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Lost in narration
Submerge yourself in other strange but true worlds
BY GENEVIEVE RAJEWSKI
An oldie but goodie

TONY HORWITZ’S Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (Pantheon, 1998) begins with a simple but apt quote from Shelby Foote: "Southerners are very strange about that war."

In this captivating, frequently humorous romp through the modern South, Horwitz spends a year "searching out the places and people who kept memory of the conflict alive in the present day." The result is a multidimensional look at the Civil War as viewed through the lenses of civil rights, race relations, states’ rights, historic preservation, and Confederate heritage.

The most entertaining and informative passages relate to Robert Lee Hodge, a "hard-core" Civil War re-enactor whose claim to fame is his eerie ability to "bloat" (or simulate the corpses photographed at Gettysburg and Antietam). Hodge has Horwitz donning homespun clothing, subsisting on famine-worthy rations, and spooning with other male re-enactors in mosquito-ridden fields.

In Richmond, Horwitz joins a town meeting where residents intelligently and passionately debate whether a statue of tennis player Arthur Ashe should join those of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on Monument Avenue. However, matters go less swimmingly at a backwoods Kentucky biker bar, where the author has a frightening encounter with a gang of white supremacists.

After escaping impending violence, Horwitz sticks around to report on a 19-year-old who was shot for displaying the Confederate flag. While the town rallies to portray the murdered young man as a martyr for freedom and "states’ rights," his co-workers paint him as a trouble-making racist. His wife notes sadly, "He’d do anything to make his truck look sharp. The truck’s red. The flag’s red. They match."

Readers also journey to Civil War prisons and battlefields — some preserved as sacred ground, others paved over as mall parking lots. Along the way, a number of odd characters dedicate themselves to keeping the memory of the Old South alive for reasons that are, by turns, understandable and condemnable.

By Genevieve Rajewski

Summer entertainment often revolves around escapism, thanks to a perennial crop of blockbuster movies. And those who fancy spending time in air conditioning and long lines won’t lack for either this year, given the upcoming releases of Troy, King Arthur, and the latest Harry Potter film.

But there are other ways to sate a craving for larger-than-life protagonists and sensational plots. Narrative nonfiction offers the reader well-drawn characters, unfolding action, and a narrator with a strong voice. Books in this tradition allow readers to ride shotgun as the author encounters unusual people and unanticipated situations.

Best of all, the following titles are very portable paperbacks or slim hardcover texts, which you can bring to the beach or to the park on your lunch break. Top that, Spider-Man 2.

GET YOUR FREAK ON

In Steve Almond’s Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America (Algonquin Books, 2004; $21.95), readers enter the world of a man who has eaten a piece of candy every day of his life, keeps three to seven pounds of candy in his house, and thinks about candy at least once an hour.

Regardless of whether you share the sweet-tooth affliction, this unfailingly funny combination of memoir, cultural history, and travelogue proves addictive. Almond’s quest to find out what happened to the candies of his youth uncovers an industry that has seen regional candy-makers largely disappear. Unlike Hershey, Mars, and Nestlé, few regional companies have been able to afford the rack fees necessary to put their calorific treats within eyeshot of checkout-line impulse buyers. Writes Almond of American candy’s glory days: "Unless you were a traveling salesman with a sweet tooth, you probably tasted not even a fraction of the candy bars produced in this country.... What people want these days is a dependable oral experience, the comfort, as they hurl through airports and across states lines, of a few, familiar brands."

However, independent candy-makers still exist, and readers enjoy a vicarious pilgrimage to the likes of the Peanut Chews factory in Philadelphia and a gourmet-chocolate-bar producer in Vermont. As the action moves from factory to factory and taste to taste, Almond shares tales of corporate espionage, Boston’s storied candy history, and fads such as the 1920s Vegetable Sandwich bar — which featured dehydrated celery, peas, carrots, and cabbage, along with the guarantee "will not constipate."

Although the book offers many amusing moments, it’s not without a bittersweet side. Of some candy received from his Polish ex-girlfriend, Almond recalls: "On the day I returned home to America, I found a cache of these bars at the bottom of my suitcase, left there by my lover, that I might carry with me, at least a little longer, the taste of our doomed enterprise."

SHE SEES DEAD PEOPLE

Like Almond, Mary Roach brings a quick wit and unbridled curiosity to her work. However, in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (W.W. Norton & Company, paperback 2004; $13.95), the characters she encounters are most often dead.

The book, writes Roach, is "not about death as in dying," a subject she finds "sad and profound." Rather, it explores the many strange and productive uses to which bodies have been put after death. From their stints as crash-test-dummy stand-ins to being allowed to decompose as part of forensics research (perhaps the most difficult chapter to read) to acting as guinea pigs to test the first guillotines, cadavers have long served as scientists’ silent research partners.

Roach opens with a conference room full of severed heads in dripping trays. After introducing readers to the women who have severed and set up the heads, she relates how plastic surgeons hover over lavender tablecloths (a soothing color!) as they bone up on their face-lift skills. The vivid imagery makes for a compelling introduction to the benefits of using cadavers to practice surgery before attempting it on the living.

A trip to the University of California at San Francisco Medical School’s memorial service for the willed bodies used in the school’s gross-anatomy labs proves more affecting still. Students play music and read tributes to the unnamed bodies, as one young woman is moved by her cadaver’s bright-pink nail polish.

However, despite the respectful use of cadavers in the present, corpses have an often-scandalous history. For example, the 18th and 19th centuries saw rampant trade in grave-robbing and body-snatching to meet the needs of the flourishing field of anatomical study. After all, as people believed in "literal, corporal rising from the grave," bodies were never voluntarily left to science.

The book is a fascinating tale of the "sweet, well-intentioned, occasionally amusing" undead who are by turns "monsters, beautiful, in pieces, and whole."

A BRONX TALE

In a departure from most narrative journalism, author Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is conspicuously absent from the pages of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx (Scribner, paperback 2004; $14). However, the decade she invested in reporting this epic tale of impoverished families from the Bronx is evident on every page of this richly detailed narrative.

The story begins in the mid 1980s with Jessica, a Latina teenager who is "good at attracting boys, but not holding them." The attention-starved, magnetic girl "gravitated toward the enterprising boys, the boys with money, who were mostly the ones dealing drugs — purposeful boys who pushed out of the bodega’s smudged doors as if they were stepping into a party instead of onto a littered sidewalk along a potholed street."

Soon, Jessica is involved with Boy George, a glitzy drug dealer, who has fathered children by various women, outfitted his Mercedes with $50,000 worth of special features (including an Inspector Gadget–like oil-spilling device), and (once) surprises Jessica and her starving family with bags upon bags of groceries and even a flea collar for their scruffy dog.

Also central to the story are Jessica’s gangster-wanna-be brother, Cesar, his wife, Coco, and an extensive cast of mothers, fathers, friends, and siblings who endure prison, teen pregnancy, homelessness, drug addiction, child molestation, and the complexities of welfare. Through it all, the reader remains emotionally involved, because LeBlanc manages to convey the realities of poverty without judging or sentimentalizing her subjects.

THOREAU IN THE CITY

If you pick up Robert Sullivan’s Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants (Bloomsbury USA, 2004; $23.95) hoping to learn about an unexpectedly cute and cuddly side to the much-despised vermin, you’ll be sorely disappointed. This blend of urban field guide and cultural history largely validates rats’ reputation for carrying disease, reproducing exponentially, and pestering humans.

Of course, much of that is our own fault, notes Sullivan, who recounts a year spent observing rats in a garbage-filled Manhattan alley. Rats exist virtually everywhere humans do primarily because we’re so sloppy with our refuse. And despite the book’s horrific tales of rats emerging from toilets, attacking pedestrians, and eating cats, you still must grudgingly respect them for their uncanny intelligence and talent for survival.

While exterminators — or rather, pest-control professionals (it is preposterous to dream humans could ever eliminate rats) — provide much of the current information on rats, it’s the past that best informs the story. Sullivan describes 19th-century rat fights that pitted dogs against hordes of captured rats, and a 1960s rent-strike organizer who convinced tenants to bring rats (dead or alive) to court to protest their slumlords. Another chapter investigates a little-known American outbreak of the plague, which surfaced in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1900. The event led to strained race relations and suspicions that a doctor had planted the virus on a dead man’s body (he hadn’t).

Perhaps the best example of the author’s talent for insightful observation coupled with blunt humor is how he ends a discussion of his chosen alley’s history. "The rat alley sometimes seems to me the most forgotten place in the city — a lost tide pool on the shore of a great ocean," writes Sullivan. "On the other hand, sometimes I just think of it as an alley, filled with lots of rats."

Genevieve Rajewski can be reached at ticktockwordshop@comcast.net.


Issue Date: May 21 - 27, 2004
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