It’s a proven scientific fact that women spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on books designed to help them understand what makes men tick. Most of these titles are centered around a clumsy, soft-in-the-middle, oft-hungover, low-level filing clerk who gets whisked away by a handsome, Master-of-the-Universe type, only to realize that the smitten dry cleaner holds the key to her heart. The moral of the “chick lit” story is yes, there’s a man out there who will let you eat, pray, and love to your stomach’s, soul’s and heart’s content.
Enjoy the Cinderella fantasy, ladies. But know this: None of these books will teach you a damn thing about men. If you seek enlightenment on the simple creature known as “dude,” then you need to read as they read.
We’re not talking about books that you wish they would read – or worse, ones you thrust upon them. Those books suck and should be thrown into a Glenn-Beck-book-burning pyre. (Quick FYI: If your fella is currently reading Glenn Beck’s Arguing With Idiots, Steve Harvey’s Act Like A Lady, Think Like A Man or Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, you should probably blog it on down the road. Nothing to see here. No hard feelings.)
But if you want to understand the apes, you’ve got to go into the jungle, which is where I come in. I will be your Jane Goodall, bringing you a deeper understanding of the literary monkeys. Each week, I’ll suggest three titles to help explain men, or at least men like me. My qualifications? I’ve been both a male and an avid reader for as long as I can remember. It’s also important to know that it’s been a lifelong dream of mine to turn “wasting yet another afternoon on the couch with Philip Roth” into “smart career move”.
Bookmark me.
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Chapter One: Baseball
Opening Day for Major League Baseball is April 5, which dovetails nicely with the beginning of this series. It’s also a good starting point because baseball has always induced the nostalgic sandlot memory-lane-strolls of aging white men like Doris Kearns Goodwin. And the season goes on for-freaking-ever, so you can knock all three books out of the park by the All-Star break (July).
The Natural by Bernard Malamud
The Stats: For all the ink spilled about America’s “national pastime” (the one the NFL usurped about 30 years ago), there are very few great baseball novels. The Natural is one of them. You’ve seen the movie; you know the story. A 19-year-old prodigy, Roy Hobbs, gets shot by a mystery woman, drops out of sight, then magically reappears as a 35-year-old making a comeback with the New York Knights. Swinging his trusty bat “Wonderboy,” Hobbs tears the cover off the ball, leads the Knights to the brink of a pennant, falls in love, and ends his career in dramatic fashion, drilling a home run off a light tower that sends celebratory sparks of glory raining down on the field like bolts from the hand of Zeus.
The Kicker: The pennant-winning homer is the climax of the film adaptation starring Robert Redford. But In Malamud’s The Natural, Hobbs whiffs, the season ends, and he breaks down in tears as some kid asks him if it’s true what the newspapers are saying – that he threw the game.
Why Women Need to Read: Most men know the movie version, but it’s common knowledge that books are always better, so your world-weary observations about the novel will be trenchant. Drop this during the 7th-inning stretch: “When Wonderboy cracks in two, it’s an allegory for Hobbs’ dreams. It’s the natural reduced to a mortal.” Men who prefer the book do so for the sadness that hangs over unfulfilled dreams and the loss of youth. Let the saps have their fairy tales. That Hollywood ending has lovely aesthetics; Malamud’s novel has failure, and soul.
A Pitcher’s Story: Innings With David Cone by Roger Angell
The Stats: Speaking of failure – David Cone was one of MLB’s most dominant pitchers from 1988-99, amassing 180 wins. He was a five-time All-Star, a Cy Young award winner, a five-time World Series champ, and owner of a memorable perfect game in July 1999 (after having suffered an aneurysm in his right arm). A wild man in his younger days, Cone was a writer’s dream: Flaky, funny, gritty, and smart. Before 2000, the pitcher teamed up with avuncular New Yorker writer Roger Angell for an insider’s look at a cagey veteran in his twilight years. Presumably, Cone would have a typically impressive season and lead the Yankees to yet another World Series with Angell and his notepad riding shotgun.
The Kicker: The victory lap was a fiery crash. In 2000, Cone would go 4-14 with a 6.91 ERA. A terrible season, brutal on the psyche, which was somehow made worse by the fact that the Yankees were good enough that loyal manager Joe Torre kept letting Cone take the mound. Things went from bad to worse to worst to please-don’t-make-me-watch-this-anymore. Angell masterfully weaves Cone’s life story throughout the book, which makes the pain of reading about his deteriorating skills that much more acute. And I loathe the Yankees. In a nutshell, Angell tells Cone, “It must be torture to give up something tough and demanding that you once did extremely well.” Two paragraphs later, Angell notes that Cone was back to smoking more than a pack a day. (See? Millionaire MLB pitchers are just like us!)
Why Women Need to Read: A Pitcher’s Story is a tremendous book about failure, which makes it a tremendous book about, you know, life. Cone never “overcomes” much of anything – no word on if he still smokes – but, to his credit, he never took Angell’s offer to scuttle the project. There’s an old sportswriter’s axiom that the best stories come from the loser’s locker room. That season, Cone was a Charlie Brown-level loser, which led to a season of personal questioning, agita, analysis, new techniques, old tricks – anything to make pitches like he always had. He shares everything with Angell, which means A Pitcher’s Story is a master clinic on what goes through the mind of a hurler who can’t make a five-ounce ball his bitch. Tame your man with Cone’s pitching insights, and he just may be yours.
Moneyball: The Art of Winning An Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
The Stats: The most important baseball book in a generation mirrors what happened in American society; it should be subtitled: “When the Geeks Took Over the Game.” It’s the story of how Oakland A’s general manger Billy Beane used different statistical metrics to gain a competitive advantage with a team that had little money to spend. (Shorthand: The A’s aren’t the Goldman Sachs Yankees. They aren’t even their yuppie neighbors, the Wells Fargo Giants. They’re the Bailey Savings & Loan.) In broad terms, Beane went after players who got on base a lot by hook or by crook. He labels coveted Red Sox product Kevin Youkilis the “Greek God of Walks,” which ain’t exactly an All-American slugger nickname like “The Sultan of Swat” or “Hammerin’ Hank.”
The Kicker: The A’s win more than their payroll says they should, but never enough to say that Beane beat the system, in terms of titles. The part of Moneyball that gets lost is that it’s a riveting profile of an outsider crashing the old boy’s party (i.e. shattering the glass ceiling for nerds). Beane struggled with self-doubt and washed out as a player before he joined management, but his thoughtfulness started a statistical revolution. Beane needed players on the cheap and his methodology pissed off the establishment until most teams adopted some form of his methodology. Joining ‘em then beating ‘em. Amazingly, there are still a few flat-Earthers in positions of baseball power who doubt the veracity of statistical modeling, because those eggheads “never played the game.” You don’t need me to tell you this, but some men never learn.
Why Women Need to Read: A look at finding and exploiting inefficiencies in the Major League marketplace might sound as boring as, say, watching an actual A’s game, but the number-crunching vs. the-naked-eye arguments have dominated baseball for a decade, and you’ll want to be somewhat familiar with where it all started. Plus, it’s a fallacy (or it should be a fallacy…ladies?) that women only enjoy sports when they “know” an athlete, which is why the Olympics are overwrought with stories about living with shingles, overcoming Xanax addictions, and the pain of pan-sexuality. My guess is that there are plenty of geeky girls out there who would dig baseball a lot more if they knew that today’s game needs protractors and laptops as much as chewing tobacco and HGH. Perhaps Moneyball will spur a young woman, excuse me, another young woman, to become a general manager. When you do, please email and explain VORP to me.
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Chapter 2: Conspiracy Theories
The Overton Window is a political theory that goes something like this: Previously unaccepted theories become more mainstream when ideas from the fringe are thrown out, thus making the previously stated ideas seem less radical and extreme. (It’s also the title of Glenn Beck’s upcoming novel, natch.) The Overton Window explains why conspiracy theories are no longer the provenance of loons and how they root themselves in mainstream thought. In a word, the Internet. Remember a year ago when everyone believed in global warming? HOAX!
So, conspiracy theories are everywhere, but they’re losing the magic. It used to be a badge of honor to come up with, get supporters of, and virulently defend a preposterous thesis that flew in the face of sane reason. There used to be admirable kooks like Heribert Illig, who concocted the “phantom time hypothesis” proving that the Dark Ages are a myth, the years 614–911 (9/11??) never happened, and Charlemagne is a fictional character. Now that’s what I call crazy! Today, we’re stuck with the “Birthers” and their easily-debunked Obama Ain’t ‘Merican thing. It’s boring, unoriginal, and passe. Besides, head cheerleader Orly Taitz is no Illig. She seems to be the living result of what happened when Tinkerbell and Myron Byron De La Beckwith breeded. If you believe, clap your hands, and we’ll make the scary black man disappear.
Like Hunter S. said, there’s no such thing as paranoia. It’s all true.
The 80 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen
The Cock-Up Theory: Trust no one. Absolutely. But at least get your conspiracy theory underpinnings from the dubious duo of Vankin and Whalen. They’re the historians of an alternative shadowy universe in which the government covers up the colonization of Mars and created AIDS to wipe out gay men, that either Yoko Ono or Richard Nixon (or both?) assassinated John Lennon, and that the all-seeing NSA superspy eye-in-the-sky Echelon is watching you right now.
The Consensus: Vankin and Whalen have turned conspiracy theories into a cottage industry; the first version of their book I read had a measly 50 and no mention of how Dick Cheney and Enron conspired with the sun to bleed California dry. (The truth really is out there. Look up.) The 80 Greatest Conspiracies is the perfect primer because the authors, while skeptical and logical, aren’t out to debunk everything in a scholarly manner and take the fun out of the Communist candy cabal’s plot to get Mothers feeding their children mind-altering fluoride. The authors do their research, but leave enough open-ended conclusions that the books shrewdly have appeal for deniers, believers, and those of us who just enjoy pondering the idea that Princess Diana was rubbed out because she refused to marry Bill Clinton, titular head of an international group of Satanists.
Why Women Need to Read: Guys love conspiracy theories because they liven up our staid. boring workaday existences. In the same way that women can’t get enough of family gossip, men can’t get enough of the idea that the New World Order is upon us, possibly utilizing a Mexican Zombie army to take over the world. It’s good stuff and allows us to daydream of leading a rebel band of outsiders against the Mexizombs. Occam and his razor can get bent. I’ll take black helicopters and Tupac Shakur faking his own death any day of the week.
Them: Adventures With Extremists by Jon Ronson
The Cock-Up Theory: Ronson is a low-key British journalist who hosted the documentary series Secret Rulers of the World, and Them is its literary sidekick. Ronson is such an unassuming wise-ass that many of the world’s premier paranoids trust him and let him into their inner circle. Nut jobs as varied as radical Islamist Omar Bakri Muhammad, Ku Klux Klan leader Thomas Robb and Northern Irish anti-Catholic politician Ian Paisley all give Ronson the access to hang themselves with their own unhinged ropes.
The Consensus: In an unorthodox combo of amusement and terror, Ronson deftly proves two things about the world’s wingnuts. They’re both off-their-rockers-like-nobody-you’ll-ever-meet, and more or less like everyone you know. For example, Omar Bakri Muhammad is believed to have strong ties to al-Qaeda, but he also loves The Lion King and fart jokes. On the one hand, British writer David Icke believes the world’s elites are descended from 12-foot shape-shifting blood-drinking lizards. On the other hand, no wonder the fat-cat bankers get whatever they want – Congress is scared of their killer reptilian overlords. Yes, it all makes sense! Greenspan is a Gecko.
Why Women Need to Read: What women really need to do is listen – to any Jon Ronson podcast with the lunatic fringe you can find. He’s living out the fantasy, hiding out in the woods with guys hell-bent on proving that the exclusive, uber-wealthy Bilderberg Group is plotting a godless-one-world-government. Imagine, if you will, that the tin-foil hat crowd turns out to be onto something real and Ronson is our only witness. He’ll be murdered of course, and there will be inevitable cover-up, and some freedom fighter/underemployed blogger would have to take up the mantle of truth. Man, that’s gonna be awesome.
FYI: You should also read Them because Ronson spends an amazing afternoon with Randy Weaver’s daughter Rachel. They shoot guns as she candidly discusses the siege at Ruby Ridge (with a Jew, no less!) that left her mother dead, her brother shot, and her father in jail. She comes off as a tragic hero and made me empathize with the white-separatist government-haters. Nifty trick, that.
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
The Cock-Up Theory: In 2004, Roth dropped the “old man’s wang doesn’t work right anymore” mode he’s been in and delivered The Plot Against America, a thrilling addition to the cannon of great conspiratorial novels. It’s an alternative American history type of book in which Charles Lindbergh (a notorious anti-Semite who praised Hitler) beats FDR in the 1940 presidential election through a message of isolationism, blaming the Jews for getting the U.S. into World War II and getting our troops killed in combat. Lindbergh signs “understandings” with Germany and Japan and sets out to remake America into a blond-haired blue-eyed Teutonic homeland.
The Consensus: The book is narrated by a seven-year-old Roth, which isn’t some postmodern meta-conceit, but a surprisingly plausible reimaging of what life could have been like if Lindbergh had been elected. Would Newark have had its own North Jersey Kristallnacht? (And what would the inevitable Bruce Springsteen song about the events have sounded like? Big Man sax solo or no?) The paranoia in the book that’s destroying America is not a fiendish Jewish plot, but the simple turning of neighbor-against-neighbor, friend-against-friend, and family-member-against-family-member during wartime. Fortunately, there are solutions for young Jews, like the “Just Folks” program that sends Philip’s older brother Sandy to work on a Kentucky farm. Presumably, he’ll learn the lessons of “Real America,” like how to make White Lightning strong enough to bed your sister. Roth is wielding an angry pen because in an age where every loon with a laptop gets their message out there, whether you go crazy right or crazy left, the conspiracies end up in the same place. The Jews. It’s always the Jews.
Why Women Need to Read: When done right, What If? novels offer the blueprint for what happens when the conspiracy theorists are right. (Especially when they involve Nazis, Fatherland is another great choice). Too often, they’re done in broad, stupidly drawn strokes (paging Robert Langdon’s mullet), but The Plot Against America isn’t. Change the Roth name to Suzuki, uproot them to California, and stick them in an internment camp and you don’t have paranoid fantasy. You have 20th century history. Fortunately, we’ve evolved as a people. No matter what Michele Bachmann says, there will be no more rounding up of the citizenry. The next great alternative history won’t be written by an American Jew (too assimilated) and it won’t take place on U.S. soil. We’ve changed. When an author we’ll call Abed Abdullah writes his What If?, it’ll take place 90 miles south, in Guantanamo Bay.
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Chapter 3: 80s Hair Metal
I have this pet theory that the essence of what these here United States are all about can be summed by Van Halen. (Here me out – you’ll kill at the next happy hour.) We talk a big game about freedom, liberty, and democracy, but the most honest quote about our country came from one of its worst presidents, Mr. Calvin Coolidge, when he noted that “the business of America is business.” It took us almost a century to go to war over the idea that black people maybe weren’t property, and that was long after we played the game of “No, it’s a sweet deal, Chief Indian guy, you get free land and firewater.” Let golden boy Bob McDonnell and his Caucasian lawn jockeys “debate” the issue of state’s rights, but let’s be clear that the only right was whether or not it was kosher for slave owners to manifest their destinies in the daughters of the fellas harvesting the cotton for compensation not even approaching what we now call minimum wage.
Which brings us to Van Halen. They are the epitome of the American archetype summed up in leather chaps, karate kicks, and guitar tapping. The band includes the immigrant story: Two talented hardworking brothers who came to these shores to ply their trade, working up from the streets of Pasadena to the mansions of Beverly Hills. They also featured the showman who shook off his Jewish heritage to get rich living and breathing the P.T. Barnum idea that suckers – and sex partners – are born every minute. Throw in the fact that David Lee Roth stole his act from James Brown, and you have American capitalism in a codpiece. I have a longer dissertation that includes the blue-collar workaday union man role of Sammy Hagar and the “New Coke” Gary Cherone experiment, but for that you’ll have to subscribe to my newsletter.
Why am I dropping my Van Halen thesis on you? Because their massive shadow covers an entire musical movement known as hair metal (a.k.a. cock rock, butt rock, glam rock, that crap we all listened to to in 1986), which added little to the global musical cannon, but spawned Big Ben-esque-not-entirely-tall tales of deviant behavior. It was short-lived, but it was glorious, and now we have books to prove it. Van Halen was the skinny Elvis and the fat Elvis rolled into one, which begat a one-armed drummer getting stadium crowds on their feet to pour some sugar on him, whatever sticky situation that inspires.
And the cradle will rock.
The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Mötley Crüe with Neil Strauss
The Riff: The genital-warts-and-all musician bio hit the big time with Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods, the unauthorized Led Zeppelin story. Released in 1985, it was a seminal (in every sense of the word) work detailing the unfathomable depths that rock stars can plummet, with the infamous and alleged mud shark incident setting a Caligulian capper of depravity that astonished fans assumed would never be topped. Not so fast, golden gods. While rock groupies were arguing over the veracity of Led Zeppelin’s hedonism, four sprite young lads from L.A. were shouting at the devil to such excess that old Beelzebub himself was all like, “You kids really need to slow down.”
The Cherry Pie: Mötley Crüe literally needed to slow down. Frontman Vince Neil, while out on a beer run during an epic bender, was doing 65 in a 25 mph zone when he crashed, killing his buddy from Hanoi Rocks, drummer Razzle Dingley. (Yes, justice was served. Neil served more than two weeks in jail for his vehicular homicide.) Even while acknowledging that half the recollections in The Dirt are fuzzy at best, “train wreck” doesn’t even begin to describe the Crue’s decadence. There was Tommy Lee’s assault on Pamela Anderson while she was holding their infant son; Nikki Sixx’s dead-for-two-minutes heroin overdose that required a paramedic/headbanger fan to jam two adrenaline shots into his ticker (genesis of the stripper anthem “Kickstart My Heart,” so win-win); and a disgraceful act involving two groupies, a ill-placed phone receiver , and the most unspeakably wrong call ever placed to someone’s poor mother.
Why Women Should Read: The enduring phrase “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” is perfect for Mötley Crüe, because the music always came last. They had a few killer tunes – I’m partial to “Too Young to Fall in Love” – but The Dirt makes it clear that the Crue was never about the art. Sixx goes so far as to admit that two of their biggest albums, Girls Girls Girls and Theatre of Pain, more or less sucked. The frankness and openness from the boys makes Mötley Crüe more endearing than guys like Hendrix or Cobain, sad cases who squandered their talent. Mötley Crüe caused, and endured, their share of pain, but collectively, their greatest gift was to the cause of debauchery, which is why The Dirt fascinates. We’ve all dreamed of the Dr. Feelgood lifestyle. Bumping rails out of porn star ass-crack is what goes through our minds while playing air guitar, not the actual power chords. It’s all part of our rock-and-roll fantasy. No mortal man would want to have lived the Crue life, but the devil is in the details. So dig up The Dirt and shout it out; we all want to take a ride on the wild side – 25 years after the fact – in book form.
Fargo Rock City: A Heavy Metal Odyssey in Rural North Dakota by Chuck Klosterman
The Riff: The Crue held such sway over the 80s hair metal decade that Chuck Klosterman opens Fargo Rock City with the thrills he got buying a “Shout at the Devil” cassette tape (kids, ask your parents) as a fifth-grader in Wyndmere, North Dakota. It’s like that great scene in Almost Famous when Anita leaves William all her records and tells him to “listen to Tommy with a candle burning and you will see your entire future.” Only in Klosterman’s version, he can’t quite tell if the guys are actually girls or if the backward messages were officially Satanic; but it doesn’t matter because, as he says: “I was possessed, just as Tipper Gore always feared.” (Attention Gore family, neither Judas Priest’s “Eat Me Alive” nor Cyndi Lauper’s “She Bop” caused the world to end, thus throwing global warming into serious question.)
The Cherry Pie: Klosterman has become one of America’s premiere pop culture gadflys, the kind of guy who gets paid handsomely to ponder Kelly Kapowski’s existential nature, so it’s kind of jarring to be reminded that he made his name somewhat seriously defending a club that accepted people like W.A.S.P., Warrant, and Whitesnake as its members. Klosterman can’t really defend 80s hair metal on its musicianship (or lyrics, style, authenticity, or originality), but where he proudly stands up for his spandexian idols is the fact that the music mattered to him, and most of the people around him – so it matters. It’s an engaging argument that can been applied all over the popular yet subpar landscape (read: 1970s disco or 2010s pop country.) If it has wide-appeal to somebody out there, doesn’t that count for something?
Why Women Should Read: Even through Klosterman’s admittance that the likes of Ratt and Skid Row aren’t the Beatles or the Stones, Fargo Rock City raises interesting cultural questions about how music shapes our adolescent years, and ears. To his credit, Klosterman isn’t overly arch or phony about answering the question. He knows he can only sort-of make the case for hair metal, but he never puts air quotes around the idea of hardcore fandom. It takes a big man to admit that the big hair bands weren’t an ironic “guilty pleasure,” but rather groups of marginally-talented coked-up overgrown teenage poonhounds that we enjoyed the hell out of. Am I biased because I saw Poison on my 18th birthday at the Billings Metra? Perhaps. But damn if Brett and C.C. didn’t know what we needed that monumental night. Nothin’ but a good time – and a healthy dose of Aqua Net.
Sad But True: Klosterman’s Fargo Rock City thesis takes on tragic dimensions in his book Killing Yourself to Live. He visits the Rhode Island club where those 100 Great White fans burned to death. He does some coke with a guy who lost a close family member, and later ruminates on why people felt it was okay to make jokes and send tasteless emails about the uncool, yet fully-invested fans of a crappy band. They died horrible deaths while seeing a band they loved, not to be seen seeing a band some damn hipsters on Pitchfork deemed acceptable. What could be more authentic?
Mom, Have You Seen My Leather Pants?: The Tale of a Teen Rock Wannabe Who Almost Was by Craig A. Williams
The Riff: This is the story of a simpler time in America, when a young boy could pick up an instrument, come up with a band name with vaguely pornographic overtones, pen the immortal “Another Tear,” play a show on the Sunset Strip, and sign boobs, all by the tender age of 16. In this engrossing memoir, Williams is the scamp out getting into some monkeyshines with his band Onyxxx, the adolescent doppelganger of, say, Winger. Like all great 80s hair metal band, Onyxxx lived fast and died young, metaphorically at least, as the whole saga took place before they were seniors in high school.
The Cherry Pie: In Leather Pants, Williams tells the story of the rise-and-fall of Onyxxx with a wink and a nod to the utter ridiculousness of the band’s “career,” but what comes through as loud as the Scorpions is that they lived a decent version of the rock star life, and he knows it’s one hell of a story. While Onyxxx wasn’t quite the Crue, they did their teenage drinking, drugging, in-fighting, backbiting, girl-swapping, groupie-banging, HIV-test-getting, geometry-class-skipping best. Leather Pants is an oddly accurate microcosm of the entire Rainbow Room scene, a Behind the Music morality tale where a hardworking band gets a shot, reaches the top, and then blows it all in a epic meltdown. Although, Onyxxx is unique in that the end days were somewhat related to the fact that too many members of the band were doing it with Barbi, their 38-year-old manager/Loni Anderson impersonator. (And no, that is not made up.)
Why Women Should Read: Beyond the sheer lunacy that Onyxxx ever happened, Leather Pants is an interesting look at the Reagan years, when those of us who dug hair metal had our boom boxes pointed toward the California Dream. For some it was the end of nuclear annihilation and lower marginal tax rates, for others, it was a quickie in the Whiskey-a-Go-Go bathroom with Lita Ford. Here was Williams, straddling both, going from a typical suburbanite smoking his first cigarette while listening to “Shout at the Devil” (not hard to picture Klosterman doing the same) to a guitar-soloing rock star partying with older statutory-rape-category Great White groupies (something Klosterman probably couldn’t have fathomed at that time.) Onyxxx could only have existed in the era of the 80s hair metal band, meaning that in a specific time and place, Mötley Crüe helped make a young boy’s dream come true: John Hancocking a set of juggs.
Rock on.
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