Nonfiction Reviews

Short reviews of recent non-fiction books.

The Philadelphia Mummers: Building Community Through Play

The most important thing to know about TUP's two Mummer books is that, though they are best taken as a whole, they don't have to be. Their histories and takes on the sociocultural aspect of Mummery, local and international, work together as well as apart.

Both authors became part of the action through membership or service. Both put in their time. The Mummers, it seems, is like marriage, jail and the priesthood all rolled into one.

Photo-essayist Kennedy, a fair historian of the culture and costumes, reaches back into the archives for all manner of Mummer glow: 1890s snaps of the Golden Crown Club, pictures of minstrel "wenches" (a lady-dressing format Kennedy devotes an entire chapter to) in blackface from the 1920s Silver Crown Club.

But it's Kennedy's photographs — some seeming duplicated from earlier poses — that are most enthralling. From their page-jumping colors to their action-catching scenes, you can feel the brush of sequin and feather on your flesh. Better still is when Kennedy hones in on the faces of makeup-laden Mummers in repose and pose — lined and at thought. How clear and cutting are these photos? I recognized my friend Jacky BamBam as a Golden Sunrise fancy man before reading the accompanying text.

The oldest folk parade in the U.S. is given its ethnographic due courtesy of Masters as she accepts the city's race, color, sex and class issues, for better, worst and best, as part of the Mummers totality. How far the Mummers have grown is evident from how Masters sat in with a fancy brigade in order to experience firsthand some of the rites and rituals she so richly describes — including the pomp and the broadening complexity of musical sound and arrangement of the 1930s; the playing to television cameras in the 1950s and the frontline Broadway choreography of the 1970s. All this and no one will try to drunkenly kiss you.

—A.D. Amorosi

The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them)

Fess up — you want to go to a swingers party and to strip clubs and on a porn shoot. Well, now you can, and without having to take your clothes off and possibly embarrass yourself. (Hopefully those are mutually exclusive things.)

With The Book of Vice, button-down NPR host Peter Sagal has in the name of journalistic integrity (right) experienced all these vices firsthand, positioning himself as a tour guide for armchair fantasists through various dens of iniquity. The result is this often hilarious "guide," which features various (s)exploits Sagal (and his wife) partook in, including attending a fetish ball.

While his dinner with Nina Hartley, Stormy Daniels and Shane, a trio of sexy porn stars, is revealing in that they are all in control of their sexuality, and are perhaps more "together" than their fans, much of Sagal's purpose in writing this book is to demystify the sex industry.

For example, Sagal acknowledges that strippers will tell patrons what they want to hear — even when they are writers like him who just "want to talk." And while swingers are trying to make their orgies "normal," in Sagal's jaundiced view, these folks are not only boring, but also depressing. (Maybe he just went on an off night?)

Ironically, the best chapters are not about sex at all, but deal with food, gambling and conspicuous consumption. Sagal's astute observations about human nature and why we want to fuck, eat, spend money, fuck some more and generally misbehave are the unifying theme of this enjoyable, and often laugh-out-loud-funny book.

Yet Sagal's sucker punch as a writer is that he tells you all about these very naughty things, not quite in the "how-to" style promised by the title, but in a way that makes readers participants. It's a shrewd move that pays off for the curious.

—Gary M. Kramer

Backyard Giants: The Passionate, Heartbreaking and Glorious Quest to Grow the Biggest Pumpkin Ever

When I was a kid, my grandfather liked to grow big pumpkins — 20, 30 or even 40 pounds each. I thought they were gigantic, but his pumpkins were nothing compared to those grown in Backyard Giants, a funny, fascinating and, at times, suspense-filled look at the world of giant-pumpkin growing where, if you're not breaking 1,000 pounds, you might as well stay home.

Warren, who got sucked into this world while on assignment for The Wall Street Journal, follows the father-and-son team of Dick and Ron Wallace from Rhode Island. They want to grow the biggest pumpkin ever — shooting for 1,500 pounds, which would give them a new world record.

The book includes more agriculture than your might expect, but Warren balances the technical stuff with what make this story really interesting. Giant pumpkin growing is a back- and heart-breaking hobby because you need to do so much to support this incredible growth, and so many things can go wrong. You could have a world champion sitting in your backyard, only to find a crack or rot right before the weigh-off. (The Warrens lost their big pumpkins that way in 2005.) Giant Pumpkins follows their 2006 quest.

The final chapters are so tense, and so well-written, that, like with a mystery novel, I covered up the last page so I wouldn't be able to see how it ended. Yes, in a book about pumpkins. You'll never look at your jack-o'-lantern the same way again.

—Jen A. Miller

The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible

Whether it's repairing a roof or mending a soul, what A.J. Jacobs does best is take on monumental tasks and make the necessary efforts to ensure their subject's luster. At least that's true of his writing. You'd have to go to his home or find Kirlian photographs of his aura to see otherwise. As he did in his previous book, The Know-It-All, Jacobs tackles his latest project evenly and clearheadedly and follows it through to its logical conclusion. With K-I-A, it was to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and help nonknow-ers know. Biblically has similarly expansive ambitions.

The Year takes in many Bibles (King James, versions that look like Teen People) and portrays an evenhanded and -headed guy taking on something he knows admittedly nothing about — namely and mainly the Old Testament and also some of the New. Jacobs spits out the knowledge he gleans cleanly and with spry humor. Being a better person for his child — or at least creating the possibility of belief for the next generation — is part of the plan.

Another part was doing something as big as All. If that sounds wry but dryly pragmatic, that's OK. The Esquire editor Shatnez-tests mixed fibers (Deuteronomy 22:11), tithes his wages in accordance with Bible law, sups on crickets, hangs with the Amish and the Samaritans and grows a beard (then gives us all the itchy details). He tries to not lie or covet and documents his slips. Ultimately Jacobs is doing a job with a directive. Luckily his warm charm wins over his cool calculation.

—A.D. Amorosi

Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir

From the New Yorker writer who created the bittersweet Beware of God: Stories comes a faith-based comedy of how an Orthodox Jewish upbringing affects a new father. If this sounds like familiar territory, that's good. Happily Auslander does not fall too far from the neuroses-bearing tree that bore wits George S. Kaufman and Fran Lebowitz. But like no writer since the Sixties and Philip Roth, Auslander updates the comic dread of his Yiddish-laden past.

This Foreskin is not exactly (thank God) the Gen-X Jews thing that others have said it is. It's a much warmer prose and steadier pace that Auslander uses in his sprightly retelling of his ill-fitting youth — from religious rites of passage to youthful indiscretions like shoplifting trips to Caldor's department store and the guilt that followed. That warmth and depth goes nicely with his bitchy jabbing.

Auslander occasionally gets stuck within linguistic stereotypes. But he's so irksomely funny (think Judd Apatow's Superbad and Knocked Up without the anal/oral jokes) that anything stuck doesn't stay stuck for long. Mazel tov.

—A.D. Amorosi

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Anybody under age 30 probably knows Steve Martin only as that guy who appears in all those mild family comedies with Eugene Levy. During the 1970s, however, Martin was the hottest standup comedian in the country with gold albums, a Top 20 novelty single (1978's "King Tut") and a series of classic SNL appearances. Only a comic of Martin's '70s popularity could turn "Excuse me!" into a polysyllabic national catchphrase, or an arrow-through-the-head party hat into something actually kinda cool.

As with most "overnight sensations," Martin's career had been years in the making. Growing up in Orange County, Martin got his showbiz start selling guidebooks at the just-opened Disneyland: "With its pale blue castle flying pennants emblazoned with a made-up Disney family crest, its precise gardens and horse-drawn carriages maintained to jewel-box perfection, Disneyland was my Versailles," he writes.

This "new comedian" of the 1970s, by his own admission, owed much to old showbiz — not merely megastars like Steve Allen and Jack Benny but to small-time masters like comic Wally Boag and magician Dave Steward. Martin developed the itch to perform, but "there was a problem. At age 18, I had absolutely no gifts. I could not sing or dance, and the only acting I did was really just shouting. Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent."

Anybody who's done comedy knows the near-impossibility of making an audience of strangers laugh. Born Standing Up is a generally serious, occasionally poignant memoir at one wild and crazy guy's dedication at pulling off the impossible night after night.

—Andrew Milner

Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography

At the peak of his success, a friend asked Charles Schulz what he would do if he wasn't drawing his phenomenally successful comic strip Peanuts. "I would be dead," he replied firmly. As it turned out, Schulz died of colon cancer on Feb. 13, 2000, hours before readers read his 17,897th and final Peanuts strip as Schulz said goodbye ("Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy ... how can I ever forget them ... ") in the Sunday newspapers.

The timing of his farewell made it seem as if Schulz had smartly resolved everything in his life, but a haunting new biography by David Michaelis, authorized by the Schulz estate, portrays the man who coined the phrases "Happiness is a warm puppy" and "security blanket" as possessing neither happiness nor security. Schulz, Michaelis establishes through interviews with family and colleagues, was fiercely competitive and protective of his strip, yet also a remote husband and father who suffered from profound depression. (The creator of Lucy's psychiatric stand, significantly, never went to a psychiatrist himself.) "Sparky" did find love in a brief 1970s extramarital affair — he acknowledged the liaison in a series of Peanuts strips where Snoopy fell in love with a girl beagle — but the melancholy remained; cartoonist Cathy Guisewite concluded the "maddening thing" about Schulz was that "you never felt like anything you said or did would ever make him feel really loved."

Occasionally Michaelis adds sociological padding to a long-enough biography, but the finished work is endlessly readable. After reading Schulz and Peanuts, you'll never look at good ol' Charlie Brown in quite the same ol' way.

—Andrew Milner