(Illustration by Deenah Vollmer)

Despite my familiarity with the American underground, I used to think of Riot Grrrl in a limited way, as a regional and stylistic subgenre of rock like her Pacific Northwest brother, grunge. Short bangs and slut scrawled on skin were the counterparts to flannel shirts and long johns worn under army shorts. Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, and Heavens to Betsy were sister bands to Nirvana, the Melvins, and Seaweed.

Sara Marcus’s new history, Girls to the Front, reclaims Riot Grrrl as something much more important and complicated. Riot Grrrl emerges as a movement of girls seeking to redefine feminism using, in part, the ethics and techniques of punk and indie rock. Through zines, activism, meetings, art, and community, as well as fashion and music, riot grrrls seized some space in their own lives, as well as at the front of the crowd at rock shows—turf usually dominated by moshing boys.

Marcus tells the story in a counterpoint that is simultaneously with the girls pounding furiously at typewriters and trap sets, and mellowed with age, perspective, and erudition. The book includes poetic and insightful analysis of the music and zines (“…‘Rebel girl rebel girl rebel girl you are the queen of my world,’ sung-chanted to a beat that could govern a drill line of revolutionaries in vulva-shaped berets…. With this incantation, the girls raise the shade of the role model, the someone they’ve been longing to see…. They make of each other that girl. They make her themselves.”), and also reflections on what was so vital about Riot Grrrl and what broke it up.

I asked Sara a few questions about Girls to the Front over e-mail, and her responses are really sharp. Read on:

1. Even before your DIY exhortation in the Epilogue, I found myself pausing my reading to pull my guitar out of the closet and play for the first time in a long while. How did you do that? Or, not to take credit away from you, how do you think the story of Riot Grrrl inspires that get-off-your-butt enthusiasm?

Josh! I’m so glad that the book got you to pick up your guitar! One of my favorite e-mails I’ve received so far is from a young woman who wrote “It kind of hurts to type right now because I decided to start playing guitar.” Yes, this effect is a result of a sort of collaboration between me and my material. I very consciously sought to tell this story not in the conventional rock-history mode of “Here were these amazingly special souls who made magic things”—not at all to diminish the gifts and talents and vision of the people in the book, which are considerable—but rather as a story about how valuable it is for everybody to make things that they’re passionate about, even if they’re not “the best.” This was a central idea of Riot Grrrl, one that had a lot to do with the permissive DIY spirit of the punk scene in Olympia, Washington. That scene was all about encouraging everybody to make whatever they could make, rather than leaving music to the Real Musicians and writing to the Real Writers. For people who are a little overachievery, and particularly people who live in a major city like New York, where there’s so much greatness at every turn, it can be hard to maintain a hold on what’s to be gained by doing something creative just for the love of it, and I’m glad the book seems to be helping people to pay attention to the value of simply creating something and being part of a conversation with a community.

2. Compared with other subcultures, it seems that Riot Grrrl had vastly less time to mature in the underground before getting shoved into the spotlight. The predominantly male punk/indie rock scenes had a good share of the ’80s to develop their codes and culture before Nirvana came out, whereas Riot Grrrl got almost immediate attention, as you lay out in the book. Was this just bad luck of Riot Grrrl’s happening to appear just before punk broke—or do you think it was somewhat inevitable in our society that a girl movement would, like the girls themselves, be objectified in its early adolescence?

I love the elegant parallel you draw, but I think the timing—the fact, for instance, that Nevermind came out two months to the day after the first Riot Grrrl meeting, and went gold two days before Nirvana and Bikini Kill played a show together in Seattle (it went platinum a couple weeks after that)—actually had a much greater impact on how quickly the media latched on to Riot Grrrl. Adolescent girls are easy objectification targets for media, sure, but condescension and dismissal are even stronger forces. Narratives about hysterical, passive girl fans (see: Justin Bieber) or puerile girl rebels are usually the trump cards in media coverage of young women (unless the young women are predominantly poor and/or not white, in which case of course entirely other narratives hold sway). What I’m getting at—and this is all highly speculative, of course—is that I don’t think the media would have known how to see these young women as cool or important had they not been linked (by geography, by scene) to a male phenomenon that was already seen as cool and important.

3. That mainstream media attention was profoundly damaging to Riot Grrrl, but as you reveal in your Author’s Note, it was a Newsweek article (which one girl called “the worst possible thing that could have been written”) that threw you a lifeline as a teenager. Is there any way to resolve that contradiction? Was it worth it for the most idyllic form of the movement to be martyred so it could save a much greater number of girls?

It’s true: Some people hated the Newsweek piece and felt really hurt by it, while I and others were inspired by it and drawn to the movement by it. Same thing with the Spin article—the experience of working on that piece led many of the DC girls to swear off media forever, but the group in Vancouver, BC, started directly as a result of some girls reading that article.

I’m going to go out on a limb, and perhaps offend some people, by saying this trade-off was worthwhile, because if you look at the stated goals and vision of those participants in that earliest “idyllic form”—getting more girls to start bands, to talk to each other about sexism, to save their lives and one another’s lives—the media attention really helped that to happen. Of course it’s lamentable that the media attention sullied the experience for other people, and the distortion enacted by the media attention led some people to feel that their ideas were being hijacked. That’s legitimate. But if I’m to do a John Stuart Mill–style analysis of the greatest good for the greatest number of people, the fact that the basic ideas of Riot Grrrl were able to spread so far, albeit in watered-down or distorted form, has had long-lasting positive effects on our culture, and although I wish Riot Grrrl could have had another year or two to shore itself up internally before the media invasion came along, I don’t wish the media had never paid attention.

4. There was something really moving about your Postscript, a collection of short bios of many of the book’s players a decade or two after the heyday of Riot Grrrl. They run the gamut from various kinds of activist to very quiet, conventional lives to Mixed Martial Arts fighter to professional sauerkraut maker. I can’t quite put my finger on what’s so beautiful about these bios. Have any insight?

I just started a Tumblr blog yesterday, and the website gave me a menu of about forty preprogrammed templates from which I had to choose one, and that was what my blog would look like. Becoming an adult is a lot like that: Based on everything you’ve done up through your late teens or early twenties, there’s a set of options that you’re expected to choose from. You could choose something else, of course, but nobody really tells you how, and meanwhile there’s this whole menu of templates just waiting for you to pick one and follow it. Personally, I remember being a senior in college and actually drafting letters to people whose class notes in the back of my alumni magazine made their lives sound interesting, and my letters—none of which I ever sent—were all asking, How do I chart my own course through this stuff?

Riot Grrrl was a community of people trying to help one another come up with new ways to live. Toss out the prefab list and make up something else. When I started writing the book, I knew that several Riot Grrrl zine authors had become successful writers or journalists, and I half expected everybody to be doing in a professional capacity whatever form of self-expression they had found through Riot Grrrl. Instead—and this is what you found moving about the mini-bios, I believe—I found out that each participant really had built herself a completely original and individual life. Which is even more exciting than if all the musicians were running nightclubs and all the zine people were working at newspapers and all the convention organizers were working at NARAL. Everybody remained committed to making their life a work of art and making it up in as original and creative a manner as possible.

(Click here to see video epilogues and reflections on Riot Grrrl. Also, there is an exciting book-release event on Saturday, October 2, at Bruar Falls in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and other events across the country in the next few weeks.)

It was my good fortune to meet the Argentinian master, Jorge Luis Borges on a calm winter evening about thirty years ago at the Salmagundi Club on lower 5^th Avenue, where, at that time, was situated the New York City office of PEN American Center. In my mind’s eye, there materializes a large room with row upon row of folding chairs and I see myself in an aisle seat, as close as possible to the front. I am looking at him, at Borges—thin white hair neatly combed back from his huge brow, limpid-eyed and heavy-lidded sightless gaze inclined toward the ceiling. He is dressed in a blue serge suit, white shirt, and tie. Both feet are firmly planted upon the floor, his large hands folded, resting one flat upon the other, on the curved top of his cane. Strengthened by three glasses of wine, did I really shake the warm and dry and patrician yet welcoming hand of Borges that night? I did.

You see how easy it is then, when writing about Borges (1899-1986), for those of us fortunate enough to have read him for our entire lives to fall into an interrogatory, circuitous and hallucinatory diction. And so, let this be declared at the outset: Aficionados, critics and fans, as well as those who come new to the genius of Borges, all owe a tremendous literary and cultural debt to Penguin Books, and to general series editor Suzanne Jill Levine, for five impeccably-produced paperback originals, two published in commemoration of National Poetry Month this past April, The Sonnets and Poems of the Night; and three in June, On Argentina, On Mysticism, and On Writing.

His journey was peripatetic and sedentary. From calle Tucuman 840 in his maternal grandmother’s home in Buenos Aires, where he was born on the cusp of the last century, the son of a frustrated writer and an aristocratic mother; to summer holidays in Uruguay; to Geneva and Lugano and Mallorca and Madrid during the war years and after; where he first encountered the writings of the American romantics and transcendentalists, stepped into the baroque, the avant-garde, Dada, and Surrealism, and never looked back; to collaborations with his beloved sister, Norah, his “permanent muse;” to the times of little magazine editing and publishing stimulated by uninhibited, feverish nocturnal café sessions and wandering through the streets of Buenos Aires. The great surge of Borges’ youthful poetry led to reviews and journalistic essays in the ‘30’s, echoing the dark transformation of the world’s politics which Borges’ acute sensibility could not ignore. Then came his first book of fiction in the mid-30s. As the operations on his chronically near-sighted eyes continued, he began to transgress the boundaries between fact and fiction, concocting what he liked to call “hoaxes” that seduced the reader into mistrust.

It is uncanny, and astonishing, and ultimately rewarding, to realize how the Penguin series follows this arc and beyond. It was a brilliant concept to start with two very specific anthologies. Borges’ intimate and classical Sonnets, edited by Stephen Kessler, had never been collected in one place until now. Through them, we take pleasure in Borges’ informing roots, and become more aware of his desire to pay homage to the great masters of literature he always admired, while, at the same time, exposing to his perceptual microscope the details of everyday, mundane life. Poems of the Night, the perfect segue, edited by Efrain Kristal, presents – as in the previous volume, in facing-page original Spanish – the labyrinth that all poets, be they sighted or blind, are cursed to negotiate. For Borges, the poem so often is a working-out of a dilemma.

From this poetic foundation, so firm and strong, the series builds into three succeeding slim, accessible, theme-driven volumes. On Argentina, edited by Alfred MacAdam, takes Borges’ well-trodden home ground and gives a judiciously-selected chronology of Borges’ crusade to revivify, value and modernize an indigenous literature.

On Mysticism, edited by Borges’ widow, Maria Kodama, is a delectable exposition of his metaphysical dimension, stories about the realm of the mysterious “Other,” followed by essays exploring the hazardous facets of familiar writers. The takeaway message is that literature is far stranger than it seems, especially when “seems” is itself an illusion of an illusion. Funhouse mirrors face each other and will not be budged.

The final compendium, of special interest to those of us who try to craft just one decent sentence, is titled, On Writing, edited by Professor Levine herself; and I have to say this is my favorite of the series. Ours is a solitary craft, one of the occupational hazards being a lethal blend of narcissism and wagon-circling, where you end up in a hermetic world of your own devising, dead certain that “nobody else gets it.”

Au contraire, says Jorge Luis Borges, quoting who else but Schopenhauer, in When Fiction Lives in Fiction, the volume’s valedictory essay, “dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book…to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream.”

All Penguin Classics Original Paperbacks, © 2010

Jorge Luis Borges. The Sonnets. 311 pp., $18.00; Poems of the Night. 200 pp., $17.00; On Argentina. 168 pp., $15.00; On Mysticism. 108 pp., $14.00; On Writing. 168pp., $15.00

Drawing by Freekhand via Flickr

Fairly or unfairly, what is assigned as a book review sometimes morphs into another kind of criticism and TFT is not one to stand in the way of said morphing. Here we have a review of John Waters’ appearance at the New York Public Library to promote his new book Role Models (FSG, May 2010).—Ed.

The sun set on axis between the buildings on 42^nd St. as if to purposefully cast its majestic spotlight on John Waters’ balding head, who sat on a purple daybed in front of the regal Williams Sullen Bryant statue in the park of the same name. John Waters looks good, I thought. Or maybe it was just the sunset.

John Waters was there to promote his new book Role Models, his forum for discussing his enthusiasm for feel-bad books, Manson cult murderesses, ugly-on-purpose fashion, outsider pornography, contemporary art collecting, the real pencil behind his pencil moustache, fifties rock and roll icons, and insane lesbian strippers. He also details his abnegation of love: “Some of us want to have lunatic porn sex and we want to have it forever.” Damn straight, I thought.

It was as Paul Holdengraber, the Director of Public Programs at the NYPL, introduced Waters that I spotted the provocateur filmmaker seated far stage left near the Bryant Park Grill where a divider obstructed everything but his head and the sun setting behind it. His hair was thinner and lighter than I expected and so was his pencil moustache which did not match the deepness of the lines under his eyes. He sat tight-lipped and sullen and I wondered why he did not smile when his accolades were spoken: directing, writing, and art credits to name a few. Has he heard it all before? Is he not a big smiler? Isn’t it normal, or at least modest, to smile when someone is listing your achievements? Or is it insincere to smile when you don’t mean to and was Waters was just being real? Or was he nervous? Or is he just not that friendly? I knew he was aware people were watching.

Applause cued Waters to rise, revealing his height, lankiness, and outfit, which, with the exception of pointy orange Paul Smith shoes, was remarkably subdued though undeniably sharp: a Junya Watanabe dark purple and black patchwork suit jacket with geometric sun patterns that concealed most of a white dress shirt and black tie, and slim CDG tuxedo pants. (At the end of the talk Waters revealed who made his clothing and admitted to wearing Gap boxer shorts as well. But it was Holdengraber who stole the fashion show with a bronze scarf, yellow speckled bow tie, and shiny gray suit, though he never disclosed his own brand loyalties.)

Holdengraber, a boisterous man with a Belgian accent, played Waters’ psychoanalyst in a mock on-the-couch session that was the gimmick for the event. Waters reclined on the daybed and Holdengraber, cross-legged on a chair angled slightly away from Waters, asked the questions and at times asked Waters to read sections from his book, to which Waters replied, “No, I don’t want to read that.” The banter was quick and witty. Both were intelligent and funny. The dynamic was dynamic. The audience got what they came for.

But still John Waters did not smile, at least not in any real way. His personality was so controlled it seemed he had gone through it with a fine-toothed comb, with good results. Waters came off as cunning and charismatic, but not candid, and his calculated presence felt as though he was performing, acting, working—and he was. But who can blame a writer on a book tour? I did because I wanted Waters to be someone I could hang out with when I go to Provincetown this August, where he summers. I had had a fantasy that this could happen, but decided that afternoon I didn’t want it to because I prefer to hang out with awkward people who are not that articulate, and Waters seemed utterly unwilling to drop the act he has refined throughout his career and which is on display again in his new book.

And then something happened, which is that Holdengraber cued the sound guy and the soulful voice of Johnny Mathis, who is the subject of chapter one in Role Models, carried a love song through the park instantly infecting John Waters who smiled, and I mean really really smiled, and I smiled too and felt better about him. John Waters meant it and that meant a lot to me and I was able to relax for a while, even if Waters only relaxed for a moment.

So what did we learn about Waters that night in Bryant Park? He’s a healthy neurotic whose favorite song is the “Monster Mash,” who used to smoke five packs a day, who keeps a daily to-do list on an index card, who thinks “The Wire” is the best show ever, who will be buried amongst his friends in Maryland where Divine is saving seats, who believes he would make a good defense lawyer, who sometimes likes to wear industrial-sized Kleenex boxes as shoes, whose favorite drug is poppers, who plans his hangovers four months in advance, and whose psychiatrist once said to him “stop trying to make me like you.” And that’s what I want to say to John Waters too. I already like you, man. At least enough to read your book and watch your movies. And if you do want to hang out with me in Provincetown, I guess I’d be ok with that. I’ll just have to remember to bring some Johnny Mathis to the beach.

It’s the year 2000, and you’re embroiled in a heated debate over the salience of Second Wave feminist organizations while on a car ride to catch that summer’s Lilith Fair. The book shoved in the space between the emergency brake and the passenger seat? MANIFESTA: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future. Like so many inspired ideas, the book was conceived over a few glasses of red wine between two friends who had met each other in their heady post-college days; Jennifer Baumgardner was a young editor at Ms. and Amy Richards was Gloria Steinem’s assistant. Both were struck by the different ways the young women around them were “living” their feminism in a culture that frequently proclaimed the F-word as a dirty one and the Spice Girls as paragons to contemporary women’s lib. Their female friends were often sexually liberated, empowered in their jobs, and pursuing activist goals in their downtime. So why, they asked, is a generation leading revolutionary lives best known for saying, “I’m not a feminist, but…?”

They identified a different breed of movement from the one their mothers had imparted to them, which the older generation had learned from women’s groups against the backdrop of the civil rights and anti-war struggles. If the imprecise terminology held that the First Wave was the Suffragists and the Second Wave was the modern women’s liberation movement, then the Third Wave seemed fractured and potentially ungrateful for it all. Baumgardner and Richards wanted to explore and extend this tenuous drawbridge; aware of the achievements secured by Second Wave feminists, the post-Judy Blume generation didn’t always relate to its every letter, and grappled with its limitations: “Ms. wasn’t effectively getting the news out there to our peers; nor did we necessarily feel represented by the fresher, younger, Jell-O-shots versions of feminism,” Baumgardner wrote in her original introduction to the book. The hefty and sprawling volume that resulted from their collaboration was eventually endorsed by Gloria Steinem and Eve Ensler, debated by their fellow daughters of the Second Wave (who didn’t always agree with its vision of “everyday feminism”), and read in Women’s Studies classes across the country. MANIFESTA: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future is being reissued this month with updates and a new preface by the authors, who will be appearing in New York at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on March 20th and the 92^nd Street Y Tribeca on April 21^st. I talked with co-authors Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner about activism, formerly righteous rage, and why they don’t give a hoot about Twitter.

In the book, you attempt to address the relationship between older generations of feminists and younger feminists. What kinds of criticism and feedback did you get from the older generation after the book was published?

JB: At the time, Amy and I were just barely thirty, and the second wave feminists in our lives loomed larger than they do now. But just simply by having this book, this serious thing, we were treated differently—or we treated ourselves differently—out in the world. Some of my most fraught relationships with older feminist writers changed a lot by being able to argue, by being old enough to write a book that seemed significant.

AR: From that demographic, we get criticism mostly from professors now, since we had our friends then who were second wave feminists who we had sent the book to before it was published. But now we see the feedback from professors, who, more often than not seem to say, “My students love your book.” Yes—they’re sort of saying, “I’m not sure that I necessarily agree with everything in your book, but it does seem to make feminism relevant to my students, so I teach it.”

Does it still read as relevant when you kick your feet up and flip through it, or does it feel like a trip back in time?

AR: The sadness is in some ways how relevant the book still is. One of the reasons we wanted to write the book was to prove that young people—young women in particular—were connecting to feminism, and were living feminist lives and weren’t resistant to feminism, which had been the assumption at the time. There’s still an assumption that young people still aren’t living feminist lives to the extent that they should be, given the history that has preceded them.

Were you tempted to recant anything from the first publication?

JB: A lot of our ideas have evolved in the last ten years. For example, there’s very little mention of trans issues in the book. After the book came out, organizing around trans/transgender/transfeminist issues became so much more visible, and the Third Wave Foundation, which Amy co-founded, now states in its mission that it’s for young feminist and trans activists. It became twinned with younger feminists in a way that we didn’t know would happen, but now it’s a really big part of what we talk about.

AR: Looking at the media chapter ten years later, we thought, well, maybe the internet has helped solve these problems of what sexist traditional magazines have been, but it hasn’t. You can take the same standard of analyzing a Glamour and a GQ and apply it to what’s on the internet today. With the exception of the Spice Girls and Monica Lewinsky—

JB: Every TV show we mention is no longer on.

AR: Although Britney Spears made a comeback from the time we wrote it until now.

JB: There have been some technological innovations that are significant to organizing—blogging wasn’t happening yet, and Twitter—but they’re not really being pioneered by us. Amy and I aren’t innovators when it comes to things like Twitter, and we don’t want to be. We don’t want to be afraid of it, but it’s not our thing.

AR: But the analyzing of it is the same analyzing we did in the media chapter. Who has access to it? Who is more popular? Why? I think you can apply the same analysis and get the same answer. If anything, blogging has only reinforced mainstream assumptions about women writers. ‘Oh, they only write about themselves. And they only write about personal things.’ And frankly, the majority of blogging does not pay—

JB: And women do things for free all the time.

AR: It’s wonderful that some women get to say, ‘I’m a writer now, I have a column,’ but they’re not getting paid for it.

In the original introduction, I was intrigued by your discussion of the rage that motivated you and your activism. Is your work now inspired less by rage? Is that part of the youthfulness of the book for you?

JB: I had more righteous anger then, and what I was trying to do was make sure my righteous anger wasn’t just expressed by bitching, but actually feel like I had some power that could be translated into social change. I think the more privileged and older I’ve gotten, the less I feel that sense of rage; the more I have things that could ostensibly make a change, the less I see what that does.

AR: I feel the opposite; I feel more angry. I see certain things come true that I was told would come true, and I always thought it wouldn’t be the case with my generation—child-rearing will be shared 50/50, or women will make the same as men. I look at the majority of my female friends, and most of them are not working, but are ostensibly supported by their husbands. Has it really changed all that much? In all of these women’s instances, they had very raised expectations for what they wanted for their lifestyle. And I’m not sure that any of these women could have actually chosen a career path that could have sustained that for them and had kids. So I look around, and I say, “yes, that’s their choice, and I’m happy that women have that choice,” but I’m increasingly angrier at the system that makes women have to choose at the end of the day, making choices that are not feminist choices to me. Women taking care of their aging parents: if there’s a brother and a sister, the woman is frequently taking far more responsibility for that parent. That’s what happened twenty years ago.

JB: When I was standing on the outside as a younger person, I had more faith. Now, the more I’m actually within some sort of cog of change and probably have done more than I did back then, I have less faith that it’s actually going to make a big difference. This is getting too depressing.

I was just thinking that.

JB: But there’s a slightly more positive way of looking at this, which is that while it was true that we used to think that trans issues were so marginal, it’s not that we didn’t care. We now realize that they’re not marginal at all, but are central—so some of our rage has been diluted by expansiveness. Students on college campuses ask us a lot about how to interact with people who didn’t agree with feminists. We always say, ‘do you have an actual relationship where you can talk and have coffee with other campus leaders?’ Often they haven’t built a relationship. That’s being youthful. It would be very hard to maintain the energy and idealism of youth without that. If you were so empathetic, which you hopefully gain with age, maybe you would never have the imagination of things being really clear. But I have a lot of— not exactly shame— but remorse about different assumptions I made while I was in college, even though I was a very gung ho feminist and am proud of it. There were a lot of assumptions I made then; “Oh, so and so said they liked the book Lolita!” Now I recognize it as a very important book, and then I was like, “You’re a date rapist.”

We were on a depressing track before. What’s the work that’s exciting to you now?

JB: We’re working on another book, called The Family Bed: Is There Sex After Kids?, about how people are creating relationships nowadays and parenting simultaneously. I’m also working on a documentary film and rape awareness project right now; there’s always a bunch of issues that we work on individually or as a team. I rarely feel that I have the blahs. As depressing as it is that these things keep not getting better there’s always new and interesting ways to deal with them. We own a feminist speaker’s bureau together, called Soapbox Inc.: Speakers Who Speak Out, to handle our own speaking engagements, as well as other people.

AR: Soapboax hosts a Feminist Winter Term, where students come from around the country and we take them to see feminist activism in action around the city. To be with twenty twenty-one-year-olds for a full week— we get such energy from them. It always reconnects us to groups and organizations that we have relationships with, and it connects us to our own feminism really intensely. And reminds us how much we love the city.

FSG, New York, 2010. 240 pp.

Image: Jay Morrison via Flickr

So the 1984 Summer Olympic Games were in Los Angeles. The Soviets thought the CIA was going to drug Russian athletes and “trick” them into defecting so the Soviet Union and its allies refused to compete. The Americans were upset because we thought this meant no one would watch the Olympics; ABC felt ripped off, and the Olympic committee nearly refunded ABC more than $90 million in fees. (Repeat: $90 million in 1984.) But then Yugoslavia broke with the Soviet boycott and competed, endearing itself to the United States and setting the stage for the American debut of the “simple, utilitarian, and honest” Yugo. The Yugo, which had been manufactured by Zastava Automobiles in Kragujevac (the “Serbian Detroit”) for seven years, went on sale in the U.S. on August 26, 1985 with the tag line “Yugo, $3,990. The Road Back to Sanity.”

It was the cheapest new car ever. Some places would let you pay $99 down and $99 a month. The man responsible for bringing the Yugo across the pond was Malcolm Bricklin, a crook and a genius, who realized that Americans wanted something cute and cheap. In 1984, he told the Dallas Morning News: “It looks a little like everything out there…it looks like a Rabbit, it looks like a Colt, it looks like a Tercel. It looks like all the cars in the $5,000 to $7,000 price range, except it’s under $4,000.” The car itself was worth about $2,000. But Bricklin was moving forward with no capital. He accepted advance franchise fees from car dealers, which were supposed to remain in escrow accounts, and used them to cover his operations costs. He made dealers provide him with $400,000 letters of credit, which he then used to secure loans, which he then used to buy the cars from Yugoslavia. By 1984, he’d declared bankruptcy three times. He wore “silver and turquoise jewelry, Indian beads, a big belt buckle, pointed cowboy boots, a straw rodeo hat, and a wide leather belt with MALCOLM spelled out in silver studs.” His neighbor says, “he had such flare.”

Tony Ciminera, then Vice President of International Auto Importers, drove a Yugo over “a historic one-lane bridge that crossed over a very busy set of railroad tracks.” As Ciminera crossed the bridge: “the driver’s seat gave way. ‘The weld snapped and I’m suddenly laying flat. My head was on the backseat. I was totally prone. I couldn’t reach the steering wheel anymore. But the car’s still moving and I’m trying to steer it with my knees…’”

In spite of such obvious crappiness, and despite the fact Bricklin was flying by the seat of his pants, the Yugo sold. It showed enough promise in its first year on the market that Chrysler tried to buy the rights to American distribution for $15 million. Bricklin declined the offer; sources say he wanted ten times that.

The climax of the book comes in January 1986. That’s when Consumer Reports panned the car in a cover story. The Yugo had been on the market for a little over one year. Yugo of Pensacola sold the most. Consumer Reports wrote: “The price is the come-on for the Yugo, but you can’t buy it for $3,990 (because of fees) and it’s hard to recommend at any price.” The Yugo had the 8^th highest death rate, with “3.6 occupant deaths per ten thousand cars.” The car did not accelerate quickly enough.

But it was really cheap and it had sold well! By April 1986 Yugo America had sold 10,000 cars. Of course, more trouble was coming. The car was the butt of a joke on Dragnet. Jay Leno said: “More problems for Dr. Kevorkian, the suicide doctor. It seems the makers of the Yugo are suing him for copyright infringement.”

By 1988, Yugo America had a net worth of $3.2 million, but was losing $1.5 million a month in operations. A now-defunct New York brokerage firm agreed to bail the company out, provided Bricklin leave and not come back. The firm planned to team up with Mitsubishi to sell Yugo-like cars, manufactured in Malaysia, called the Proton Saga. Bricklin was furious, but in April of 1988, he agreed to sell his shares, and the shares of his sons, for $13 million. He got lucky. Mitsubishi flaked on the deal and the brokerage firm lost an estimated $10.5 million on “nine utterly boneheaded months of work.”

In January of 1989 Yugo America filed for bankruptcy. They were sued, sued, sued. The Association of Trial Lawyers of America formed a special Yugo-suing group. In September of 1989 there was a terrible Yugo accident on a bridge in Michigan. People thought the car got “caught by a sudden gust” of wind and blew away, over the bridge, into the water.

Around this time, Bricklin was sued by Citibank for a $98,171 balance on his Diner’s Club card. His helicopter was repossessed. He owed the IRS almost $400,000. By 1991, Bricklin had less than $50,000 in assets and was $20 million in debt to more than 150 creditors. In one case, a judge issued a $17 million dollar judgment against him.

Yugo America was completely out of business by April 1992 and warranties weren’t honored. Warranty lawyer Vernon Vig said: “I don’t know what happens in a case like Yugo. I think everybody’s probably out of luck.” On May 30^th, 1992 President George H. W. Bush “froze Serb accounts and prohibited American businesses and individuals from conducting trade business with and other transactions with Serbia and Montenegro.” (In the fall of 1992, Bobby Fischer violated the sanctions by playing chess against Borris Spassky. He was indicted, escaped to Iceland, died there.) Meanwhile in Kragujevac, Yugo’s manufacturer Zastava Automobiles, crushed by “war, sanctions and bankruptcy,” subsisted by manufacturing AK-47s. NATO started bombing Serbia on March 24, 1999. They bombed for 78 days, destroying Zastava’s power station, computer center, and assembly line. 124 workers were injured, and “mangled Yugos swung from conveyor belts.” The war ended in June of that year. Zastava, like all of Serbia, was broke and needed a foreign investor. Malcolm Bricklin stepped up. Inexplicably, Zastava signed a new deal with him in 2002, but, not surprisingly, the deal was dead one year later. Bricklin moved on to China where he failed to import a Chinese luxury car for Americans. This Yugo book is supposed to be funny and sometimes it is. I’d rather, though, read a biography of Bricklin.

In 2008, Fiat bought the company and officially killed the Yugo. Vuic estimates that there are 1,000 Yugos working today. “Stay Tuned,” Vuic writes, because “as of late 2008, the Serbian government was negotiating with officials in the Congo about moving the Yugo to Africa.”

The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of Worst Car in History is one of those awesome magazine articles no one should have turned into a book. But since that has already happened, how come there’s not more Cold War drama? Vuic notes but does not discuss the relationship between Josip Broz Tito and the U.S. administration. When Tito withdrew from the Soviet Bloc, Vuic writes: “he took his Mediterranean ports with him, a coup of immeasurable importance to the U.S. Military…successive American presidents treated Yugoslavia like a ‘pampered child,’ giving it billions of dollars in aid and loans, most-favored trading status, and tons of military equipment.” We were cool with that. “We believe that cars do not have politics,” wrote Automative News in 1985. But still, how come Vuic doesn’t enlarge upon the claim that Yugoslavia successfully did “everything capitalists say socialists can’t do”? The Yugo, as a “product of a state-owned socialist enterprise” was snatched up by an American con-man and sold, for a profit, as the best of what socialism could offer us Americans by the dawn’s early light.

Hill and Wang, New York, 2010. 272 pp.

Photo: Flickr, Damian Corrigan

Point of view is the big challenge for the historian. After years of research, travel, interviews; years of note-taking, transcribing, sorting-out, arranging, using the floor of one’s study to map out chapters; years of consultation with trusted colleagues willing to read drafts and offer suggestions – the writing begins, and you have to decide: Where do I stand vis a vis my subject?

Even if the facts at hand are as real as today’s headlines, history is not journalism. You regard situations sui generis at some distance: an arm’s length, a decade’s, or a century’s. You may also be looking at a culture foreign to your own. Every few pages of Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss seems to be reminding the reader of his invasive behavior; so does De Tocqueville, in Democracy in America.

Two Frenchmen in foreign countries spring to mind not only because the past is a foreign country, but because, in The History of White People, instead of geographical travel, Nell Irvin Painter historicizes a race that is not her own. When well-meaning people approach her at symposia and cocktail parties, as they are wont to do, and ask her if she is “writing as a black woman,” her response – after the possible joke riposte-question, “What are my options?” – is, simply, “I am writing as an historian.”

The History of White People is therefore a scrupulously well-chosen title. The core of the story is made up of discrete individuals with defined cultural roles. This book is not a litany against racism. It is not a catalogue of injured aberrations and finger-pointing. It is not a guide to the oppressed. It is, rather, a narrative in the most accomplished and deliberate sense, as the beautifully-paced genesis and evolution of an habituated definition.

The story begins in antiquity, a time we already tend to idealize, made all the more fascinating as we learn – or are reminded – that “back in the day,” Scythians, Celts, Gauls and Germani knew no such thing as race. It was where you were from, the climate of your home, that defined you. Nevertheless, slavery was omnipresent; before the color-line there was social hierarchy.

Before too long, the reader is on home ground, among the slave-owning colonials of America. Slavery was an integrated practice, and remained so for some time. This perversely mirrored the alabaster-skinned ideal of the odalisque. Painter skillfully guides us through the convoluted path of race-awareness in the plastic arts. Winckelmann and Blumenbach and Meiners and de Stael, eighteenth-century standard-bearers for whiteness, contributed in important ways to the elaborate taxonomy of race on the edge of modernity in America. Painter maintains stride as she penetrates the mind of our quintessential, prototypical intellectual, Thomas Jefferson, and his depiction of Saxon forbears – again, by process of elimination, tilting the balance toward whiteness.

Painter casts “The First Alien Wave,” the immigrant explosion of the first decades of the nineteenth century that gave rise to the myth of the Melting Pot, in a disturbing new light. She shows how the influx of Irish Catholics and their brand of “blackness” made them “people bred to be dominated,” thereby an accelerant upon the flame of indigenous race-thinking. From there, she segues to Ralph Waldo Emerson, presenting a chillingly authoritative discussion of the Transcendental idealist as polluted by the machismo, rough-hewn Germanic philosophies of his close friend Thomas Carlyle. Idealizing “English Traits,” Emerson devalued the darker hues. In his eyes, the paradigmatic “American” was a white male.

The line from Emerson to William Z. Ripley, Franz Boas, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Goddard and Madison Grant is likewise Teutonic. By the time the second great immigrant wave – the Jews – engulfed our shores, prejudice was systemic. Henry Ford, with his publication of The International Jew, The World’s Foremost Problem emerges through Painter’s saga as the one of the prime movers behind American anti-Semitism, an integral ingredient in race-thinking.

A keystone in this historical arch, the black power movement, arrives in the mid-1960s when heightened black identity and black pride turned the white man into The Other. Painter’s analysis here trenchantly torques the preceding story into a distorting mirror wherein white America was caught by surprise – the intellectuals seized upon Malcolm X as a man whose excoriations brought them closer into empathy with black nationalism. But Malcolm’s effect on right-wing American society was the opposite: “If black people could proclaim themselves black and proud, white people could trumpet their whiteness.”

“Any nation founded by slaveholders,” Painter writes, “finds justification for its class system, and American slavery made the inherent inferiority of black people a foundational belief, which nineteenth-century Americans rarely disputed.” The History of White People is replete with this kind of causal reasoning, sophisticated, fact-based logic that has always been foundational to the praxis of history. The facts in this book do not “speak for themselves.” No facts can do that. Facts need to be substantiated by a scholarly apparatus, which these are; but the scaffolding of The History of White People is never allowed to overwhelm the artful edifice. By the time Painter concludes her study of whiteness on the minutest, granular level, the genome – upon which “race-talk” is still being grafted – makes eminent sense.

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010. 496 pp.

Hannah Seligson’s term for this amorphous period of courtship is “a little bit married.” Her new book, “A Little Bit Married: How to Know When It’s Time to Walk Down the Aisle or Out the Door,” is about couples who have postponed marriage for a year or ten and decided to just play house instead. Play is, according to Seligson, a big reason for the trend. Generation Y (born 1977 – 1989) might as well stand for Generation Youth; we still pine for our days in the sandbox. “In previous generations there was no transition into adulthood, you just became one,” says professor Jeffrey Arnett, one of dozens of relationship experts interviewed in the book. These mini-marriages provide a “stay against loneliness” during those not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman years. Seligson spoke with over a hundred unmarried monogamists and the book mostly consists of snippets from her interviews.  They offer quips that will hush your most prying relatives and suggest topics – like determining a monthly budget -you ought to cover before you move in.

According the U.S. Census, there are 6.7 million unmarried couple living together; they outnumber the population of Arizona. However, a little bit married, Seligson writes, is not vying to replace the real thing. Studies show 75% of cohabiters plan to marry eventually. It’s a trend with a limited following, occurring among “upwardly mobile college educated twenty- and thirty- somethings living in urban areas.” This is hardly the seed of revolution, Seligson states upfront.

In fact, reading Seligson’s book makes you realize that dating hasn’t changed very much since the advent of Facebook, except for its ever-yawning duration. Changes in our courtship rituals hardly inspire ethnography. In one chapter, “Dating Peter Pan,” Selgison describes the maturity gap between men and women; in another “Are We There Yet?” she comforts readers fretting because their man hasn’t proposed yet. Seligson’s book is much like other self-books for women anxious about marriage, a genre that, given the recent release of Lori Gottleib’s Marry Him, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed, and Kate Figes’ Couples: The Truth, appears to be the only recession-proof strain of the publishing industry. Seligson is less interested in analyzing the little-bit-married phenomenon than she is in patting the anxiety-ridden shoulders of the women navigating it.

What distinguishes ALBM from other books in this genre is Seligson’s gently prodding tone. Her advice is never too specific; instead she asks her readers valuable, self-reflective questions. “To be clear, though, this is not a chapter about how to get your guy to propose through trickery, manipulation, or harassment” she writes at the beginning of “Are We There Yet?” Instead, she inquires about the origin of the anxiety – perhaps social pressures have gotten under your skin? – and offers suggestions on how to discuss marriage with your partner. The book begins with a brief synopsis about her experience being a little bit married. But following those three pages, the book takes a decidedly impersonal turn; there’s scarcely another sentence in the first person. This might explain why her tone is measured, her prose low-drama; her run-in with partial matrimony was years ago, and now she’s empathetic to your woes but doesn’t quite share your obsession. Also, while the book does reinforce a number of stereotypes (“you’re ready to register at Pottery Barn and he’s playing Grand Theft Auto”), there are certain traditions she identifies as outdated. Engagement rings, for instance, get to her: “What if the engagement ring went where it should historically be catalogued: an anachronism of a time when women were considered something to which an economic value could be assigned.” She questions whether marriage really is the epitome of love. “Cohabitation is more committed than marriage. When you cohabit with someone you are making a conscious choice, outside of a forced institution, to be with that person.” She quotes hordes of people who advise against marrying before thirty. It makes the stereotypes in the book far easier to digest – you don’t sense that she’s projecting her own neuroses as the national standard, nor recycling old wives tales. She’s just reporting what she heard during her interviews.

If marriage isn’t your thing and never will be, a better guide might be “Unmarried to Each Other” by Dorian Solot and Marshal Miller. Solot and Miller, the founders of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, have been unmarried for eighteen years. Their book, which was published in 2002, has a chapter about legal precautions unmarried couples ought to take – like signing a health care proxy form. Another chapter is about “commitment ceremonies” for those who want to throw a party without the institutional baggage of a wedding. For Solot and Miller, postponing marriage isn’t just an issue of cold feet or dawdling before you turn thirty. The unmarried couples they interview haven’t tied the knot because they can’t (Seligson book only applies to heterosexual couples), or because it’s just not appealing. Some feel uncomfortable getting married when their gay friends can’t, others just think there’s something awry about mixing their emotional and legal relationships. Most of the people they spoke to never want to get married, not even the littlest bit.

The Hemingses of Monticello by Annette Gordon-Reed: This book has a lovely cover, feels weighty with knowledge, and has excellent page-feel. However, I don’t think it will make a good pillow.

What Color is Your Parachute? 2010 edition by Richard Nelson Bolles: Embiggen parachute on front; sets mood 4 fantastical recession career (creative director, hedge fund mngr).

Going Rogue by Sarah Palin: I’d rather read Going Rouge, An American Nightmare. Where’s she looking in this pic–watching people walk away? What color’s HER parachute?

The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss: DO TELL. Was thinking I’d write the 1 nanosecond version. Literary ponzi scheme.

Twitterville by Shel Israel (or any book on Twitter): Bad news: book is too long. And it’s a book. It’s like rollerblading about the solstice. Wait, did I do that right?

Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert: Committed: EAT PRAY LOVE EAT PRAY LOVE EAT PRAY LOZZZZ… ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ………….ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ…………ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Food Rules by Michael Pollan: OMG you GUYS, have you read The Omnivore’s Dilemma? …..Silence.

Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government by Glenn Beck and Kevin Balfe: Big book, scary picture! Propped it against O’Reilly book: they made out and had a baby Rogue. Cue Billy Ocean: When the goin’ gets tough…

America For Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty by Jerome Corsi: Ooo, America with a barcode! CuYute, can I get that in a necklace? I’m thinking, make America red and put little yellow stars in the corner?

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer: This is a nice cover. I read the flap—it’s an inspiration story based in Madonna, I mean Malawi. Madawa? Malonni? Crypt keeper?

The Ticking is the Bomb by Nick Flynn: My fav cover, altho ambiguous. Poster worthy. He <3s parenting? Wait, Abu Ghraib+baby=love? Can’t wait to see how this feel-good plays out.

I Want To Be Left Behind: Finding Rapture Here on Earth by Brenda Peterson: Brother and moi discussing Rapture. Me: Why did they pick the word Rapture for 2nd coming? I mean, it’s a BIRD. Him: Um, you mean “raptor”?

The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin: You know what makes me happy? A good project. And a good project about becoming happier? (Walks slowly back to irrelevant hamster wheel.)

Talented Mrs. Highsmith by Joan Schenkar: Hey, see what she did there? Cause PH did the Talented Mr. Ri… ya get it. If not, you won’t read this. If you do, useful life points 4 u.

Redeeming Features by Nicholas Haslam: Pink and orange dude bio? Says one thing: men won’t pick this up. But I will. Guess interior designer. That was easy.

Here’s the Deal: Don’t Touch Me by Howie Mandel and Josh Young: HM is an OCD guy trapped in a bubble. ANOTHER game show host with OCD? I would read this if Marc Summers were in the bubble, too.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Early Years by Ilan Stavens: OMG you GUYS, this book looks amazing from cover alone. And it’s re: Marquez: super. Angels sing. Must save Glenn and Bill from the raptor.

New York City has lost its soul. If this is an argument that you’ve already read and talked about to death, do not turn to Sharon Zukin’s latest offering. But, if this seems like a good jumping off point for an inquiry into the last fifty years of New York’s changing cityscape, Naked City could appeal.

The book doesn’t so much strip the city naked as it does point out the weighty adornments that contribute to its contemporary culture. Zukin, a sociologist at Brooklyn College and a prolific writer on cities, relies less here on the data and demographics found in her previous books, choosing instead to take a softer approach. She grabs our hands and leads us through neighborhoods, remarking on zoning changes, recent clashes between communities, shifting understandings of public space. At times, this approach gives Zukin’s writing a lively blush, and we’re happy to be along for the ride; at others, it’s temping to want to wrench free of her grip. Troubled by the alterations to her city, she also experiences tinges of guilt around the edges; after all, she admits, “I would never shop in a discount store or drink bodega drip coffee when I could have a latte.”

This bind may ring true for Zukin, but the discussion of her own patterns of consumption sets a distracting tone. We want a tougher tour guide to navigate these streets, someone who will bypass the dull imagery of lattes and fancy cheeses. Since we’re listening for insight on what lurks behind these shifts, her occasional revelations of complicity feel unnecessary. Especially if you’re someone who doesn’t mind deli drip coffee or yellow cheddar instead of raclette, but you’re still interested in the knotty landscape of “supergentrification.”

This book may not be for every urban enthusiast, as some of Zukin’s territory is well worn. The narrative she provides for Brooklyn’s ascent into cultural “coolness” provides a familiar cast of characters, as artists displace manufacturers in live-work lofts, and are displaced in turn by lawyers and media moguls who buy these lofts as luxury condos; a gourmet cheese store or quirky coffee bar replaces a check-cashing service, and is in turn displaced by a chain store. Similarly, armchair urbanists will have probably already read how Veselka (the famous Ukranian restaurant) used to exemplify the East Village’s uneasy combination of change and constancy.

Yet there’s much to be gained from this book as hand-in-hand we stroll from Red Hook to Williamsburg, the East Village to Harlem. Rhetoric, the power of capital, state power, consumer tastes, and media manipulation: all are implicated in her mapping of “authenticity.” The habit of identifying authenticity has been with us since the days of Shakespeare and Rousseau, but Zukin explores all of its contradictory and contemporary uses: representing as a vision of the city that is timeless; as a status symbol thrust upon groups of people; as an expression of origins; as a style that can be produced, sold, and consumed by everyone from the media to the real estate agencies to the city itself. Zukin’s writing about authenticity is most powerful when she links it to a desire for origins, contrasted with the experience of strangerhood in the spaces of our shared city. While the notion doesn’t always apply so cleanly to each of her subjects, it’s one that we want to hear more of; the people of the city and their searching for neighborhood and home is the muted energy in this book that wants to be set free of the relentless (and often tedious) inquiry into appearances.

The book gains strength as it departs from this pursuit of authenticity, sold and consumed, and instead shifts to the maneuverings that have created some of our most prized spaces. Her look at the politics and economics behind community gardens, Union Square, and the World Trade Center site, emphasizes how some of our most dearly held “public” spaces are operated and regulated by a complex blending of city, state, and private involvement.

As the title suggests, she references Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities throughout, using the landmark text alternately as a guiding light and a tool of comparison and critique. We hear echoes of Jacobs most clearly throughout Zukin’s final recommendations when Zukin peels off the kid gloves to argue for reclaiming “our origins in the small scale of old buildings, the low rents of working class neighborhoods, and fewer corporate names” along with new “public-private stewardship” that would protect people, buildings, and institutions.

Throughout, she reminds us that appearances can be deceiving, and much of this contemporary city culture is revealed to be a bit like the emperor sans clothes. Constant tatter on real estate blogs can be filled with inaccuracies and falsehoods, a quick scan of the patronage at a crowded café can be misrepresentative of a neighborhood’s unemployment rate, and, finally, the theories of Jane Jacobs can be implemented in law, but not in spirit. Naked City may be best suited to former New Yorkers who mourn their altered urban village but haven’t had to experience the changes while reading the New York magazine articles that Zukin frequently intones. For those who remain and question the daily reality of changes, it might be too painful to see the emperor naked once more.