers fans, Iverson lovers, pop culture critics and sports-media pundits ought to find this book that Platt rightly calls "part bio, part meditation on the phenomenon that is Allen Iverson" an intriguing if overly effusive trip up A.I.'s ladder to (largely) unpackaged success.