Nonfiction can be stranger than fiction

Nonfiction books cover so much territory. Some are light and humorous, others are serious and academic. And the topics covered — well, if you can think of it, you can bet there's a book (or a dozen) about it.

You could easily pigeonhole audiences for each of the books mentioned here. A teacher might get a kick out of "Change Your Underwear Twice a Week," a hilarious look at vintage classroom filmstrips. New Yorkers and New Yorker wannabes will learn a great deal about the mega-city with Pete Hamill's "Downtown: My Manhattan." Anyone who's struggled with weight will find thought-provoking reading, not all of it pleasant, in "Scoot Over Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology."

Those of us who only Web- or channel-surf will find a new respect for those who dare to surf the waves by reading "Zero Break: An Illustrated Collection of Surf Writing." And speaking of channel surfing, "Planet Simpson" takes a lengthy look at America's favorite cartoon family. D'oh!

Fun with filmstrips
Do schools today still show filmstrips? Most don't, with VCRs and DVDs and computers, they've left that primitive form of visual learning behind. But those of us who remember trying to feed the darn film into the right slot, only to see the "START" screen come up upside down, will love, love, love Danny Gregory's "Change Your Underwear Twice a Week: Lessons from the Golden Age of Classroom Filmstrips" (Artisan, $19).

Artisan

The filmstrips Gregory has uncovered here are so bizarre they seem to come from another planet. In "You and Your Clothes," little Billy learns to change his underwear all of twice a week and to wear a tie when playing with his soapbox racer. In "Trailers at Work," kids learn not to mock the mighty trailer, whether it's someone's home or is just hauling trash to the dump. In "Electricity at Home," kids learn how electrons help us make toast.

Gregory includes so many generous samplings of the filmstrips that it would be easy to flip through the book and all but ignore his text. Don't. You'll laugh out loud, as I did, at bits such as "Jim is chastised for staying up late. Is he boozing? Playing dice? Raising heck? No, he's quietly reading a book in an overstuffed armchair. The next morning, this wastrel sits groggily on his bed, no doubt ruing his night of easy pleasure." Gregory's book is the "Mystery Science Theater" of the filmstrip world, something I didn't even know there was a call for.

Mixed in with the humor is an obvious respect for the gentle goofiness of the filmstrips, which really did aim to teach, to inform, to make their viewers decent citizens and good people. Especially touching is the epilogue, where Gregory writes of watching his first-ever filmstrip, about an American farmboy, while a nine-year-old student at an American school in Pakistan, and through it getting "the first true taste of the country I have called home for 30 years." Aww.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

New York, New York
Do you know why the apostrophe in "Macy's" is a star, what used to go on in Washington Square* in the eighteenth century, or where Manhattan's "grid" system of streets comes from?  You'll find all these answers, as well as vivid portraits of New York City's past and present, in Pete Hamill's "Downtown: My Manhattan" (Little Brown, $23.95).

Little, Brown

Hamill defines "Downtown" (capital letter his) rather broadly, and his adherence to the conceit of Downtown as a state of mind is sometimes a bit much.  So much has been written about the Big Apple that it's difficult to find new things to say, or new ways to say them, and Hamill tries too hard at times.

But in spite of the occasional overwritten phrase like "enclosing genius," Hamill's decades-long career in journalism serves him well.  He gives readers an excellent sense of what it's like to live in New York City in the present, and paints vivid pictures of the city's past; even long-time Gothamites can pick up new bits of information.  And for those wanting to learn more about selected aspects of NYC history, Hamill provides a suggested reading list at the end.

*Washington Square functioned as a potter's field and staging area for public hangings. Yikes.    —Sarah D. Bunting

The ex-Presidents
In 1987, Bob Greene, former Chicago Tribune columnist, wrote a famous book, "Be True to Your School," based on the diary he kept during his junior and senior years of high school. Greene has gone on to do many things — he wrote thousands of columns and many books, went on tour with Alice Cooper, and, famously, was forced out of the Tribune in 2001 due to indiscretions with a teenage girl  many years ago.

But there is a large part of Greene that is forever that teenage boy at Ohio's Bexley High School, seeing the world through innocent, midwestern eyes. That persona drives Greene's latest book, "Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents" (Crown, $24). In it, Greene set out to meet with five ex-presidents, Richard Nixon through George H.W. Bush. He succeeded with all except Ronald Reagan, and was set to meet with him when Reagan's Alzheimer's disease was announced.

Greene doesn't want to ask these men hard-hitting, journalistic questions. He wants to know what the Bexley boy in him is curious about: Do you think your face will be on money? How did you dress when you were working in the Oval Office? Do you listen to music?

PERSONAL PICK Okay, full disclosure, I’m a recovering book snob and lit geek. Alice Munro’s “Runaway” (Knopf, $25) is manna for those of us hungry for great contemporary literature. It’s the kind of book that makes any aspiring writer both awestruck and extremely envious. And this isn’t her only good book; the woman just doesn’t know how to write a bad short story. There must be something in the Canadian water.    —Paige Newman

If you can accept that "Fraternity" is going to be that kind of book, there are elements of what Greene learns that will forever stay with you. Jimmy Carter, working tirelessly to feed and cure the world's impoverished, at a time in his life when he could have been taking things easy. George H.W. and Barbara Bush, getting out rakes to erase a swastika they stumbled across on a Hawaii beach. Gerald Ford, reminiscing about the friends he still has from the high-school football team he captained that won the 1930 Michigan state championship.

Sometimes Greene's naive questions get annoying, as when he repeatedly pesters Bush to speculate on what would have happened had he not campaigned at all against Bill Clinton. But overall, there's a charm to getting to know these powerful men on a very personal level. Greene may be down, but as a writer, he's far from out.    —G.F.C.

Funny business
Lawrence J. Epstein provides an excellent overview of paired comedy in "Mixed Nuts: America's Love Affair with Comedy Teams from Burns and Allen to Belushi and Aykroyd" (PublicAffairs, $26).  His prose is occasionally stiff, but the trove of trivia about America's iconic comedians more than makes up for it.

Epstein reviews workings of vaudeville, responsibilities of the "straight man," why Harpo Marx stopped speaking, sound effects used in radio (precursors to modern Foley artistry), the provenance of Homer Simpson's "D'oh!", Vivian "Ethel Mertz" Vance's personal problems — and more.  The book is full of entertaining historical bites, like Charlie Chaplin playing the violin to disguise the sound of Stan Laurel — his roommate at the time — secretly frying food.

Epstein does try too hard at times to tie the appeal of comedy teams to a thesis about the American personality. The idea that "self-sacrificing" audiences of the forties longed to escape into selfish characters, for example, seems like an overanalysis of Abbott and Costello's appeal, which we can probably attribute to clever wordplay and slapstick — and often Epstein's correlations feel forced. 

But if readers can set aside the hypothesizing, they'll enjoy a meticulously researched compendium of comedy-team history.    —Sarah D. Bunting

In-flight entertainment
Most readers don't like to go to airports, much less read about them, so it's a good thing Alastair Gordon gave the title of his "Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure" (Metropolitan Books, $27.50) a hint of the sexy. 

Metropolitan Books

A book about airports might sound airless and dull, much like airports themselves, but Gordon's book elegantly traces the development of the airport and air travel from the barnstormer era through the so-called space age and up to the present day.  Dozens of black-and-white illustrations demonstrate Gordon's architectural descriptions of "airport vernacular," and anyone can enjoy his discussions of early airport construction (Newark Airport was built on "tons of refuse, including seven thousand Christmas trees"); the all-star movies and trashy novels about the glamorous lives of jet-age personnel; and the measures taken to disguise American airports during the second World War. 

Gordon's prose is deft and witty (he describes a boarding pod at LAX as "Valium-shaped," and his Sept. 11 epilogue is sharply observed).  Without straining, Gordon positions the airport as a metaphor for our relationship to history and the rest of the world, capturing both the excitement and the anxiety of modern flight.    —S.D.B.

Touchdown
Bernard M. Corbett and Paul Simpson provide an engaging overview of one of the oldest and bitterest rivalries in college athletics in "The Only Game That Matters: The Harvard/Yale Rivalry" (Crown Publishers, $25). 

Crown IMAGE: "The Only Game That Matters"

But their book is a good read for any football fan or history buff.  Within the framework of the 2002 Ivy League football season, the authors also trace the evolution of the sport, at the college level and elsewhere; explain the formation of both the Ivy League and the flying wedge; mention famous Harvard and Yale graduates who played for the varsity squads (Ted Kennedy and Tommy Lee Jones, to name just two); and narrate the climactic 2002 Harvard-Yale contest with efficient and entertaining prose.

Memorable Harvard/Yale match-ups of years past receive a thorough treatment, but so do lesser-known worthy subjects like the effects of the G.I. Bill and the breaking of Harvard football's color line.

The book is overly pleased with the Ivy League's reputation at times — and perhaps a bit too interested in claiming the honor of "first college football game," which historically belongs to Princeton and Rutgers — but detailed research and strong writing more than make up for the occasional hint of smugness.    —S.D.B.

D'oh!
How do you devote 438 pages to dissecting "The Simpsons"? Certainly, there’s plenty of grist for the mill, but it's a gamble to engage in cultural commentary about something so beloved. No question, Chris Turner knows his Homer and Bart, chapter and verse. The immaculate detail of "Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation" (Da Capo Press, $26) proves that beyond a doubt.

What’s not entirely clear is what point he’s trying to make. Too often, the lengthy chapters diverge into rants. I don’t question his effort, but there’s no shortage of discourses by disgruntled Gen Xers (big tip-off: foreward by Douglas Coupland) about the dot-com dream gone rotten. There’s a place for such things, but it would have been better segregated from "The Simpsons."

Turner acknowledges the split between the brilliant early years and what he defines as the "Long Plateau" of later seasons. His chapter on Mr. Burns is a brilliant discourse against the evils of unprincipled capitalism, but 37 pages of it gets to be a bit much.

Most of all, though, I kept wondering: Who’s his audience? By all accounts, it should be me, but I don’t know that I wanted a book to tell me where to place "The Simpsons" in the modern cultural universe. I like my satire and my textual analysis in different buckets.

To steal a line from "Barcelona," we know the subtext. But what do you call the message or meaning that's right on the surface? It’s the text, of course. More attention to the surface might have made "Planet Simpson" an irresistible read.    —Jon Bonné

Weighty matters
The one thing that can safely be said about fat in America is that we’re not sure exactly how we feel about it. On the one hand, lots of us are carrying it around, but on the other hand, we mock, fret over, and hate it. Thus, it makes sense that there are a variety of viewpoints in “Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology” (Harvest Books, $14).

Some pieces are funny, like David Sedaris on his father’s prejudices against fat people, and Steven A. Shaw’s brilliant, hysterical “Fat Guys Kick Ass,” which alone is worth the price of the book. Some are downright inspirational, like Cheryl Peck’s brisk, fearless “Queen of the Gym.”

A few are appalling, like the exposé on “hogging” (sex with fat women as a last resort) which will be one of the most awful things you have ever read, and a woman’s self-congratulatory tale of having actually dated a fat guy (NO!), which would be hilarious in its preening arrogance if it weren’t so heartbreaking in its utter absence of insight.

This is a good book. It’s funny, it’s interesting, it’s thoughtful, and it plunges without fear into one of our sorest subjects. Worth a read, no matter what size you wear.    —Linda Holmes

Hang ten
You probably wouldn’t expect a surfing anthology to open with Captain James Cook, would you? Nevertheless, Cook is indeed the first writer in “Zero Break: An Illustrated Collection of Surf Writing 1777-2004” (Harvest Books, $20). Also appearing are Mark Twain and Jack London, as well as current writers and many of those who covered the explosion of surf culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“Zero Break” is a little dry in places for the uninitiated, and there is probably a bit more dwelling on the Tortured Loner (Surfer Variation) than is strictly necessary. As with skateboarders, surfers tend to blow their sport up to something akin to a religion — a key marker in the battle between man and corporation, and a fundamental quest for freedom.

In fact, however, the best selections in this anthology are those — like Susan Orlean’s piece about highly competitive girl surfers — that allow the sport to exist on a simpler level. There is nothing new in pretentious devotees of anything, but when it gets into the intricacies and oddities of surfing itself, the book is a good read, even for those of us who have never been any closer to the surfing than floating in the pool.    —L.H.

Gael Fashingbauer Cooper is MSNBC.com's Books Editor. Linda Holmes is a writer in Bloomington, Minn. Sarah D. Bunting is a writer in Brooklyn. Jon Bonné is a writer for MSNBC.com.

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