Non-Fiction

Short reviews of recent non-fiction books.

• Macedonia
• Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style
• Goth: Undead Subculture
• The Manual: A True Bad Boy
• Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River
• The View from the Upper Deck: The Funniest Collection of Sports Satire Ever
• Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song
• Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South

Macedonia

By Harvey Pekar, Heather Roberson and Ed PiskorVillard, 161 pp., $17.95

Ask any saber-rattling politician or television pundit about the possibility of peace, and they will tell you war is an inevitable part of life. Harvey Pekar, the comic world's irascible autobiographer, hopes to prove that axiom wrong with his new graphic novel, Macedonia. In this endeavor, Pekar has shifted his eyes from his own life to that of co-author Heather Roberson, a peace and conflict studies student who traveled to the titular country to study how in the 1990s the Balkan nation, despite years of ethnic discord and no standing army of its own, was able to avoid the violence that plagued its neighbors. Based on notes Roberson took while on her trip and interviews conducted by Pekar, Macedonia unfortunately suffers from information overload. While the story certainly demands attention given the possibility for civil war in Iraq, in many parts the novel is as exciting to read as a thesis paper that just happens to be accompanied by excellent illustrations (by young R. Crumb progeny Ed Piskor). What captivates in Macedonia is the unexpected � and often humorous � interactions Roberson has with swarthy hotel owners, cab drivers and horny Eastern European men, as the rest of the dialogue, with its strong academic flavor, often plods along.

�Dominic Mercier

Louis I. Kahn: Beyond Time and Style

By Carter Wiseman, W.W. Norton and Co., 288 pp., $60

General enthusiasm for architecture is not the reason that the documentary My Favorite Architect packed movie theaters here. Granted, this Academy Award-nominated feature by Nathaniel Kahn is exceptionally well made, but it is the extraordinary story of the title's subject, who happens to be the filmmaker's father, that made the narrative so compelling.

Louis Kahn has been the subject of many books, and this new one by Yale architectural historian Carter Wiseman does as good a job as any in describing his life and works. Born in Estonia and raised dirt poor in Philadelphia, this short and homely man went on to become one of those artist-practitioners whose influence and posthumous fame greatly exceeded his professional success, not unlike his contemporary Frank Lloyd Wright. Kahn is vividly portrayed by Wiseman as a driven, selfish, idealistic and brilliant architect, whose stealthy personal power was reflected in his monumental buildings. Just as he alienated and intimidated many of his colleagues, including Ed Bacon, he inspired deep awe amongst younger architects, clients (memorably, Jonas Salk) and especially his students at Yale and Penn.

This book is smartly laid out, easy to read and comprehensive. Wiseman's prose style is somewhat prosaic, and he tends to repeat clichéd factoids about Kahn from chapter to chapter, but this is, in whole, a neat and often insightful overview of a great American life in the arts.

�Peter Burwasser

Goth: Undead Subculture

Edited by Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby, Duke University Press, 456 pp., $25.95

If goths want to see their culture reflected in all its messy glory, this wide-ranging collection of academic inquiries should do the trick. The 23 essays that appear in Goth: Undead Subculture poke into all kinds of places. Not just the postpunk England that birthed Joy Division, or remote Australia, which gave us Nick Cave, but idiosyncratic scenes in Los Angeles, Austin and beyond. Mark Nowak ties Buffalo's mid-'80s goth-industrial scene to the city's dying factories; Jason K. Friedman compares the Southern Gothic tradition of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor to the South-set goth fiction of Poppy Z. Brite and Anne Rice; Paul Hodkinson finds community in LiveJournal comments.

Many of the contributors are self-identified goths, and a couple take great pains to give their subjects the last word. The subculture lends itself to a multitude of readings on physical manifestations: Dracula, Buffy and Edward Scissorhands get a closer look, and fashion and religion cross paths more than once. Male femininity and sadomasochism are explored from a number of perspectives, and essayists find a wealth of meaning in such commonplace objects as flowing skirts and silver jewelry.

Goth has some fascinating ideas, and even when authors contradict each other, they do so with sensitivity and tolerance for conflicting opinions. The academic language may keep some readers from really sinking their teeth into it, but most chapters are worth wading through the jargon for. The language is dry, but Goth's complex visions of much misunderstood creatures bring the subject to life.

�M.J. Fine

The Manual: A True Bad Boy Explains How Men Think, Date and Mate � and What Women Can Do to Come Out on Top

By Steve SantagatiCrown, 304 pp., $21.95

Cocky, Cocky, Cocky. How else to describe Steve Santagati, the smug and handsome bad boy who "comes clean" in this book and proffers dating advice which tells readers to be confident � but also puts himself on the front cover image with a call out to his penis that reads, "more than two million served." Well, Santagati understands guys, and in The Manual (get it? Man-ual?) he provides what he calls "the straight up truth" for women who want to meet, keep, fuck � or even fuck over � men. And while his book is full of practical (read: generic) advice to women, such as "don't get drunk," or "a woman's desire to feel good about herself is equivalent to a man's desire to have sex," perhaps his most important bit of wisdom is that men simply do not care about women's shoes. High heels, which show off a female's legs, however, are the one and only exception.

When he talks about "tit dizziness," why men don't cuddle, and how to flirt, Santagati can be quite insightful, but The Manual is best used as a reasonable guide to learn how to behave in particular social situations � where women can create a safe space to feel comfortable/empowered about approaching or being approached by a man.

If Santagati's strength is his ability to write short chapters in a conversational/confessional tone, his attempts at humor are a drawback. And with his Q&As, quizzes and notes, this book reads like a collection of Cosmopolitan articles. Alas, The Manual is also about as deep.

�Gary M. Kramer

Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River

By Beth KephartTemple University Press, 120 pp., $23

With Flow, National Book Award-nominated author Beth Kephart gives the Schuylkill River a voice, a memory, an irascible sensibility. In 76 narrative poems and nearly as many straightforward historical essays, Kephart describes several hundred years with the city's most intimate and engaging river, and in doing so, turns in a finely-tuned work on loss and wanting.

Kephart's well-researched essays provide historical nuance, ultimately placing her work alongside Gary Nash's First City and Steve Conn's Metropolitan Philadelphia as a prescient contemporary account of the city's history. But it is the narrative poetry, in the taut female voice of the river, which makes this a book to descend into, slowly, with all senses at the ready. In a passage titled "Temptation," the river says: "What you have not considered is this: My senses are not yours. My eyes are also my thousand water ears. I do not touch; I feel."

Kephart is a master not only of descriptive memory, but of constructing an existential vocabulary. Thus the river is born, becomes aware, is besieged, comes to terms with abuse, half-wishes to be abandoned, and nearly loses hope. "When they gush me on," she writes, "when they yank me off, I am slivered into tears. I die of boredom in their buckets." Kephart reminds us that our souls as Philadelphians � as humans � are reflected onto the world we inhabit, and vice versa. When one is sick, so is the other. When one cries out, the other weeps, even if there is no sound.

�Nathaniel Popkin

The View from the Upper Deck: The Funniest Collection of Sports Satire Ever

By DJ GalloThomas Dunne Books, 300 pp., $12.95

"April 4, 1971: Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia is dedicated with a ribbon-booing ceremony."

It would be easy to call DJ Gallo's SportsPickle.com the Onion of sports and be done with it � except that The Onion also does sports, and Gallo has written for America's Finest News Source. ESPN.com "Page 2" columnist Gallo's Sports Pickle site does owe its soul to the Internet's most trusted fake news site. And The View from the Upper Deck owes its soul to Sports Pickle, from which a purported 50 percent of its contents is culled. But more than just compiling previously published fake stories ("Allen Iverson keeps it real for record 2,548th straight day"), Upper Decker Gallo breaks his compendium down by sport, buttressing the easily digestible content with people to know ("Curt Schilling: The smartest person ever about everything"), great moments ("March 27, 1988: [Katarina] Witt received ... a perfect 10 for breasts") and fun facts ("Ninety-eight percent of male NASCAR drivers have consulted a urologist about Dick Trickle"). Pennsylvania-based Gallo gives Philadelphia its due, making sport of the likes of Iverson, Peter Forsberg, Donovan McNabb, Charles Barkley, Citizens Bank Park and the Phillie Phanatic. If Gallo can learn anything from his satire superiors, it's the art of fake dialogue, where, at times, he overplays, letting "quotes" go on a little too long, read a little too written. Which is a small complaint for a compendium of stories we already know to be fake. Gallo's humor can be a bit more on-the-nose that The Onion's drier variety, leaning toward locker-room and potty jokes, which is, of course, appropriate given where Upper Deck is most likely to be read.

�Brian Howard

Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song

By Ted AnthonySimon and Schuster, 320 pp., $26

Maybe you think you know who wrote the song "The House of the Rising Sun," or what it's about. Ted Anthony bets you don't, and my money's on him, because his 500 CDs, 200 books and "10,000 miles on various vehicles" say he's more obsessed than you are.

It's not just that he loves the song, but that looking into it reveals a huge swath of 20th-century culture. Blending travelogue and investigative techniques in a hunt for the song's origins in Chasing the Rising Sun, Anthony works in well-sourced capsule biographies (with recommendations for further reading) of legends like Josh White, Roscoe Holcomb, Bob Dylan and The Animals, each of whom marked "Rising Sun" indelibly. And then there's Georgia Turner, who, at 16 years old, recorded a version for Alan Lomax that turned pop music on its ear, according to Anthony.

What's wrong with this book is what's right with it. A journalist, Anthony borrows from disciplines like ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology but doesn't quite pay the interest. He grates when he dwells on minor differences in lyrics, and his ideas on the commodification of performance are interesting yet simplistic. But would a more-disciplined work sweep from Beehive Hollow, Ky., to Beijing, China, with a stop to see Elvis's barn or Eric Burdon singing karaoke? Anthony unearths great details and great music, and if he occasionally dilates on matters of lesser interest, like the vagaries of Chinese compilation labeling, it's worth the trip for the ride and the tunes.

�Amy Baily

Long Time Leaving: Dispatches from Up South

By Roy Blount Jr.Knopf, 383 pp., $25

"You have to be crazy to be a writer, and Southerners like being crazy," Roy Blount Jr. writes in his latest collection of essays. "As a road lizard, as a June bug, as a hog that has got into the mash, as an outhouse rat. Ever hear Willie Nelson or Patsy Cline sing 'Crazy'? That's a rhetorical question. I'll tell you one thing, you don't ever hear anybody say, 'Don't mess with him. He's sane.'"

The veteran freelancer dissects the South and North with equal parts Mark Twain, titles of country songs and Pogo quotes. "People call Southern culture Gothic, as in emphasizing the grotesque," Blount writes. "So? What's not to be Gothic about? Life? Please. Your own parents, two people who can't even legally use the same public restroom, perform an inconceivable act together � the upshot of which is, an invisible minnow bearing all of your father's traits plows headlong into an egg (there is no other word for it) bearing all of your mama's, and from this hodgepodge of fish and chicken, you begin to develop. Right on up through birth (don't ask), high school (where, in defiance of logic, most people are not popular), marriage (don't ask) and senility. And then, get this, you die. Literally. How can the South be significantly more Gothic than anyplace else?"

Long Time Leaving (the title is taken from a Roger Miller song) is a welcome and laugh-out-loud reprieve from the culture wars. With the recent passing of Molly Ivins, Art Buchwald and Kurt Vonnegut, I nominate Roy Blount Jr. as America's funniest living writer.

�Andrew Milner