Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond
By Mark Ames
Soft Skull Press, 288 pp., $15.95
If you're going to be so bold as to compare the workplace and schoolyard massacres of the 1980s and 1990s with the 18th- and 19th-century slave rebellions of Nat Turner and Denmark Vesey, you'd better have your ducks all in a row. New York Press columnist and eXile editor Mark Ames synthesizes a mountain of diverse information to do just that. His conclusions are chilling.

Going Postal bounces back and forth between two arguments. The first is that American management culture as we know it evolved directly from techniques developed for placating slaves on Southern cotton plantations. (Corollary to this is the argument that capital accumulated under the plantation system was absolutely necessary to finance the American industrial revolution.) The problem here is that if Ames wants to prove that the corporate culture satirized in Office Space is the direct descendant of Gone with the Wind, he's going to have to account for what came in the middle: the massive waves of immigration from Ireland, southern Italy and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The people occupying the lower tiers of the financial services industry are for the most part the descendants of these folks, and chances are the techniques used for keeping today's accounts manager or McBroker in line evolved from the techniques used to keep their great-great grandfathers shoveling coal or hammering railroad spikes. Going Postal skips that part entirely, thus damaging its argument that today's HR exec is yesterday's overseer.

The second argument is much more effective. Going Postal argues that the schoolyard and workplace massacres it recounts happened in a historically specific context: The office workers were, in each of the cases cited, driven over the edge by new workplace phenomena — downsizing, wage freezes and tough, paternalistic management strategies — all of which "trickled down" from the aggressive deregulation policies of the Reagan administration. In other words, Reaganomics (and later Clintonomics) turned up the heat on the middle class so quickly and to such an extent that, here and there, people started flipping out and killing people. This is dark and serious stuff.
-Joel Tannenbaum

The Underdog: How I Survived the World's Most Outlandish Competitions
By Joshua Davis
Villard, 224 pp., $21.95
Joshua Davis' The Underdog is driven by swift quips and self-deprecating humor that will keep you laughing the way people laughed at the awkward kid in middle school gym class. The author takes readers through a series of "epic quests" to find his niche in the world and appease his wife, Tara, in her dreams for a bathtub, dining room and sunlight. Today, Davis is gainfully employed as a contributing editor for Wired magazine; in other words, readers know that he finds his niche even without reading the book. Regardless, it's fun to follow his small successes and big failures on the way.

Davis carries out his twisted pursuit of happiness throughout Underdog. While the average person looking to pick up a hobby might go for chess or Texas Hold 'Em, Davis puts himself in unlikely situations for a man of his 5'9", 130-pound stature, trying his hand at arm wrestling, retrorunning (backward running) and the sacred Japanese art of sumo. His valiant efforts are belittled by his family and his therapist. (Therapist: "What exactly do you mean by bulls… is that a metaphor?" Davis: "No, I want to be a bullfighter.")

The book reads as a memoir of mildly pathetic attempts at greatness, but Davis is so endearing that his striving for victory and masculinity in the most offbeat manner he can find is always interesting. Though most of Underdog is dedicated to detailing the outlandish events Davis attempts, the work is also an account of his desire to please his ever-supportive (and easily frustrated) wife and achieve the elusive taste of success that his mother failed to find in her prime.

For all his oddball scheming, Davis begins to see eye-to-eye with Tara and his family, and learns more about himself as well. Perhaps his biggest insight is this: "It's amazing how much fighting spirit wells up when someone starts tugging up at your diaper."
-Lou Perseghin

Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause
By Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel
Touchstone Books, 372 pp., $24.95
Recommending chronicles of a celebrated film is a futile effort at best --readers will be drawn in if they love the cinematic subject at hand, and steer clear if they don't, no matter what virtues the book's narrative may possess. Live Fast, Die Young, however, has a number of things going for it that disprove the rule. Yes, it's a thorough examination of Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray's tragic 1955 vision of teenage alienation that's considered the classic paradigm of adolescent angst and the picture that catalyzed James Dean's iconic, laconic stature. But even if one could care less about Dean or the Poetics-infused kicks of "chickie runs" and the Balanchine-caliber knife fight that ignites Rebel, this book has got the bullets to penetrate fickle consumer tastes with plenty of lurid Tinseltown history that would've made the editors of the era's preeminent gossip mag Confidential blush.

Just like the charmingly subversive Ray, who intensely researched juvenile delinquents prior to making the film, Live Fast, Die Young's authors have feverishly documented every possible facet of Rebel, be it profound or provocative — or both. As a result of their meticulous preparation, in which they cultivated firsthand interviews, library sources and the Warner Brothers archives, they have produced an extraordinary account not only of the movie but also the enticing lore of the old Hollywood star machine. They also achieve a delicate yet controlled balance between Rebel's volatile realization and the dubious exploits that occurred offscreen. The reader therefore learns that Ray and Dean improvised the post-"chickie run" remorse scene at Ray's bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, and that Ray bought Cuprex at the drugstore to combat Dean's first case of crabs.

For hardcore Rebel fans, this book is obviously a must — as it is for anyone interested in the controversial underbelly of mid-20th century show business. Live Fast, Die Young is an E! True Hollywood Story and Hollywood Babylon wrapped up in one striking package.
-Frank Halperin

Julie and Julia
By Julie Powell
Little, Brown, 309 pp., $23.95
In August 2002, underemployed office worker Julie Powell decided to combat ennui by cooking all the recipes in Julia Child's classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year and writing about it in a blog that is still up (juliepowell.blogspot.com). Julie and Julia is an expanded recounting of Powell's life during that cooking/blogging year.

The Julie/Julia Project idea — "365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen," as the book's subtitle puts it — is appealing. At her best — when she is fashioning a makeshift oven spit from a wire coat hanger, or describing the animal-like behavior in the New York subway (commuters avoid crazies "as instinctually as a herd of wildebeests evading a lioness") — Powell is Sarah Vowell-esque.

The big difference: Powell is nowhere near as smart as Vowell, and what's worse, not at all intellectually curious. You'd think at least once during the hundreds of times she melted a stick of butter or attacked an animal carcass it might have occurred to her to wonder about Child's recipes, their impact on American eating habits in the 1960s, their legacy or relevance, if any, today — even to point us in the direction of a few delicious, not-too-difficult dishes. But no. What we get instead are stories (some admittedly funny) about her drone government job, dive New York apartment, pushy mom, friends' dating adventures, her own sex life (or lack thereof) and ticking biological clock. The most obvious question — how fat did she get? — doesn't get addressed until page 273, and only then in describing a TV interview about the project where the question was asked. That's probably because, like so many bloggers, Powell isn't writing (and didn't cook) for us or the love of her ostensive subject so much as to fill a hole in her soul by taking on a challenge, any challenge. From all the interest and insight about food and cooking Powell demonstrates, it's clear she could just as well have knit or competitive skateboarded her way to fame, mental health and a freelance writing career. And this book would have been better titled just Julie.
-Carolyn Wyman

Chess Bitch: Women in the Ultimate Intellectual Sport
By Jennifer Shahade
Siles Press, 250 pp., $24
Jennifer Shahade is a girl with a problem. As a woman in an insular, male-dominated world — she tells us that only some 3 percent of competitive chess players in America are women — she has set out to debunk the myth that women are naturally inferior to men at the chessboard, somehow genetically unable to deal with the intellectual rigor of chess. At the same time that she disputes the stereotype of "playing like a girl," though, Shahade wants to deliver a history and an overview of women in chess, essentially recreating the ghetto she's trying to argue her way out of.

This makes for a standard gender-studies dilemma, albeit within an extreme subculture. But even though Shahade peppers her book with quotes from feminist cultural theory, invoking Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, she never comes near the rigor and subtlety of their arguments. Instead, Shahade's manifesto for chess queens remains a contradictory mishmash of identification and exceptionalism, working to make these players not just girls while maintaining a gossipy "we're all just girls" voice.

In fact, it's Shahade's gossipy voice that saves the book. Where Chess Bitch fails as a manifesto, it succeeds as a first-person memoir of women's competitive chess — excepting perhaps the chapter that examines what women players look for in their men. Philly-born Brooklynite Shahade, at 24, has grandmaster status and a pair of U.S. Women's titles to her name, and introduces a clique of current competitors that range from highly serious Vietnamese Hoang Trang to kittenish Alexandra Kosteniuk (whose cheesecake Web site positions her as chess's Anna Kournikova).

Shahade's interviews with these players, and her opinionated reviews of their careers and strategies, make a juicy counterpoint to her dry arguments about the state of women in the game. Even if Chess Bitch doesn't come close to resolving the problem of women's status in chess, it does provide a gossipy overview of the women at the board.
-J.B.
Jennifer Shahade will sign and discuss her book and play the first 40 comers in conjunction with the Masterminds Chess Club, Fri., Oct. 7, 6 p.m., $20 (bring your own set), Student Activities Center, Room 220, Temple University, 13th St. and Montgomery Ave. Call 215-455-6285 for more information.

Born to Kvetch
By Michael Wex
St. Martin's Press, 320 pp., $24.95
To really get Yiddish, you have to think with your puts. Yidishn means "to circumcise," and a common synonym for goy is orel, "be-foreskinned one." Thanks to bilingual wordplay, the word for Irishman translates as "testicular one." In a language rife with puns and irony, schoolboys repurpose a poetic phrase from the Song of Songs to mean "nice tits," while mezuze, the box that affixes a prayer to every Jewish doorpost, is also slang for mother (you knock her and then you kiss her) and prostitute (everyone lays a hand on her). From there it's a short leap from gever, which means both man and cock (in the rooster sense), to an endless store of poultry references.

Separate chapters address idioms for biggies like health, money, food, sex and death, and Born to Kvetch deftly illustrates how freely Ashkenazic Jews mix their metaphors for the sacred and the profane. Michael Wex is passionate about his subject, and his prose is engaging on many levels. He discusses Yiddish's geographic, religious and cultural roots just long enough to bring the goyim up to speed, and though he patiently explains things that even a Mormon should already know, he throws in enough jokes to keep the native speakers from getting restless. (Hamlet, The Three Stooges and Courtney Love all get their due; considering his sources, it's a wonder Born to Kvetch has such a high witty-to-corny ratio.) For the know-it-alls, Wex shows how the language evolved in unexpected ways and debunks certain traditions as folk superstitions.

There's a 17-page glossary at the end, but for handy reference, bookmark the page of medical curses. You might want to practice shouting, "A shtekhenish dir in di krizhes!" — "A terrible pain in the small of your back" — before your next bar fight.
-M.J.F.

A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906
By Simon Winchester
HarperCollins, 480 pp., $27.95
Simon Winchester has uncanny timing. His 2003 Krakatoa book on the 1883 Indonesian Island volcanic eruptions eerily preceded last year's Indonesian earthquake and Indian Ocean tsunami. Now, his account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, intended for next year's centennial, has been published at the time of another catastrophe, as Gulf residents recover from Katrina.

Winchester devotes the first part of his book to a geology lecture, illustrating how tectonic-plate collisions cause earthquakes, and at one point he travels across the length of the North American plate from Iceland to Amarillo. Those of us who dozed through high school earth science class may find this boring, but Winchester leavens the technical jargon with memorable anecdotes about the 1886 earthquake in Charleston — one survivor claimed "the temblor which wrecked Charleston was more severe than [the 1906 California quake], and in relative destruction, considerably worse" — and a series of earthquakes in New Madrid, Mo., in 1811 ("a five-month-long nightmare").

After summarizing the settlement of California by Gold Rush miners, Winchester swiftly takes us to 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906, when a 7.9- to 8.3-magnitude quake struck San Francisco and the surrounding area: "It was as if a plowshare were being driven through their countryside, with the soil on each side of the blade turned up and over, carrying all before it and tossing it contemptuously to each side." Some 3,000 people lost their lives, and 225,000 of the city's 400,000 were left homeless. In a painfully relevant passage, Winchester observes, the survivors were "now of a class that the 'promised land' had never imagined it might see created within its own domains. They were Americans seeking refuge from the calamity, and thus they were American refugees."

Fans of Winchester's The Professor and the Madman will appreciate the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of earthquake-related words here, and readers willing to stick it out through the lengthy plate-tectonic discussions will find A Crack in the Edge of the World rewarding — and Winchester's predictions of a major 21st-century earthquake in the West Coast more than a little frightening.
-Andrew Milner