Reviewing the Reviews

"In 2003, Colby Buzzell, then twenty-six, was living in a small room in a renovated Victorian house in the Richmond district of San Francisco, doing data entry for financial companies," Michael Massing writes in The New York Review of Books. "Raised in the suburbs of the Bay Area, Buzzell had hated high school and, deciding against college, ended up in a series of low-paying jobs - flower deliverer, valet parker, bike messenger, busboy, carpet cutter, car washer. Data entry paid somewhat better - about $12 an hour - but even so he was barely able to get by. At one point, he ran into an old friend who had joined the Marines, and, in his telling, military life sounded like one big frat party, but with weapons and paychecks. After nearly a year of feeling stuck, Buzzell decided to visit an Army recruiter. He describes his state of mind in My War: Killing Time in Iraq, an uproarious account of his life in the military:

I was sick of living my life in oblivion where every fucking day was the same fucking thing as the day before, and the same fucking routine day in and day out. Eat, shit, work, sleep, repeat.

At the time, I saw no escape from this. I was in my mid-twenties and I still had no fucking idea what the hell I wanted to do with myself . . .

"I figured if I joined the military it might be a quick-fix solution to my problems, it would add some excitement to my life, and at the same time give me the sense that I had finally done something with myself. And who knows? A trip to the Middle East could be one hell of an adventure."

My War: Killing Time in Iraq is just one of several books Massing considers in a piece called "The Volunteer Army: Who Fights And Why."

Massing's most compelling insight is an obvious truth few Americans seem to want to face: "In these books, the idea of joining the military to defend America or uphold its values is largely absent. Rather, these soldiers signed up to escape dead-end jobs, failed relationships, broken families, bills, toothaches, and boredom. The armed forces offered a haven from the struggles and strains of life in modern-day America, a place to gain security and skills, discipline and self-esteem."

Nervous Nellie
"For a brief but intense period in 2006, Patricia Pearson logged on daily to Flu Wiki. This is a Web site (fluwikie.com) devoted to the concerns - the very deep concerns - of people convinced that a worldwide outbreak of influenza is imminent, and that it will make the ravages of the Black Death seem like a mildly unpleasant interlude," William Grimes writes in the New York Times.
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"'Here could be found a great milling together of fiercely articulate and freaked-out people from around the world, posting to discussion topics like What Will We Do With the Bodies?' Pearson writes in A Brief History of Anxiety. Visitors to the site offered suggestions on how to turn back the infected, zombie-like hordes who, in a desperate search for food, will try to invade the fortified homes of the healthy.

"Pearson, the author of the highly amusing Area Woman Blows Gasket, sees the humor in Flu Wiki, but she too worries about pandemics. A lot. She also obsesses about sudden liver failure, possibly cancerous moles, flying insects, the supervolcano underneath Yosemite National Park and the possibility that her car will blow up. All of this seems potentially hilarious, but the humor quickly freezes as Pearson describes a lifetime of absurd but crippling fears.

"Like 40 million Americans, Pearson suffers from anxiety, which she pithily calls 'fear in search of a cause.' Her own case fascinates her, and quite rightly. It presents her with the opportunity to examine modern civilization and its discontents, as well as her own miseries, which she does, thoughtfully and incisively."

Blunt Edge
"This year's Columbia College event at Metro gives Sun-Times writer Kevin Nance the opportunity to write a fluff piece that offended the heck out of my sensibilities and made me shed my second tear this week for Chicago cultural journalism," Eugenia writes at Literago. "The angle of his article in Friday's paper seems to be that Columbia's decision to host a reading at Metro is bold and anti-establishment . . . Is his editor Poochie?"

Browsing
* "[Nicholson] Baker's portrait of Churchill may infuriate those who believe he was a hero."

* "Americans of many sorts were in one bad mood or another between 1819 and 1850."

* "In Knockemstiff, lonely women do 'kinky stuff with candy bars, wake up with apple fritters in their hair.'"

* "In January, 1965, Jenkins was a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in South Korea. Sure that he was about to be sent to Vietnam, he drank ten beers, abandoned his patrol, and crossed into North Korea. He spent the next four decades in a country that had become 'a giant, demented prison,' until the Japanese government secured his release, along with that of his Japanese wife, who had been abducted by the North Koreans. Jenkins's book is oddly compelling. The blank ordinariness of his character brings out the moral and physical ugliness of life in North Korea, where soldiers steal and beg for food; a dog digs up a fresh mass grave (and the next day all the dogs in the neighborhood are shot); and Jenkins awakens to the bleak, deadening realization that his two daughters are being groomed as spies. 'I would always tell them, We are not in the real world. This is not the real world,' Jenkins writes of his daughters. 'But they didn't believe me.'"