Non-Fiction Reviews

Digging in the City of Brotherly Love

As a city grows, remnants of its past are buried. In Digging in the City of Brotherly Love, urban archaeologist Rebecca Yamin discusses how she and her colleagues spent the last 15 years slowing developers in Center City just long enough to unearth some of Philadelphia's history — including evidence of African slave quarters found beneath Independence Mall.

"To reveal the layers is to gain a deeper understanding of the place," Yamin writes, and her book delivers a detailed, opinionated and lively account of her quest. For Yamin, people long dead still speak via artifacts that are threatened urban development, such as the current Convention Center expansion. Yet careful excavation of the past is slow and costly, and Yamin reveals how local politicians and developers used their clout to keep archaeologists at bay. When she and her team won, they got time to excavate the food bones, dishware, tools and human remains that show how 18th and 19th-century people survived here, and how their struggles mirror city life today.

The book, which has a few slow chapters, may surprise readers who missed it when her discoveries made headlines. It is a welcome reminder of what lies beneath the city's modern veneer of national monuments.

—Matt Jakubowski

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America

What do you really know about the handful of bland-sounding Midwestern states you've never visited? Or for that matter, the states you've driven through, vacationed to, lived in? Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey's smart compilation — including 50 essays by all manner of literary celebrities — confronts the notion that, despite being well-traveled and Google-obsessed, we know surprisingly little about our country and its constituents. What unites us? What makes us special? What gives Mississippians, Montanans and Mainers their sense of state pride? What's most fun about this book is its myriad perspectives: Anthony Bourdain expounds on the smells of New Jersey; Dave Eggers professes his love for the greatest Illinoisan of all, Abraham Lincoln; Jonathan Franzen requests an interview with New York, the state, and is denied by her press rep; John Hodgman clues us in that "no one calls himself a 'Massachusettsean,' in part because it is impossible to say"; and Allison Bechdel depicts herself as an "artisanal cheese-eating, NPR-listening, Subaru-driving homosexual Vermonter who came from somewhere else" — in graphic-novel form. Watch, too, for "The 50 States in Numbers," in which Montana is listed as first in the nation for breast-feeding; West Virginia is No. 1 in toothlessness. (No surprise there.)

—Carolyn Huckabay

A People's History of Sports in the United States

Dave Zirin attempts to copy Howard Zinn's landmark A People's History of the United States with a similarly left-wing look at American sports history, from Choctaw lacrosse to Title IX. He fiercely tries to wrestle jock culture from the likes of George Will and Rush Limbaugh, who tell us that "sports are a 'field of dreams,' a true meritocracy where hard work always meets rewards." But Zirin counters that iniquities on the field are a microcosm for our unequal society. The book's strongest section is "Sports on the Edge of Panic," Zirin's summary of the 1960s, culminating in the '68 Mexico City Olympics. Zirin puts John Carlos and Tommie Smith's notorious Black Power salutes on the medal podium in the larger context of Mexico City police gunning down protesters.

A People's History is an effective and lively overview, but is way too brief; the story of Pat Tillman's life and death, for example, deserves more than the five pages it gets here. Zirin, of the Edge of Sports blog, should have no trouble putting together an even beefier second volume.

—Andrew Milner

Turkmeniscam

Turkmeniscam is classic investigative journalism by Harper's Washington editor Ken Silverstein. Expanded from a news article, the book details how Silverstein went undercover to expose the dirty nature of Washington lobbying. Posing as an associate of fictional energy company the Maldon Group, he aims to bridge relations between the U.S. and Turkmenistan, a country that is equally energy rich and authoritatively governed by despots. Only someone with Silverstein's knowledge of the ins and outs of government could make his company and himself appear to be an appealing business partner.

No act of pork barreling goes unnoticed — the first half of the succinct book informs readers of the ABCs of earmarking and hobnobbing. Some fraudsters buy influence with legislators through all-expenses-paid trips or a $74 steak. Money serves as the lubricant that jump-starts the gears of high-level corruption.

Although the subject matter is serious, Silverstein peppers his stories with dry humor and credits Borat for inspiring him to hatch such a wickedly courageous plan. The wealth of meticulously researched information makes Turkmeniscam an insightful, revealing look at the Beltway in-crowd.

—Mark Maurer

Happy Hour is for Amateurs

For the past 10 years, some crazy lawyer in town has been guzzling bourbon, sucking down nitrous and snorting coke after work, then billing clients for his hangovers. Fiction? Not if you believe the collected tales in Happy Hour is for Amateurs, by blogger-with-a-book-deal the Philadelphia Lawyer, the anonymous writer behind philalawyer.net.

In a screed sure to get local lawyers guessing his identity, "R.J." chronicles his boozy days in law school and time spent bouncing around various Center City law firms. In 28 brief chapters, which quickly become repetitive, he paints a dreary picture of a lawyer's life. Empty days at the office lead directly to nights of drunken sex and drug scores — his only solace as he endures the brutal cycle of toil, binge and recover.

College students will learn what to avoid, and terminal desk jockeys will get a vicarious thrill reading about strippers and trashed hotel rooms. For everyone else, it will reinforce the image of every rotten lawyer joke ever told.

Under the raunchy, cooler talk and sharp humor, it's clear that after 10 years and a Bukowski-size bar tab, it's best to admit when you're stuck, and get out while you can.

—Matt Jakubowski

Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

Within the United States is the nation of Guyland, made up of 16- to 26-year-old white males who live by the credo "Bros Before Hos" and binge drink their way through their formative years. At their most innocuous, the citizens of Guyland are nothing more than young men who play too many violent video games and watch a lot of porn (often with other guys). But at the core of Guyland are toxic mores that permit and encourage date rape, vile fraternity hazing and beating homosexuals.

Michael Kimmel, a professor of sociology at SUNY-Stony Brook, posits that the hyper-masculine culture that has emerged among young men is the male backlash to gender equality. With women's achievements now on par with their male counterparts, men feel they must assert their masculinity in increasingly extreme ways in retaliation. Additionally, the homogenization of American culture has created an atmosphere in which citizens of Guyland have become the dominant social groups on many college campuses and high schools.

From interviews with hundreds of guys, Kimmel writes a highly readable account of the Guyland mentality and its consequences for those both inside and outside Guyland's borders.

—Andrew Thompson

More Information Than You Require

It's hard not to appreciate the kind of decisions required to compile a fake trivia book when an advance copy errantly includes an editor's note advising the author to keep a part about green M&M's, but "maybe not ferrets."

In More Information Than You Require, John Hodgman again assembles an almanac with the kind of half-historical truths and pure absurdities — like details about which presidents had hooks for hands — that he first discussed with deadpan authority in The Areas of My Expertise, the first installment in his planned trilogy. The same esoterica reigns in MITYR, with minutiae about the history and habits of hobos replaced with those of "mole-men," along with, naturally, a list of 700 of their names and occupations. While the humor in Hodgman's nonsense doesn't always work, the fact that his fiction is utterly unpredictable is easily enough to elicit anticipation about what weirdness he'll conjure next.

The best surprise this time is his incorporation of autobiographical elements — mainly about his status as "a famous minor television personality" (the PC Guy in Apple commercials) — that are both too strange to have happened and too bizarre to have been made up. Enjoy deciding which is funnier.

—Nick Norlen

The Wordy Shipmates

Textbook writers could learn a lot from Sarah Vowell. The plucky NPR personality knows how to make history hilarious.

Her latest, The Wordy Shipmates, recounts the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 by the second-wave Puritans, a group that social studies classes largely ignore.

Since her last historical discourse, Assassination Vacation, Vowell has matured as a writer and a humorist. Her longest, most in-depth work to date, The Wordy Shipmates relies more on rigorous academic research into original source material than globe-trotting to historical landmarks. Less traveling and greater sophistication does not mean she has lost her sense of humor: Armed with hindsight and an encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture, and with her nephew Owen in tow, Vowell is in top form with her usual barbed quips, zingers and anecdotes of quasi-educational family field trips to the water slide at the Pilgrim Cove Pool.

Vowell's witticisms play like the hooks of an infectious pop song and make history feel relevant. Learning through laughter is probably as ill advised as teaching world history from Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," but for sheer entertainment value, The Wordy Shipmates cannot be beat.

—Jesse Delaney

Christopher Walken A to Z

Did you know that Christopher Walken was with Natalie Wood the night she mysteriously drowned? Or that he hates eating out because he doesn't like people touching his food? That he dreams of having his own cooking show? That Christopher isn't his given name?

Walken is something like a god, but for many, he's a one-dimensional deity whose adoration stems disproportionately from "Weapon of Choice" (the Fatboy Slim video) and SNL bits "The Continental" and "I gotta have more cowbell." But there's a reason, as director Tim Burton puts it, that "nobody else can just sit there and stare at you and give you so many feelings at one time." Walken is a genuinely strange individual, and A to Z catalogs not just his every screen appearance, but each of his character quirks as they've evolved in interviews over his career. He has a name for his odd cadence ("zen drift"), he can't play poker (no poker face), he was once taken in a Ponzi scheme (it was run by his mother-in-law's boss) and he spent several years worshipping the moon. This reference book won't tell you why he's the way he is, but it provides a pretty fascinating and detailed portrait of the very particular way he is.

—Brian Howard