James Alan McPherson, an African-American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop, has come a long way from his early life as a poor boy in racially segregated Savannah, Georgia. Yet, as his title indicates, he is troubled by questions of identity and belonging. The barriers that still exist in America between races, classes, and ethnic groups make him uneasy, cautious, and fearful for the fate of the country.

Longing for genuine community across his diverse and still-divided native land, McPherson is a spiritual heir of the novelist Ralph Ellison. In "Gravitas," an essay that is the finest piece of writing in this collection of reflections, McPherson pays tribute to Ellison, the renowned author of Invisible Man and Juneteenth, for his affirmation of his identity as a black man and for his recognition of the humanity of all men and women. Although Ellison regarded himself as a product of the complex history of blacks in this country, he also saw himself as an American and as a sibling of all people. The hurts of racism never made him back off from that image of himself. Still struggling, McPherson hopes he will be able to match his mentor’s equanimity.

Throughout his career, McPherson has drawn hostility from African-American intellectuals for putting American solidarity above black solidarity. "Junior and John Doe" will make him a target again. In this essay, McPherson is contemptuous of the black middle class and its success. He has no respect for this burgeoning success because, as he sees it, successful blacks have simply adopted the corrupt values of the white middle class, so devoted to the pursuit of wealth and possessions, so morally obtuse.

McPherson is convinced that the black middle class has lost the moral certainty that earlier generations of blacks in this country had, an ethical imperative that had been passed along as a kind of a legacy. Included in that legacy was the notion that any dehumanization of another human being was wrong. In pursuit of creature comforts, blacks have learned to lie and manipulate with the worst of whites.

The dozen pieces in this book have an autobiographical thread that allows us to see an American writer raising himself from humble beginnings to intellectual force, a writer who measures his own success by what he has contributed towards the building of an all-inclusive human community.

Paul Marx is a freelance writer in New Haven, Connecticut.

If you haven’t read the nonfiction works of Peter Matthiessen, or you merely yearn for a one-volume greatest hits album, a new book offers the ideal sampler buffet. The Peter Matthiessen Reader: A Selection of Nonfiction, the latest in Vintage’s ongoing series of handsome trade paperback series of Readers, features excerpts from every nonfiction book by Matthiessen in the period covered. From Wildlife in America to Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution, from The Tree Where Man Was Born to In the Spirit of Crazy Horse the breadth is astonishing. With an artistry denied to most naturalists and an expertise few literary writers ever attain, Matthiessen easily earns his place in the pantheon of great nature writers. In a thoughtful introduction, the editor, McKay Jenkins, places Matthiessen’s work in the context of his life. The subsequent selections prove that Matthiessen is eagerly sometimes urgently trying to articulate the lives of the less articulate, whether animal or human. This broad sampling of his work reminds us that Matthiessen’s nature writing is motivated by the same curiosity, compassion, and love of life as his fiction. Like Thoreau, he is eager to report the glory of the universe.

Since his acclaimed first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published exactly 50 years ago, Norman Mailer has been at or near the center of our literary stage. His novels, essays, short stories, criticism, and political and social reportage have earned him much recognition and admiration, including the National Book Award and two Pulitzer Prizes. At the same time, his work has often been controversial, due to his choice of (and approach to) subject matter. One perceptive critic, Louis Menand, wrote in 1985 that “Mailer’s life and times are [his] great subject and if we were to string together his omnibus collections . . . one would have a history hard to beat for completeness and impossible to beat for moral nuance.” Others have called him outrageous, combative, eogcentric, even distasteful. Mailer, age 75, now allows us the chance to finally decide for ourselves with the publication of The Time of Our Time, a collection which represents the entire range of the author’s work.

This generous anthology holds Mailer’s selections of his best writing. In over 1,200 pages, the excerpts and pieces appear in the order of the year they refer to, rather than the year they were written. In this, his 31st book, Mailer places fiction, narrative nonfiction, interviews, and other writings side by side. With a body of work arranged in this manner, comparisons and observations are easily made. Striking is the sheer range of Mailer’s intellectual curiosity and his willingness to pursue difficult topics. Among them, the 1967 march on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam, the 1968 and 1972 political conventions, the CIA, Watergate, the lives of Maria and Lee Harvey Oswald, Marilyn Monroe, boxing, modern art, sex, feminism, ancient Egypt, and the life of Jesus. Mailer’s keen powers of observation and insight enable him to bring a unique sense of immediacy to whatever he’s doing; there is a realistic, human understanding of all of his subjects. Also remarkable is his willingness to try different genres. As he writes, “if there is one fell rule in art, it is that repetition kills the soul.” This has not been a problem for Mailer, as is evidenced in this volume. I can confidently assert that there is much in The Time of Our Time to admire. Likewise, there is much sure to offend and disturb. Commenting on his goal as a writer, Mailer said in an 1958 interview “that the final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary to exacerbate the moral consciousness of people.” At this goal, Mailer has succeeded with a body of work that is truly a testament to a prolific career.

Reviewed by Roger Bishop.

he political face of Europe changed more between 1989 and 1999 than in any other decade since the period between 1939 and 1949. With the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism, new opportunities arose in Europe for freedom and democracy. But these were often accompanied by difficult economic challenges and sensitive political problems such as what role the former Communist leaders should play. In the former Yugoslavia there was the ultimate nightmare of war, ethnic cleansing, and thousands of refugees. How can we in the West understand what has happened in that part of the world? For many of us, the most authoritative and readable guide has been Timothy Garton Ash. For the last 20 years his incisive reporting and insightful analysis in The New York Review of Books and such books as The Uses of Adversity and The Magic Lantern have illuminated complex issues and introduced us to a broad range of diverse personalities. Ash is both an Oxford historian and a sharp-eyed journalist with a passion for accuracy. His magnificent new collection, History of the Present, offers an abundance of riches. There are reflective analytical pieces that help the reader understand events in historical perspective. He notes, for example, that if a diplomatic observer had gone to sleep after the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and awoke now, there would be a few surprises, but much would be familiar. “In the so-called Contact Group, he would see representatives of the same powers France, Britain, Germany, and Russia pursuing their national interests through their national diplomats and national armies. . . .” He continues, “It begins to look almost as if the whole twentieth-century European story of postimperial federations and communist multinational states was merely an interruption of a longer, underlying process of separating and molding peoples into nation-states.” Other pieces offer the immediacy of encounters with individuals whose lives have been transformed by events. One particularly memorable person is Ash’s friend Helena Luczywo in Warsaw. When he first met her in 1980 she was deeply involved in preparing a samizdat (underground) magazine allied with Solidarity and the workers’ revolution. “Today she is the key figure behind the most successful newspaper in the whole of postcommunist Europe,” the author writes. Why did she initially get involved as a political activist in the 1970s? “Oh, I don’t know. Just a sense of decency,” she told Ash.

In 1992, Ash visited former East German Communist Party leader Erich Honecker in prison. Honecker relates that he had often spoken on the phone with West German chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl. “A quarter century of divided Germany’s tragic, complex history,” Ash writes, “is, it seems to me, concentrated in this one pathetic moment: the defiant, mortally sick old man in his prison pajamas, the dog-eared card with the direct number to Chancellor Kohl.” Ash, who describes himself as “an agnostic liberal,” has lavish praise for Pope John Paul II, whom he describes as “simply the greatest world leader of our times.” None of the other credible candidates for this designation Gorbachev, Kohl, Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Margaret Thatcher matches the pope’s “unique combination of concentrated strength, intellectual consistency, human warmth, and simple goodness.” By emphasizing the inalienable rights of each human being, the pope has supported the cause of those without economic, political, or cultural power.

Anyone who wants to better understand the last decade in Central Europe will benefit from reading this stimulating and perceptive book.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Hal Crowther writes prose the way Stevie Ray Vaughan played guitar: with inexplicable passion, punctuated by explosive bursts of finger picking laid down over an inviting carpet of swampy soul. There’s not much dancing around on stage. You either get it or you don’t.

Most of the 28 essays in this book were first published in The Oxford American, with others appearing in the Independent Weekly and the Spectator. They are, by necessity, economical and straight to the point. Magazine and newspaper editors evaluate prose by the inch, not by the depth of thought in the prose. Some of the best essays in this collection are based on actual events into which the writer has wandered without much expectation. “The Last Wolverine” is about his literary idol, James Dickey. In 1,500 words or less, he builds him up into a literary lion, then tears him down with an account of the poet’s visit to the office of Time magazine, where Crowther was employed as an editor. Dickey spoke to an audience of would-be poets and accentuated his lecture with an inappropriate comment of a sexual nature to one of the women present, then grabbed Crowther in a drunken headlock that very nearly turned out his lights.

In “From Auschiwitz to Alabama,” he bemoans the horrible medical experiments that were performed on unsuspecting black Alabamians by the federal government, but he resents that people outside the South would blame Alabama instead of the federal government. Writes Crowther: “The U.

S. Public Health Service was not controlled by Alabama racists, or in collaboration with them. These sweet doctors were most attracted, it appears, by a passive, impoverished rural population with no tradition of standing up for itself.” By the time you get through reading this collection of essays you realize that Crowther has a love-hate relationship with the South that is as complex (and bizarre) as that of any fictional character created by William Faulkner or Tennessee Williams. You’ll want to pat him on the back just as often as you’ll want to put a headlock on him with the intent of turning out his lights.

A journalist’s edgy enthusiasms I tend to measure all literary journalists against Joseph Mitchell, who was a literary journalist before anyone and certainly any self-respecting journalist ever thought of putting the two words together. This is no more fair than measuring a novelist against Mark Twain or Henry James, I concede, but when you find your rock in the firmament you tend to cling to it.

Ron Rosenbaum, I’m happy to say while mixing my metaphors, is more than fit to touch the hem of Mitchell’s garment. Their writing differs, of course. Mitchell sinks more completely, almost with abandon, into his subjects, and Rosenbaum, though he doubtless would deny it, sometimes writes with a sense of knowingness edging into mockery that is foreign to The Master. But all in all, Rosenbaum’s collection, The Secret Parts of Fortune: Three Decades of Intense Investigations and Edgy Enthusiasms, is a worthy bookshelf companion to Mitchell’s McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon and Joe Gould’s Secret.

Rosenbaum prefers the term “narrative nonfiction” to literary journalism, which, as he correctly says, sounds too highfalutin. In a foreword, filmmaker Errol Morris himself something of a narrative nonfictionist nails Rosenbaum pretty squarely by describing his “grand scheme . . . to squash grand schemes, to defeat our natural tendency to retreat into easy answers and bogus explanations.” Morris refers to Rosenbaum’s metaphor of “the lost safe-deposit box” a device that Rosenbaum used in his Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil “a metaphor for truth that exists but may be beyond our grasp.” Well, truth, schmooth sometimes you just want to have fun. One of the book’s chief pleasures is learning about all sorts of quirky ideas and the oddball characters who believe in them.

There is, for instance, the Rev. Willard Fuller, a dental faith healer with the inspiring message, “The Lord’s out there fillin’ teeth!” Indeed he is, and the good news is that he doesn’t require an actual laying on of hands to fill cavities, straighten crooked teeth, or grow new ones. It seems the Lord also works through the U.

S. mail.

Then there’s Robin Leach of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, much more high-profile and prosperous than the Rev. Fuller but, in his own way, no less deranged. Asserting that he documents what he calls, without a scintilla of irony, the “passion for privacy” of the rich and famous, Leach grows indignant when Rosenbaum suggests that Lifestyles could be considered “porn for the wealth-obsessed.” Not deranged, but certainly monomaniacal, is Ralph Waldo Emerson III in his quest to unseat Charlie Douglass, the King of Canned Laughter, with “real” canned laughter. Trouble is, he’s too good. His canned laughter does sound more natural than Douglass’s, but the networks don’t like it because it’s too different from Douglass’s more artificial-sounding laughs, which audiences have grown used to.

And deranged on an empyrean scale are the scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls, or at least many of them. In fact, there appears to have been some sort of Curse of the Scrolls that has driven a disproportionate number of scholars to drink, depression, or religious dementia. Those who weren’t crazy were consumed by ambition or a Fred C. Dobbs-like passion for secrecy. “The Riddle of the Scrolls” is one of the best pieces in the book. In it, Rosenbaum gives a brief rundown of the loony crusades to find the Ark of the Covenant and thereby forcibly bring on the Messiah, Judgment Day, or some other calamitous cosmic event satisfying to the souls of moonstruck religionists of various stripes. But in the course of his research, I wish he had learned that it is the Book of Revelation, not Revelations.

This is not just a litany of wackos, far from it. All sorts of people and topics are covered, from Mr. Whipple of “don’t squeeze the Charmin” fame to Yale’s Skull and Bones society. He gives a nice appreciation of Ben Hecht, one of the first Americans to raise his voice about the Holocaust when it was happening, and one of Murray Kempton, “our Gibbon.” “The Catcher in the Driveway” is another superior piece that stands out from an excellent bunch. It is about not just his attempt to find J.

D. Salinger’s home, and Salinger himself, if possible, but about explaining the meaning of Salinger’s isolation and silence and “the compelling seductiveness of the silence.” In the latter goal, at least, he succeeds.

Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer in Wisconsin.

ÊCarl Hiaasen, a columnist for the Miami Herald, has the type of job many of us wish we had: He gets paid to complain. What does he rail against? Injustice, greed, crime, pollution, guns, you name it. In that, he’s like an opinionated neighbor, up on current events and unafraid to share his views.

Hiaasen, who has also written several best-selling novels, including Strip Tease, Tourist Season, and Lucky You, writes on issues dealing almost exclusively with Florida. It might seem that this type of writing would be too parochial, but after reading a few pieces it is sadly apparent that while the names of the cities and personalities may change, the outcome is frequently the same. Unfortunately, it seems most municipalities can boast of corrupt, lazy, or merely stupid politicians; and the situations the author describes, such as inadequate social services, could also apply. It’s clear Hiaasen is a champion of the underdog, a knight in the battle against the dimwits, half-wits, and nitwits who manage to rise to undeserved levels of power within the halls of government. Going through these columns, it also appears that the cliche is proved: the more things change the more they stay the same. Hiaasen’s writings span almost 20 years, and the same topics keep popping up (i.e. drugs, guns, crime, and the ubiquitous political problems). It would seem that some people don’t get much smarter over time.

One of the problems with a collection such as this is the tendency for overkill. Choosing columns dealing with the same subjects again and again may be of interest to regional readers, but they might lose their appeal to a national audience.

Whether mourning the death of a state treasure (in this case an eight-foot, half-blind alligator) or suggesting that people actually be paid to leave the state, thus easing its over-crowding woes, this thought provocateur blends the pundit’s tools of insight, foresight, and hindsight to try to get readers to share their sense of outrage. Sometimes it works, as when Hiaasen tells the sad tale of murdered policemen, calling for the politicians to display some backbone in tough gun-control legislation; sometimes it doesn’t, when he writes of certain environmental injustices unique to the southeast.

Readers of Kick Ass will appreciate Hiaasen’s sincerity and moral courage. He is unafraid to speak his mind, knowing full well that he may incur the wrath of those he writes about. ¦ Ron Kaplan is a writer from Montclair, New Jersey.

The best of damn near everything Sometimes it’s nice to have someone else do the work for you. You can’t read everything. Various yearly anthologies try to save readers the trouble of filtering out the lesser nominees for our disposable income and spare time. Prominent among them are Houghton Mifflin’s Best Of series.

The Best American Essays 1998, edited this time by acclaimed practitioner Cynthia Ozick, is the feast of fine writing we’ve come to expect from this series. The 25 contributors range from the venerable William Maxwell on Nearing Ninety to John Updike’s lovely meditation on the art of cartooning. The Best American Short Stories 1998 ($27.50, 0395875153), guest-edited by Garrison Keillor, includes 20 stories by authors such as Meg Wolitzer, Carol Anshaw, and, inevitably, John Updike. Each of these stories surprised and delighted me, Keillor writes. He isn’t alone.

A newer series, The Best American Mystery Stories 1998 ($27.50, 0395835860), edited by the alphabetical Sue Grafton, offers 20 forays into crime and punishment. The authors range from old standbys like Edward D. Hoch, John Lutz, and Donald Westlake, to surprising additions, such as Jay McInerney.