THE UNWANTED SOUND OF EVERYTHING WE WANT
A Book About Noise
By Garret Keizer
385 pp. PublicAffairs. $27.95

IN PURSUIT OF SILENCE
Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise
By George Prochnik
329 pp. Doubleday. $26

Writers are notoriously noise-averse, perhaps none more so than the historian Thomas Carlyle. “SILENCE, SILENCE: in a thousand senses I proclaim the indispensable worth of Silence, our only safe dwelling-place often,” he wrote a friend in 1840. A few years later, after his neighbor in London’s Chelsea district added a flock of “demon fowl” to his yard, Carlyle resolved to defend himself against the clamor of roosters, organ grinders, the neighbor’s piano, etc., by adding a floor to his house for a sound-proof study. It didn’t work: with certain sounds shut out, others became more audible — distant whistles among them. “The silent room is the noisiest room in the house,” his wife, Jane, observed.

So it might not surprise that a writer has just come out with a book about the problem of noise. But what does it mean that three have done so, within barely a month? Has a sonic tipping point been reached?

I do know that each of these writers had me saying, “I know just what you mean,” within the first few pages. With George Michelsen Foy, it was a moment, described in the first paragraphs of “Zero Decibels,” that took place on the uptown platform of the Broadway local at the 79th Street station. A perfect storm of subway noise enveloped him when all four trains (two express and two local) screamed through the station at the same time. He put his hands over his ears “and screwed my face into the scrunched expression of a root-canal patient. I usually despise people who do that on subway platforms, . . . who cough if someone is smoking across the street, who wear cardigans and bicycle clips; for God’s sake, if you’re so delicate, move to an ashram! But here I was doing the same thing.”

With George Prochnik, it came on the second page of “In Pursuit of Silence,” when he says he has had a “passion for quiet as long as I can remember.” Worried that he’s a borderline “noise crank,” he admits to having “snitched on contractors who started work early” and “battled neighbors who hold large parties.” “My most notorious moment,” he confesses, “occurred when I called our cable company to come check out the volume of sound that the DVR made when it was turned off. I wasn’t home when the cable man showed up, and my wife was forced to try and help him make out the faint clicking projecting from deep inside the machine. (“There can you — there, no — wait, I think that’s it. . . .) It’s an incident I will never live down.” (Reviewer’s confession: I can relate to Prochnik because I did exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reason.)

Garret Keizer waits until Page 11 of his book to tell us about his relationship with noise, but there’s really no conceit here about seeking silence. Rather, “The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want” is a meditation on just that: the unreconciled gap between our desire to do things like fly in airplanes and our misery over how loud the associated racket can be.

It can be no surprise that all three of these writers touch on many of the same loud spots of the history of sound. Each mentions Carlyle and his study, for example. Prochnik and Keizer cite the key role loudspeakers are thought to have played in the rise of Hitler. Foy and Keizer both mention Julia Barnett Rice, who campaigned against tugboat whistles at the turn of the 20th century and started New York’s Society for the Suppression of Unnecessary Noise. In their quests for quiet, Foy and Prochnik both interview astronauts (who know the silence — and sounds — of space) and meditate with monks in monasteries. They consult with the makers of sound-measuring devices (Foy even purchases a portable unit, which becomes his companion for the duration of the book). Foy and Prochnik discuss the etymology of the word “silence”; Keizer does the same with “noise.” Foy and Prochnik also review the evolution of hearing and common problems, including tinnitus, consulting with an array of audiologists and ear, nose and throat specialists, none better drawn than the professor of otolaryngology at New York University whom Prochnik mocks and compliments in the same breath: “Given his profession, it’s impossible not to notice the handsome Svirsky’s enormous Vulcan ears.”

But where their paths diverge, things get more interesting. Foy is the most self-revelatory and memoirish. He admits that his “lust for silence is only the point man for a platoon of other worries.” The reader can’t help being impressed by how many quiet places fail to provide the real quiet he seeks. Not his bath tub, not the commercial isolation tank, not the catacombs beneath Paris, not Joseph Pulitzer’s sound-insulated bedroom on the Upper East Side, not a mine shaft 7,000 feet below the surface of Ontario — all of these have some noise, often a tinge of the urban hum he refers to as “monster breath.” Only enclosure in a special “anechoic” chamber at a lab in Minneapolis brings him close to what he’s after, but even there Foy hears something (does it come from his own body?) and wonders if true silence is findable.

Prochnik’s book is the most amusing, polished and magazine-y. “I’ve worn so many earplugs (powerful, swimming-pool-blue Hearos from the Xtreme Protection Series) that if they were laid end to end they’d probably manage to extend all the way around a New York City block.” He has also written the single most entertaining chapter in these books: “Soundkill,” an account of a competition between boom-car drivers in central Florida. The meet takes place in the parking lot of Explosive Sound and Video, the domain of the world champion Tommy McKinnie, the King of Bass (and characters like MP3 Pimp and Big Red’s Lady). Here, cars packed with huge sound systems emit blasts that cause windshields to shatter, clothes to flap against one’s skin and loose hair to fly up in the air.

Even so, I found that much of Prochnik’s and Foy’s books did not stick with me; both cover perhaps too many basses, er, bases. It’s Keizer, a contributing editor for Harper’s, who has really wrestled with the noise question and comes away with the most to say. Much of it is cultural analysis, beginning with the observation “A person who says ‘My noise is my right’ basically means ‘Your ear is my hole.’ ” He questions why American culture in general seems to be on the loud side, examines “the historic relationship between noise and violence, between the arrogance of power and contempt for the weak.” He happily cites other sources in generous footnotes, everyone from the music critic Alex Ross to the historian Emily Thompson, who was “undoubtedly correct in pointing to the concept of ‘noise pollution’ as an outgrowth of the environmentalist mind-set that emerged in the 1970s.”

What kept me engaged in Keizer’s book was a succession of unexpected ideas about the links between noise, politics and technology. If there is a villain behind our era of noisiness, Keizer suggests, it is Edison’s bulb: “The electric light did for the colonization of the soundscape what ‘guns, germs and steel’ did for the colonization of the globe — it opened up new territory.” He is sensitive to bombast (“Even the word global has a noisy, self-important ring to it, loud with superlatives and grand designs”) and appreciates silver linings: “One perhaps unintended effect of the 9/11 attacks was that people experienced the sound of a sky without aircraft. Several times now I have heard someone comment, always in the positive, on the uncanny celestial quiet of Sept. 12, 2001.”

Will the noise abate? Unlikely, suggests Keizer, who concentrates on the din produced by road, rail and air transit and cites a Dutch professor’s view that “noise is yet another ‘baked-in’ environmental effect of ‘the technology used and the physical infrastructure in which it is based.’ In other words, we can take noise out of our civilization with about the same ease as we can extract an egg from a cake.”

But that doesn’t necessarily imply surrender. Keizer’s book ends with a section, “Sitting Quietly at the Back: A Set of Resources,” which includes a list of organizations that deal with noise, as well as lines you can use in arguments with people who are too damn loud. For example, when they say, “You’re just complaining because you don’t like (my kind of) music,” you respond: “This is like saying that a person who opposes rape doesn’t like sex. In fact, there is convincing anecdotal evidence to suggest that people who truly love music are the most likely to resent having it forced on them.” Such ideas may not lead to victory in the battle against noise, but together they constitute an energizing manifesto that might at least help writers, and readers, win enough quiet to hear ourselves think.

Sometimes journalists can only describe, not explain. Certainly that was the case when the tattered freight ship the Golden Venture beached itself on New York’s Rockaway peninsula in June 1993, disgorging from its fetid hold a cargo of 286 undocumented Chinese, ten of whom died while struggling to swim to shore. The national reaction was one of shock–at the time there was little public awareness that Chinese were sneaking into the country in this manner, in such numbers and at such expense: $30,000, it was soon revealed, was the starting price of the squalid passage. Passengers in this rust bucket had lived below decks for months without sanitation or adequate food, and been subject to harassment by representatives of the “snakeheads,” or smugglers, who set the whole thing up. But who the snakeheads were; why it was happening now; why the nighttime landing, inside New York City, within miles of the Statue of Liberty, was so brazen–all cried out for explanation.

I knew about smuggling over the Mexican border from crossings I’d made for my book Coyotes. So when The New York Times Magazine assigned me to write a follow-up to all the news stories–the sort of now-take-a-deep-breath-and-try-to-explain exercise that can only be done well after the fact–I figured I could come through with the goods. I visited Golden Venture detainees in prison in Pennsylvania, talked with recent immigrants from China, fixers in Chinatown and Chinese-American professors, and got everything I could out of the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service. After a couple of months I had a fine collection of puzzle pieces–but only hunches about how they fit together. Those who knew weren’t talking yet. Lacking the big picture about the Golden Venture, I wrote instead of the state of political asylum (see below) and waited for the day when the explanations would come.

Well, sixteen years later, that day is here. In Patrick Radden Keefe’s The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream we finally have a satisfying, comprehensive account of the Golden Venture debacle and its place in the larger story of people smuggling and US immigration policy. In fact, it is not only satisfying; it is excellent. Keefe, a contributor to Slate and The New Yorker with one previous book to his name (Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping), has done an immense amount of research around the globe; if the Golden Venture beaching was the tip of an iceberg, then here, finally, is the iceberg.

Our enlightenment begins with context: most of the migrants came from Fujian Province in southeastern China. This was known soon after the Golden Venture grounded, but Keefe tells us about the place (poor, mountainous, situated on the coast across the strait from Taiwan) and about precedents for “this peculiar type of population displacement, in which the people of a handful of villages seem to relocate en masse to another country within a short span of time”–in New York City they include Calabrians relocating to Mulberry Street in Little Italy at the turn of the twentieth century. Such regional migrations can take on a momentum of their own; Keefe writes, enlighteningly, that they are driven not simply by poverty but, once under way, by the disparities in income between families related to emigrants (who receive remittances allowing them to live large) and families who are not.

He also describes the pull factors, which included not simply the perennial economic opportunities of the Golden Mountain, as the United States is known in China, but the declaration by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 that the United States stood by those whose childbearing rights were trampled by oppressive governments. Bush’s executive order made this, if not a matter of law, a clear statement of his preferences, and Chinese had no difficulty reading the tea leaves.

Keefe’s main narrative strand is the tale of Cheng Chui Ping, also known as Sister Ping, a Fujianese who immigrated legally in 1981. During an interview for her visa, Cheng Chui Ping had expressed a desire to work as a domestic servant. But it seems that was never in the cards. Not long after her arrival, she responded to the burgeoning demand for passage from her homeland by establishing a smuggling operation out of her variety store in New York’s Chinatown. (She also ran a money transfer business by undercutting the fees charged by the huge Bank of China, which had a branch right across the street from her shop.) She arranged for Chinese to be smuggled over the border with Mexico, and over the border with Canada, too. The Coast Guard stopped a boat heading to Florida from the Bahamas that was carrying twelve undocumented Fujianese. When authorities checked the phone records of the man who leased it, they found he had made one call to New York City on the day of the voyage–to Sister Ping’s variety store. Not that she actually guided clients herself; it seems that in most cases, Sister Ping instead was more like a general contractor. She would oversee an operation, handling the money, guaranteeing the result and, with her husband, supervising subcontractors who managed the logistics of transport.

Other criminals in the Chinatown underworld were jealous of her success. One of them was a young man named Ah Kay, the head of a Chinatown gang known as the Fuk Ching. Ah Kay, famous for his brutality in shaking down restaurant owners and other businesspeople, twice in the 1980s tried to rob Sister Ping, whom he figured had a lot of cash squirreled in her residence from the money transfer business. Both times her children were held at gunpoint while Ah Kay’s men searched for money. The first time they netted only $1,000; the second, they scored $20,000 from her refrigerator.

Despite this history, business came first for Sister Ping. In September 1992, she had a boat off the coast of Boston loaded with more than 100 illegal migrants who needed to be brought to shore. Ah Kay had provided this “offloading” service to other snakeheads, but he had a different history with Sister Ping. When she approached him for help, according to courtroom testimony, he hastened to apologize for the armed robberies. “Sorry, Sister Ping,” he said. “Everyone has their past.” She replied, “That’s what happened in the past. We’re talking business now.” In exchange for $750,000, Ah Kay sent a deputy on a fishing boat 200 miles out to Sister Ping’s boat. The immigrants were deposited quietly on a wharf in New Bedford, Massachusetts, shortly after midnight: mission accomplished.

They would work together again on the Golden Venture, but this time the collaboration was very different. A third smuggler, Weng Yu Hui, who had himself been brought into the United States by Sister Ping in 1984, was the snakehead in chief behind an aging ship, the Najd II, which left Bangkok for the United States with 240 passengers in July 1992. The vessel ran aground briefly in Malaysia, then developed engine trouble en route to the island of Mauritius, where its Australian captain abandoned ship. Finally, in October, it limped into the port of Mombasa, Kenya, and went no further.

Trying to salvage the enterprise, Weng Yu Hui met with, among others, Ah Kay, who agreed to put up the money for the new boat. Weng also spoke with Sister Ping, assuring her that space would be saved on the boat for twenty clients of hers who happened also to be stuck in Mombasa. She still owed Ah Kay $300,000 for the offloading in New Bedford, and wired it to the people who would purchase a replacement craft.

Among the many interesting revelations of The Snakehead is that the US government knew that a cargo of undocumented Chinese was headed here from Mombasa months before they arrived. Soon after the Najd II docked in Mombasa, Keefe writes, “representatives from Mombasa’s Missions to Seamen contacted the small US consulate in the city and explained the situation.” Months later, an INS agent based in Kenya alerted American officials that the Najd II had been emptied and a different boat full of Chinese, the Gold Future, was possibly headed for the United States via the Cape of Good Hope. He had the right idea but the wrong ship; American intelligence reports at the time were full of partial and conflicting information.

“Ironically enough,” writes Keefe, “the officials could have gained a much better understanding of the situation if they had simply consulted the newspaper.” On April 4, 1993, the South China Morning Post correctly reported that “a ship carrying hundreds of illegal Chinese immigrants is on its way to the United States.” Keefe writes, “The Hong Kong-based newspaper exhibited no confusion about the names of the ships or the sequence of events, and explained that the immigrants were now bound for the United States ‘aboard a Honduran-registered fishing trawler MV Golden Venture.’”

Unfortunately, the ship’s arrival in the United States would not go as smoothly as the arrival of the vessel that had unloaded at New Bedford in 1992. Ah Kay, though a major investor in the trip, had had to go into hiding in the meantime because of strife with another gang. Nobody could be found to offload the passengers; while the smugglers looked, the Golden Venture waited. And the Coast Guard, Keefe reports, noticed: a surveillance plane spotted the ship southeast of Nantucket the morning of June 4, 1993, and reported it as DIW (dead in the water)–in other words, not moving. It “was quite close to shore, and as it approached New York its course took it on a trajectory that ran directly perpendicular to the shipping lanes in the area–a dangerous move, and one that might have attracted some notice,” he writes, adding that, as the boat sailed slowly toward Rockaway the next evening, “the Coast Guard dispatched boats to intercept it. But they couldn’t find it.” (Unfortunately, Keefe is unable to offer further information about why this would be.)

Other disturbing revelations abound. Government officials had Sister Ping and her husband in custody long before the Golden Venture disaster, in connection with smuggling schemes including an incident near Niagara Falls in which four people died. But apparently they figured Sister Ping and her husband for bit players; he never went to prison, and she served only a four-month sentence. Well before the Golden Venture grounded, an INS employee, Joe Occhipinti, had perceived the scope of the smuggling from China and proposed that a multi-agency task force be formed to take it on; the suggestion was never acted upon. Ah Kay, the Fuk Ching gang leader responsible for several murders and untold other violence, became a government witness against Sister Ping and others and in exchange was quietly released from prison. (He is now under witness protection.) And even though there was an active warrant out for his arrest, Sister Ping’s husband was naturalized in 1996.

Americans are sadly accustomed to bureaucratic incompetence regarding most matters involving immigration. Ultimately more worrying, however, is our national ambivalence about new citizens; it’s hard to find a better example of this than President George H.W. Bush’s actions with regard to immigration and China. Following the Tiananmen Square uprising, Bush was clearly tortured. He wanted to show American disapproval while preserving a working relationship with the Chinese. He halted sales of military equipment to the People’s Liberation Army, for example, but rejected the idea of broad economic sanctions. He also wanted to protect dissidents, such as the Beijing astrophysicist who sought refuge at the US Embassy during the crackdown, and it was in connection with this that he issued the fateful executive decree. First, said Bush, any Chinese citizen who was in the United States before the crackdown should not be forcibly removed by immigration agents. Keefe, noting that the directive effectively offered safe haven to 80,000 Chinese students, calls it “a kind of founding document for the Fujianese community in America.”

A second part of the order, writes Keefe, “would unwittingly facilitate the snakehead trade and set the stage for an epic influx of undocumented Chinese.” This was Section 4, where Bush directed officials to provide for “enhanced consideration” under immigration laws for people “who express a fear of persecution upon return to their country related to that country’s policy of forced abortion or coerced sterilization.” In Keefe’s words, “the breadth of the provision led to the de facto result that any fertile Chinese person, whether a parent or not, suddenly became a potential political refugee in the United States.” It was an “unambiguous invitation,” and the effects were unmistakable: “in 1992 political asylum was granted to roughly 85 percent of the undocumented Chinese immigrants who requested it, a rate almost three times higher than for immigrants from other countries. ‘The Fujianese thank two people,’ a Chinatown real estate broker who emigrated in the 1980s observed. ‘One is Cheng Chui Ping [Sister Ping]. And one is George Bush the father.’”

Keefe consulted an impressive array of sources in piecing together this book. Many were in law enforcement–agents of the FBI and the immigration service seem to have been especially forthcoming. Where others were not, Keefe dug deeper. His source notes reveal that many details of the scene from that horrific night on Rockaway Beach come from Keefe’s Freedom of Information Act requests for the reports of first responders, such as agents of the US Park Service Police. Outside law enforcement, Keefe spoke to attorneys, White House staffers and all kinds of people in New York’s Chinatown. In York, Pennsylvania, where many of the migrants spent more than three years in prison, he spoke with volunteer lawyers and a committee of advocates for the men in prison. And he interviewed many of the migrants, including one, Sean Chen, who left Fujian with snakeheads in 1991; traveled overland through Burma to Thailand; languished in Bangkok until July 1992, when he boarded the Najd II; languished in Mombasa until April 1993, when he boarded the Golden Venture; and then languished in York until President Bill Clinton ordered him and all other Golden Venture detainees freed on Valentine’s Day 1997.

Sister Ping’s life, however, was moving in the opposite direction. In 2006 she was convicted of smuggling-related crimes and sentenced by then-judge Michael Mukasey to thirty-five years in prison. (When Keefe wrote her there asking for an interview, she replied, “What’s in it for me?”)

Keefe’s book ends with his visit to the man who was head of the regional immigration service office in New York at the time of the Golden Venture landing, the man who decided that, instead of releasing the migrants pending disposition of their cases in immigration court, as was the common practice, he would detain them indefinitely. I remember thinking at the time how heartless William Slattery was and, with his inflammatory pronouncements, how nasty. But with a fairness that’s characteristic of his approach, Keefe explains some of Slattery’s thinking. There was a snakehead boom under way; Chinese asylum seekers were arriving by the boatload. At the top of his agency there was a vacuum: Bill Clinton had been in office only six months, and his nominee for INS commissioner, Doris Meissner, had not yet been confirmed. Slattery tells Keefe that no higher-up told him to detain the migrants, but nor did they say not to. Washington, in Slattery’s mind, was “terrified, paralyzed by its own indecision.” The brazen landing inside New York City “was a final, unmistakable fuck you from the smugglers to the United States government, and Slattery took it personally.” “I led. Washington followed,” he brags to Keefe.

Slattery’s anger probably reflected that of many; snakeheads like Sister Ping were clearly out to exploit the good will of the United States. Now retired in Florida, Slattery “to this day…is skeptical about the asylum claims of the passengers aboard the Golden Venture,” writes Keefe, and once you have in hand this larger picture, it’s hard not to share that skepticism. Or to agree with Slattery’s current, pragmatic position that, having been here so long, the Golden Venture passengers should of course be allowed to stay.

The immigration official is not the only player in this tale that has found its final resting place in Florida. After being auctioned off by the US Marshals in 1993 (and repainted, and renamed the United Caribbean), the former Golden Venture carried cargo for a while before the new owner abandoned it in the Miami River. Keefe reports that eventually local authorities decided to sink the ship and turn it into an artificial reef for divers. That’s its final act, out in the Boca Raton Inlet. I think no one was sad to see it go.

Following the success of Freakonomics, somebody realized that Venkatesh–now a tenured professor at Columbia University–probably had a pretty interesting story to tell about his gang days too, one that might attract a larger audience than his two books of sociology, Off the Books and American Project. And so we have the strangely titled Gang Leader for a Day.

It gets off to a brilliant start. Venkatesh, a ponytailed math major from suburban San Diego and the son of immigrants from India (his father is a professor too), wanders from cosseted Hyde Park into one of the poor neighborhoods that surround the university on Chicago’s South Side. His professor, William Julius Wilson, is mounting a new study of urban poverty, and Venkatesh has volunteered to help administer a questionnaire. He’s looking for young black men, and Census data in the university library point him toward a building in the Lake Park housing projects in nearby Oakland.

Told to get lost by gang members who are selling drugs in the lobby of the first building he enters, he moves on to a second. This lobby is deserted; seeking subjects to interview, Venkatesh climbs up a smelly staircase to the fourth or fifth floor, clipboard in hand. There he finds a group of his intended demographic shooting dice. Suspecting he’s been sent by a rival gang of Mexicans, they circle around, one brandishing a knife; as Venkatesh tells it, he goes ahead with his administrative task and asks the first question on the survey: "How does it feel to be black and poor?" The multiple-choice answers are "very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good."

"Fuck you!" says one man. "You got to be fucking kidding me."

The question is, indeed, so ludicrous that the reader not only applauds the gang member but may be forgiven for wondering if the celebrated Professor Wilson really sent his graduate student out on such a risible mission, or even whether–forgive me–this little part of the tale, which took place back in 1989, is apocryphal.

But no matter. The more important thing is that Venkatesh, told not to leave, is eventually confronted by the gang’s leader, J.T., with whom he establishes a relationship that lasts for years. J.T., with "a few glittery gold teeth, a sizable diamond earring, and deep, hollow eyes that fixed on mine without giving away anything," quickly takes charge of the situation:

He took the questionnaire from my hand, barely glanced at it, then handed it back. Everything he did, every move he made, was deliberate and forceful. I read him the same question that I had read the others. He didn’t laugh, but he smiled. How does it feel to be black and poor? “I’m not black,” he answered, looking around at the others knowingly. “Well, then, how does it feel to be African American and poor?” I tried to sound apologetic, worried that I had offended him. “I’m not African-American either. I’m a nigger…. Niggers are the ones who live in this building. African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.

Certainly intending no disrespect to his academic adviser, Venkatesh writes that the gang leader "was about to become the most formidable person in my life, for a long time to come…. I felt a strange kind of intimacy with J.T., unlike the bond I’d felt even with good friends. It would have been hard to explain then and is just as hard now, but we had somehow connected in an instant, and deeply." J.T., after a getting-to-know-you period, accepts Venkatesh as his Boswell, taking him under his wing, offering him access and protection. Eight months later, when J.T. moves his business out of the Lake Park projects, which are slated for demolition, and heads north to the massive Robert Taylor Homes, Venkatesh follows. (HOPE VI, the federal public housing renewal project, eventually leveled and replaced the Robert Taylor Homes, as well, with lower-density housing.)

In terms of journalism, the gold standard for writing about life in the projects was set by Alex Kotlowitz with There Are No Children Here (1991). It also takes place in Chicago, just before Venkatesh’s research began. Though he makes no mention of that book, Venkatesh borrows from the techniques of Kotlowitz and other literary journalists, focusing on a set of main characters, setting scenes, using lots of dialogue and–much more than Kotlowitz–putting himself into the story as narrator.

But his story is different. Where Kotlowitz sharply evokes all the fear and randomness of the projects, aiming to spark reader empathy with his main characters, Pharoah and Lafeyette Rivers, ages 7 and 10, Venkatesh is more interested in understanding and explaining the big picture. Gangs are violent and too powerful, yes–but why is that? How are the police involved or not involved? What are the economic relationships between people in the projects? Venkatesh has ceded the family-level focus to Kotlowitz; there are very few children here.

But what is here is truly remarkable. As he grows closer to J.T. and then, feeling suffocated, experiments with moving outside J.T.’s sphere of influence, Venkatesh is present for just about all the kinds of things one fears could happen in the projects, and then some. For starters, he witnesses at least two drive-by shootings: after the first, he says, he was the only one left standing (because everyone else was smart enough to hit the ground); and after the second, when J.T.’s main enforcer, Price, is brought down by bullets, Venkatesh pulls him to safety inside the building.

On another occasion, he joins the building’s squatters in chasing down a young man who had just brutally assaulted his girlfriend. As the men intercept the assailant in a stairwell, Venkatesh unabashedly describes joining in on the beating that the man receives. Though such a deed would hardly pass muster at today’s university institutional review boards–which must authorize the research graduate students do with human subjects–Venkatesh succeeds in making vigilante justice seem reasonable in a world where police and ambulances don’t respond. Similarly, he shows how the Black Kings didn’t simply "take over" their buildings, like some kind of occupying army. Rather, they stepped into a void of power left by the reluctance of the police department, emergency services and various social agencies, all of which appear to have been too afraid or too scornful to address local needs. Venkatesh, via J.T., shows how violence and disorder are bad for business, explaining why gangs have a strong incentive to maintain the peace in these no man’s lands. J.T.’s gang "acted as the de facto administration of Robert Taylor: J.T. may have been a lawbreaker, but he was very much a lawmaker as well."

Venkatesh recounts scenes of a sort that one would be hard-pressed to find in any other book. There’s the public forum to discuss gang violence, during which everything gets vented and nothing gets settled–until afterward, when the gang leaders settle their quarrel and shake hands in a small sit-down quietly brokered by a local minister and attended by a cop, Officer Reggie, who grew up nearby. There’s the near-lynching of a Middle Eastern store owner, who had sexual relations with the daughter of an angry local woman; J.T.’s lieutenant brokers an agreement involving cartons of free soda that keeps the store from being ransacked. There’s J.T. trying to expand his turf by pitching young would-be gangsters in Iowa with the zeal of an Amway salesman.

And there are several riveting encounters with police. Except for Officer Reggie, police in this account are generally absent from the projects. But on a visit to see Reggie at his precinct house, Venkatesh notices a flier for a party at a bar that was sponsored by J.T. and the Black Kings; Venkatesh was there when the affair was raided by a multiethnic group of masked men who stole all their cash and jewelry–cops, according to J.T. at the time. The flier is annotated with names, apparently like a sign-up sheet for those who planned to take part in the raid.

Reggie, asked directly, tells Venkatesh he’d be better off letting the matter drop because already other officers are suspicious of the young researcher. Reggie tries to help him by setting up a meeting at a bar between Venkatesh and a number of the men in blue, but it almost turns into a fight when one vituperative cop keeps repeating, "I know what you’re up to." Later Venkatesh realizes, with trepidation, that he has seen this man before: shaking down a dealer in his apartment, leaving with a bag of money from the man’s oven. And the officer saw him. Not long after, Venkatesh’s car gets broken into and the contents of his knapsack are strewn about in a presumed search for notes and a warning to be careful.

That officer was a rogue cop. But is Venkatesh, as the subtitle has it (and as he, getting into the spirit of things, even refers to himself), a "rogue sociologist"? In some ways, apparently yes: sociologists these days spend a lot of time collecting data (a term Venkatesh even uses to refer to his field notes), which they then parse in ways that a math major would appreciate. The kind of qualitative, ethnographic research Venkatesh was up to seems less common these days, even though, as he notes, it was what made the sociology of the Chicago School famous in the 1920s and ’30s.

But in other ways, he seems decidedly not a rogue. The image he more consistently paints of himself is that of a graduate student keenly attentive to his father’s advice that "the key to success in graduate school would be to develop a good relationship with my advisers," a graduate student who, for example, picks up the game of golf expressly in order to cultivate a relationship with his famous mentor. Venkatesh’s initial, reasonable impulse–to write a dissertation about this gang and its leader–is discouraged by Wilson and other professors, who steer him instead to study everyday life in high-rise projects. That would seem to explain why this book, which roughly describes a period from 1989 to 1996, wasn’t written until now: academia is the author’s first master, and there was other work to do.

Venkatesh admits, however, that he never really informs J.T. of this change in his marching orders. The gang leader, despite drawbacks (Venkatesh’s association with J.T. sometimes makes it hard, for example, for him to cultivate relationships with people outside the gang), "was certainly my best access" to the community. And so he uses J.T.–and J.T. uses him, though it takes the guilty-feeling Venkatesh a while to catch on to why. For example, to further Venkatesh’s study of the projects’ off-the-books economy, J.T. happily agrees to help him set up interviews with pimps, prostitutes, "all the people stealing cars" and more. And he introduces Venkatesh to Ms. Bailey, the book’s second great character. Ms. Bailey, a hard-boiled, heavyset older woman, augments her salary as building president (an elected, part-time position) by skimming off a percentage of the proceeds of unofficial business activities to which she turns a blind eye–the illegal hair salon, the illegal hamburger kitchen, the illegal daycare center–making her a gangster of a sort, as well. These men and women–many of them no doubt under duress–agree to talk to Venkatesh, who promises them he’ll keep the details confidential.

Unfortunately, and somewhat horrifyingly, he then turns around and shares what he learned with J.T. and Ms. Bailey–to verify the information, he says. Readers can see this train wreck coming a mile away, but the gormless Venkatesh doesn’t realize anything’s gone wrong until suddenly everybody he’s interviewed is giving him the cold shoulder. Many of them, it turns out, were making more than J.T. and Ms. Bailey presumed they were, and now the power brokers are shaking them down for a bigger share of revenues. In journalism, these people are called sources, and I have not read about such a massive, clueless betrayal of a source since Denis Johnson’s amazing, conflicted piece about the war in Liberia, published in Harper’s in 2000 and included in his 2001 nonfiction collection, Seek: to sneak into the country without proper credentials, Johnson hired local fixers–who suffered mightily when he offered up their names to the police as soon as he was caught.

The title of Venkatesh’s book refers to a stand-alone chapter that is a kind of set piece about a gang leader’s life. It starts like this: Venkatesh tells J.T. that he’s got it easy. J.T. says, Oh yeah? Why don’t you try it for a day? Venkatesh says, OK, I will.

It’s my least favorite part of the book because it’s gimmicky, a setup for a first-person telling of a day in the life of a crack gang leader. And it’s based on a premise we already know to be false: by this point, Venkatesh has spent pages detailing the perils and stresses of J.T.’s life: the risk of prison, the risk of death and injury, the risk of betrayal, the need to use physical intimidation, etc. Sure enough, as Venkatesh makes the rounds with J.T., his patron (sworn to protect him and disinclined to add uncertainty to a tenuous enterprise) doesn’t put him front and center but instead tells him to shut up and stay in the background. He’s hushed during a negotiation with a convenience store owner who won’t let Black Kings into his shop anymore; he’s told to sit in the car and look the other way when J.T. punches one of his salesmen in the face as punishment for withholding revenue.

I sense a marketer’s hand in the "gang leader for a day" conceit, as I do in the phrase "rogue sociologist" and the author’s pose in the photograph on the book’s cover: leather jacket, arms folded as though he’s the tough guy. Yes, we are all in favor of helping sociologists reach a general audience. But this book is exciting enough without trivializing the author’s work. Gang leader for a day? How about for years and years? Inside America’s largest, doomed housing project? And at the peak of the crack epidemic?

When you think about it, that first scary meeting with J.T. was the start of Venkatesh’s career. That was in 1989, and it is described in the book’s opening pages. Fast-forward to 1996, which falls near the book’s end. The Robert Taylor projects are soon to be torn down, J.T. is facing the prospect of dwindling sales (and unemployment) as his base of operations is demolished and an outdoor party sponsored by the gang is interrupted by a shooting. Life in this world looks as grim as ever. Space break, new paragraph: "In the spring of 1996, I learned that I had received a junior fellowship at Harvard’s Society of Fellows," writes the young sociologist. "I was ecstatic; it was a much-sought-after position, a three-year salaried research post. I went to tell J.T. the good news."

By Venkatesh’s telling, his main informant doesn’t take it too hard–he even offers to set Venkatesh up with a gang leader he knows in New Jersey. But the arrival of Venkatesh’s career news in this setting is a bit grotesque:

For a time I thought that J.T. and I might remain close even as our worlds were growing apart. “Don’t worry,” I told him, “I’ll be coming back all the time.” But the deeper I got into my Harvard fellowship, the more time passed between my visits to Chicago, and the more time passed between visits, the more awkward J.T. and I found it to carry on our conversations. He seemed to have grown nostalgic for our early days together, even a bit clingy. I realized that he had come to rely on my presence; he liked the attention and the validation.

I, meanwhile, grew evasive and withdrawn–in large part out of guilt. Within just a few months at Harvard, I began making a name for myself in academia by talking about the inner workings of street gangs.

Bringing up Harvard strikes me as a strategic error: Venkatesh could have just said he was leaving Chicago to do a postdoc. Instead, by sketching out his glorious trajectory, he encourages us to picture him in a paneled dining room, sipping sherry, while his erstwhile soulmate languishes in the ghetto. Within a few years, J.T. is done with gangs and is managing his cousin’s dry-cleaning business. Then he’s starting up a barber shop, which fails.

This is a peril of first-person nonfiction, which the author of a sociological study might not typically face: suddenly, the reader cares about the narrator’s relationships with the main characters. In fact, he will approach you after readings or send letters via your publisher or e-mails via your website to ask, Where is that person today? Are you still in touch? In his mind the story goes on–even if, in reality, it’s over.

Alex Kotlowitz, coming from a place of privilege, sagely and admirably ended There Are No Children Here by telling how he helped the Rivers brothers find a better school outside their neighborhood, and established a fund to help ensure their continued education and success.

J.T. was not so helpless, and Venkatesh makes it clear that J.T. used him just as he used J.T. (It takes a lecture from angry C-Note, a squatter whose income has just been divulged to J.T., for Venkatesh to admit that he was hustling in the projects just like everyone else, even if what he was after was information.) To his considerable credit, Venkatesh acknowledges feeling bad and seems candid throughout about his various missteps. Still, the divergence of the two men’s paths through life is a disconcerting note on which to end. Venkatesh (whose online CV lists grants received to study social ills that add up to more than $4 million) concludes his book by recharacterizing that "deep connection" and "strange intimacy" with J.T. that we heard about at the beginning:

It would be hard to call us friends. And sometimes I wonder if we ever were.
But he was obviously a huge part of my life. For all the ways in which I had become a rogue sociologist, breaking conventions and flouting the rules, perhaps the most unconventional thing I ever did was embrace the idea that I could learn so much, absorb so many lessons, and gain so many experiences at the side of a man who was so far removed from my academic world.

It’s a kludge of a final paragraph, the tone a bit reminiscent of a college admissions essay. Perhaps the author knows he has reached the less-inspiring part of the tale: the same dynamic that makes this story so exciting (hero enters a dangerous, unknown world, slowly gains acceptance) makes it hard not to end it with a whimper (hero moves on to better things, leaving friends behind). Give Venkatesh credit for doing something brave and difficult. Fault the world for the bitter ironies he exposes in his book, both intentionally and not.

There’s a lot of stuff we consume while barely pausing to consider where it comes from; it is easy, these days, to be insulated from production. Inquisitive writers profitably explore the knowledge gap: recent work about the life stories of handguns, French fries and Panama hats comes to mind. Tracy Kidder chronicled the creation of a computer in “The Soul of a New Machine,” and last year Michael Pollan traced the sources of our dinners in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” This year comes something new about those obscure practicalities of how does it get here: “Oil on the Brain,” by Lisa Margonelli.

It’s a great subject because oil is at once so familiar (the average American uses about three gallons of gasoline a day) and so obscure — how many of us have any idea where, exactly, our gas comes from, or how it was transformed from crude with a name like “light sweet” to the flammable cocktail we pump into our tanks? What other product is so much a part of our personal lives and so implicated in our foreign policy? As China and India spawn vast middle classes that want to drive cars, and as Hugo Chávez of Venezuela thumbs his nose at his largest customer, the United States, global oil supplies seem more precarious, and their provision more contentious, than ever before.

Margonelli, a fellow at the New America Foundation (and recently a guest columnist for The New York Times on the Web), says she got taken with the subject while in Prudhoe Bay, researching a story on new methods for the cleanup of oil spills. She watched a chemist ignite spilled crude with a baggie of napalm, and heard him expound on oil fields’ “ever-changing stew of complex compounds, endlessly unpredictable and absorbing. He began musing about the components of crude, from the light gassy hydrocarbons to the heavy gooey ones: All of them have distinct personalities.” And she was hooked.

The specialized knowledge of those who deal with oil is mainly what Margonelli sets out to channel in these pages. She traces the chain backward, from a San Francisco gas station near her home to the trucks of a jobber, or oil wholesaler, to a refinery south of Los Angeles, and then to a drilling rig in East Texas. Margonelli intrepidly loiters around the gas station at all hours, climbs aboard a tanker truck making oil deliveries and lucks into an emergency during her visit to the refinery, observing carefully and asking lots of questions when sirens sound and production halts. Her approach is quirky but comprehensive, informal but rigorous: Margonelli has a facility with numbers and an easy way with questions of policy, and the narrative passages here, lightly first-person and often funny, help make accessible the facts of our dependence on oil. Visits to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve near the Gulf of Mexico and the New York Mercantile Exchange round out the American half of the book.

She could have stopped there. But 60 percent of America’s oil is now imported, and Margonelli is ambitious: she next visits four petrostates (Venezuela, Chad, Iran and Nigeria) and China, where oil suddenly matters a lot. Oil has enriched each of the petrostates, of course, just as it enriched Pennsylvania, then Texas, then Alaska, but there the similarities end; in Margonelli’s telling, oil has brought corruption in Chad; corruption, environmental disaster and political instability in Nigeria; a new strongman in Venezuela; extremism in Iran; and everywhere the widespread loss of national sovereignty to oil companies and international lenders — what Margonelli calls “the external locus of control.” A Chadian recounts a debate in the country’s new Parliament over the coming of oil — they had seen it start wars in Sudan and Libya, he recalls, and were fearful. A man had stood up and said something like: “In my area there is a certain type of bird. When you see that bird in the forest, you know you will lose either your mum or your dad. This is the case with petroleum. … Oil means that something will change — you cannot choose if it’s your mother or your father who will die. Something bad will happen whether you like it or not.”

Needless to say, this was not quite the scenario faced by Jed Clampett, the Beverly Hillbilly, when “black gold” burbled up from his property in the Ozarks. Oil’s enduring mystique in our country, the romance of Texas wildcatters and giant gas-guzzling cars, runs up against an effective foil in the overseas chapters, where we’re forced to confront how we get oil now. Petroleum has not solved poverty, and its production abroad is garbed in realpolitik and lots of nastiness.

Unfortunately, these chapters feel cut from a different cloth. While Margonelli spent days with a drilling rig’s “mud logger” in Texas, collecting his every folksy expression (“Put a dress on that pig and take it to the fair”), once out of the United States she’s more inclined to skim — conducting quick interviews in the manner of a foreign correspondent writing a feature. Well-drawn characters whom we got to know over many pages in the book’s first half — oil people Margonelli got to know by sitting in on their lives — cede to a new set who, a day after finishing the book, I have some trouble recalling. For the first time, in Iran, Margonelli describes her hotel room, the hotel’s breakfast room, her own awkward appearance in a big blue dress — she has stalled!

However, she turns this chapter around. It becomes one of the best in the book because of the passions Margonelli gets embroiled in. Everyone here seems to feel strongly about something. An American sailor who has done five tours in the gulf region, and took part in the shelling of an Iranian oil platform in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war, says he was “shocked to be fighting Iraq after protecting them from Iran in ’88. If we’d predicted that, we should have let the Iranians take ’em down.”

Even better is a fellow journalist. Aresu Eqbali, a friend of a friend of a friend, helped Margonelli set up interviews from afar, and then accompanied her on a visit to Iranian oil platforms in the Persian Gulf. “In her mid-30s, she wears an olive drab coat and head scarf and deep red lipstick, which reflects her stealthy sense of humor. Disguised as a staid oil reporter, she’s got a mocking sense of the absurd, anger and a taste for old-fashioned, mildly dirty jokes.”

The two fly by helicopter to a platform that was bombed by Iraq during the war. “Tiny boxes stick above the surface of the sea, reminding me of dental work — little bridges and crowns,” Margonelli writes as they approach from the air. She looks at girders melted by the bombing, still unrepaired, and observes, “I’m trying to imagine the inferno of the platform burning, but there’s ice in my cup, and the rosewater reminds me of the sachets my grandmother used to put in with her clothes.” She describes men they meet later as “cheerfully submissive to the platform, as if they’ve married someone far larger and more powerful than themselves.”

The women are greeted by an ebullient character named Mr. Ebrahimi, who gives them a tour of another platform, known as Salman Complex, “my home of 20 years.” But Ebrahimi’s cheeriness soon gives way to seething anger as he describes the day American warships attacked the lightly armed platform. The Marines gave little warning, and platform employees had to jump into the shark-infested water, some without life jackets. “We couldn’t defend. I myself was in the middle of the sea, with no gun. It upsets you; it makes you full of hatred.” A manager named Aslani grows even more distraught recalling American attacks, and Aresu has to start poking Margonelli to get her to end the interview.

The fury leaves a big impression on the author. “For me, the abiding lesson of Operation Praying Mantis” — in which Americans attacked the platforms — “is Aslani’s anger. Winning, particularly in the politics of the petrostate, is little more than the start of a long war.” In other words, these battles have not supplied us with a new beginning. Iran is still there, with its large share of the Middle East’s 57 percent of the world’s oil reserves, and 45 percent of its natural gas. Margonelli notes that President Bush promised last year to “make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past” by 2025. “Even if that is possible, which I doubt,” she says, “we still have 19 years of living together left.”

The short final chapter, on China, begins with a recitation of figures on China’s exploding smog problem, car industry and thirst for oil. Then quickly we’re in Shanghai, where the book abruptly concludes with an account of a competition for alternative-fuel and low-emission vehicles. These are hardly visible in China now, and the chapter feels disconnected from the pages that have come before it — until, in her epilogue, Margonelli segues into reflections on the need to reform our relationship with oil.

“The one lesson I’ve learned from writing this book is that there is no such thing as cheap gas,” she says. New strategies are needed to steer us toward “many fuels, not just one.” The challenges are technological but also political. “Oil diplomacy, long outsourced to oil companies, and increasingly to the U.S. military, needs attention and leadership. The special relationships the United States nurtured with countries like Venezuela and the security guarantees offered to Saudi Arabia have lost their appeal; and the threats, which include sanctions and military intervention, have lost their effect.”

Daniel Yergin’s magisterial book, “The Prize” (1991), remains unsurpassed as a modern history of oil. But “Oil on the Brain,” kaleidoscopic, accessible and focused on our present quandary, is a timely sequel.

In Chicago’s Cook County Criminal Courthouse, ”the biggest and busiest felony courthouse in the nation,” 17-year-old Leslie McGee sits before Judge Daniel Locallo, on trial for a murder she confessed to committing at 16. The victim, a cabdriver, asked for sex as payment for a ride and grabbed her breast, McGee says; she shot him, and soon after attracted the attention of the police as she threatened to kill herself. McGee’s defense lawyer argues that what she did in the cab is understandable given that she suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder: a year earlier, she’d been abducted at gunpoint and kept for several days until she escaped and the police found her ”running naked from her captors.” On the evening of the third day of the trial, Leslie McGee, being tried as an adult, is convicted of first-degree murder.

What didn’t the jury know about this case (which the prosecutor, outside the courtroom, called a ”weird little murder”)? All kinds of things, some of them shockingly relevant. For one, McGee and the married cabdriver had probably been having an affair for several months. According to one confession she gave the police, she killed him because he’d been beating her; according to a second, because she’d seen him with another girl. She had fired the gun after saying, ”God bless you,” and kissing him on the cheek. In jail, McGee had been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. She was the second of her father’s children to have killed someone as a teenager. (”When she was 6, her 17-year-old half brother plunged a butcher knife into the face of his mother’s boyfriend during a fight.”) No matter the outcome of the trial, she thinks she needs to be locked up for a few years, ‘’somewhere I can close myself off from the world, clear my mind of all the negatives.” At the defense table, she dresses like a schoolgirl, with pigtails and Winnie-the-Pooh on her blouse. But tattooed on one calf, under a pulled-up crew sock and invisible to the jury, is an image about as far from the Hundred Acre Wood as you can get: a picture of a hand grasping a penis.

Steve Bogira, for years a reporter for The Chicago Reader, burrows into the machine that processes thousands of citizens a year, most of them poor, African-American and involved with drugs. His intuition was that the goings-on in the old limestone courthouse on 26th Street, however banal-seeming, might hide sprawling human dramas. And by focusing on something small — the cases coming before one judge, in a single courtroom — he gets a handle on something large and hard to make sense of: the American way of criminal justice.

Bogira gained admittance to Courtroom 302 with the permission of Judge Locallo, a Chicago native and policeman’s son. Locallo gave Bogira access to his chambers, his staff and, more than once, his own home. The prosecutors and public defenders assigned to the courtroom also opened up, allowing him to see police reports and other documents. These reports were crucial because, as Bogira notes, ”the heart of criminal court proceedings is not the judge . . . but the defendant, who is the reason for the whole exercise.” Incidents he learned of in the courtroom gallery (the shooting of a burglar by a homeowner, a stabbing in a prison barber shop) were merely the starting point for Bogira. He found and interviewed defendants’ parents (often absent from the trial) and grandparents, talked to jurors, psychiatrists and probation officers and, by following up with convicted defendants in jail and prison, even collected a confession of perjury, as well as at least one admission of guilt from a defendant who had claimed he was innocent at trial.

In this search for context, Bogira read seminal articles in legal journals. For the McGee case, he can offer a synopsis of the history of juvenile justice in the United States. Other cases open the door to informed asides on issues like the value of expert witnesses, jury selection and race, prosecution of the mentally ill and mentally retarded, and false guilty pleas (”at 26th Street, pleading guilty doesn’t mean you are”).

”Courtroom 302” also shines in its intimate portrait of a judge and his work. Daniel Locallo seems in many ways a judge’s judge — he receives positive ratings from six bar groups and is, from all evidence, honest and hard-working, candid and open. Yet the portrait is sometimes unflattering. We learn how, as a young prosecutor, Locallo uncritically pressed a raft of trumped-up charges against a black teenager accused of a rape-murder, possibly giving inappropriate coaching to a child witness. We watch his impartiality compromised by friendships and realpolitik, and we hear him refuse to repudiate his mobster uncle for the same crimes he convicts strangers of every day. (”Maybe it’s because I loved my uncle Vic, but I never looked down on him because of what he was involved in. You do what you have to do sometimes.”)

In the book’s most extended and suspenseful subplot, Locallo presides over the cases of three white teenagers accused of savagely beating two black kids who wandered into their neighborhood. This being Chicago, the probation deals offered two of them provoke the Rev. Jesse Jackson and other activists, while the eight-year sentence given the leader sparks a campaign by his family and organized labor to unseat Locallo (Illinois judges face re-election every six years). Locallo keeps his seat, but when he tells Bogira that his only regret ”is that I didn’t give the sonovabitch 10,” we see even a good judge can nurture a grudge.

Most of Locallo’s proceedings, however, are not so exciting. Readers whose acquaintance with criminal justice comes mainly through high school civics may be perplexed to learn that one important measure of performance is the number of ”dispos” — that is, dispositions, or plea bargains — a judge can achieve. Trial by one’s peers seems almost quaint today, so strong are the incentives for a defendant to choose something less demanding on the system than a jury trial. More than four of every five cases in the courthouse are ”dispo’d,” Bogira reports. He compares the negotiations to car sales: the maximum sentence is the sticker price, the plea offer the wholesale.

Of course, it is drug cases that have overwhelmed the docket. Bogira follows the continuing story of one genial middle-aged drug defendant, Larry Bates, through three probations, repeat arrests, drug treatments and his son’s high school graduation before a prison term from Locallo. ”The concept of studying an offender and devising a rehabilitation plan isn’t frowned upon so much as not looked upon at all,” Bogira writes. ”The proper sentence is whatever both sides can agree on to belch out one defendant and make space for the next.”

A picture emerges of a system so cynical and overburdened it fails to elicit, or even seek out, the reasons behind crimes. (Leslie McGee’s public defender, informed by Bogira of her client’s unusual desire to be incarcerated, responds, ”What do I look like, a social worker?”) The idea that the courts might attempt to facilitate reconciliation between aggrieved parties, called in progressive circles ”restorative justice,” is never entertained. One of the most memorable scenes of this excellent book takes place in the gallery of Courtroom 302 on the day a murderer is sentenced. The murderer is a gang member; his victim, a college student. Both are African-American. The murderer never testifies and no explanation for the crime emerges, even after the conviction. The murderer’s mother, trying to control two small children (one of them his), sees the victim’s mother and her family enter:

”After they’ve settled into a bench across the aisle, Karen Harris takes a deep breath, pushes herself to her feet and steps hesitantly over to the aisle. She catches Diane Smith’s attention, then quickly averts her eyes.

” ‘I’m sorry about what my son did to your son,’ Harris says softly.

”Smith tilts her head subtly in Harris’s direction, nods and says, ‘Thank you.’ ”

Sometimes, when the system fails to provide resolution, people find it for themselves.

Early in this sprawling, wry, opinionated, beautifully written memoir, Edward Conlon writes that he laughs a little whenever editorials denounce police power. To a patrolman, he says, the job doesn’t seem very powerful. Charged to embody lofty ideals, cops are jerked around by politicians, superiors and just about everyone else; they are mistrusted from within and without. He might have spent ”hours on a frozen rooftop, watching below,” only to have a supervisor on rounds ”reach out and feel my shield, to see if it was cold to the touch.” When police officers are sick at home, he notes, they have to call for permission to leave the house, and check in again when they return. Though vested with the power to use deadly force, cops have been treated like schoolchildren. These contradictions, Conlon says, have led many New York City police officers ”to develop a decidedly ironic point of view.” And it’s this, he maintains, that best explains the department’s ”blue wall of silence”: ”It’s not so much that cops don’t want to talk, it’s that they can barely begin to explain.”

Never has a cop explained like this — and a working cop, at that. The New York Police Department has, of course, inspired a huge variety of popular entertainments over the years, from genre novels to films and long-running TV shows. But ”Blue Blood,” in terms of its ambition, its authenticity and the power of its writing, is in a class by itself. Conlon is uniquely qualified to write about this giant (four times the size of the F.B.I. when he was hired) yet famously insular tribe. Among the city cops in his family tree are his father, uncle and a great-grandfather, a crooked policeman who used to ”carry the bag on Atlantic Avenue.” His family is Irish Catholic, solidifying his insider status, but at the same time Conlon is an outsider: after a Catholic education in the city, he went on to Harvard.

The story begins with Conlon, a rookie at 30, on foot patrol in the South Bronx. He likes the ‘’spontaneity and variety, reacting to the rhythms of the street, with its long lulls and sudden convulsions.” The neighborhood’s streets and buildings are the book’s canvas, the backdrop to smart observations (”when you arrest someone, it’s like a blind date”). We meet a multiethnic cast of other patrol cops and Conlon’s extended family, and learn about his own brief dalliance with delinquency. We flash back to training at the academy. Then it’s a return to the South Bronx, where he joins the plainclothes Street Narcotics Enforcement Unit, and, some time later, becomes an investigator with Bronx Narcotics. Conlon, who says he became a cop ”precisely to avoid work that entailed a suit, a commute and a cubicle,” has a scare when he is nearly made an assistant to Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik after the commissioner hears about his education. But that falls through, and soon he makes detective.

”Blue Blood” runs from the episodes of a cop’s life to meditations on that life, from gun-in-hand assignments like executing search warrants to mundane calls about vicious cats. Layered with Conlon’s family history; allusions to St. Augustine and early police books; and his own views on departmental dysfunction, the war on drugs and urban race relations, the book becomes a kind of rich ethnographic document, steeped in what Clifford Geertz might have called ”thick description” (not to mention a bible for future generations of cop show writers). There aren’t many dates or other signposts here, though, and not much narrative arc; it’s easy to lose the way. Conlon is funny on the subject of police language (”the general oddity of cop talk, its shotgun marriage of street slang and legalese”), but woe to the reader who, by Chapter 12, forgets the difference between a P.O. and an O.P., the 61 and the five, a bag and a skell. You might want to take notes as you go.

Similarly, given how much he does say about his extended family, his omissions regarding his personal life are curious and sometimes frustrating. We learn he’s the second-oldest son only when he wonders if second-oldest sons have a problem accepting authority, and find out he has a girlfriend only when he’s dreading going back to work after spending time with her. Nothing is revealed of his Harvard years except that he got in a fistfight and was placed on disciplinary probation soon after arriving. And on Sept. 11 we discover, out of the blue, that two of his brothers work downtown, one as a lawyer and one as a banker, but only when a worried Conlon admits he doesn’t know exactly where either has his office.

Some of Conlon’s most absorbing digressions concern episodes in the life of the modern New York Police Department, such as the French Connection heroin case; the corruption cases involving Frank Serpico, David Durk and the Knapp Commission; the rise of the ”Compstat” system for monitoring neighborhood crime; the shooting of Amadou Diallo; and the station house abuse of Abner Louima. His takes on these are interesting. He accepts, for example, the guilt of Justin Volpe, who was convicted of sodomizing Louima (”Thanks again, Volpe,” he mutters when a crack dealer makes a scene on the street by yelling how the police sodomize people with broom handles). But in the case of Diallo, he talks about the serial rapist whom cops from the Street Crimes Unit were looking for that night; ”I wondered if Amadou Diallo died because the N.Y.P.D. thought too little of the South Bronx, or too much. Whenever I heard about the 41 shots, I thought about the 51 women raped.”

While sometimes the detached observer, Conlon is often deeply involved in the stories he tells, and to the extent that he’s not self-aware, his tales can yield some unflattering insights. There is a faint echo of the Diallo case, for example, when his partner John Timpanaro pushes down a fleeing suspect, a drug addict. ”The perp had bounced off a wrought-iron fence before hitting the sidewalk” and was still there when the ambulance arrived, ”unconscious and twitching.” Timpanaro explains: ”He ran on me and I knocked him down, Eddie, and I swear, at first I thought I killed him. He ran down that hill, and I chased him, and he started to turn around with something in his hand.”

Something in his hand. Since Diallo, that phrase carries a resonance of police cover-up, which, oddly, Conlon doesn’t seem to hear. He does, however, grill his partner, noting that ”John was a strong guy, the junkie was running downhill, and he could have flattened him with a flick of the finger.” Then he quickly segues into the dangers of being too hard on cops who make an honest mistake. That turns out to be the moral of the story, the perils of politics intruding on the job. ”There’s a wall at Police Headquarters full of names, and some are of cops who hesitated.”

More seemly, perhaps, might have been a little sympathy for the addict. Something similar happens when Conlon’s beloved sergeant, P.K., in a patrol car speeding the wrong way down a one-way street, collides with a truck and hurts his head on the windshield. We learn how reassuring it feels to the author as the police shut down highways in order to speed their own to the hospital, but nothing is said about what happened to the truck driver. Informants, trying to collaborate their way out of drug charges, are encouraged to place themselves in harm’s way throughout the narrative. Conlon portrays himself as more concerned about them than some of his colleagues are, but questions this impulse, and the trickle of payments that turn him into something like a junkie’s employer (”Homeless junkies were part of the landscape, like pigeons, and the people who spent their days feeding them breadcrumbs had a hobby that was kindhearted but maybe a little unhealthy”). He can never quite bring himself to question whether some officially sanctioned aspects of police work are inherently dirty.

The department knows about Conlon’s ‘’side job,” as he refers to his writing career; top brass had to preapprove articles he began publishing in The New Yorker, as ”Cop Diary,” by Marcus Laffey, starting in 1997. (Though he doesn’t say, one assumes the book was vetted, as well.) Still, some higher-ups don’t like the idea of his telling tales out of precinct, and, according to the author, his upward progress in the department is stymied more than once. (A friend says that his application to the Street Crimes Unit was shot down by supervisors worried about ”the prospect of bringing a reporter into the unit.”)

But these policemen had it wrong: he may love writing, but Conlon is no newshound, trolling for a juicy story or aspiring to be objective. Rather, the title is just right: Conlon bleeds policeman blue; ”the Job” to him is a Catholic-style calling, a vocation. ”I liked the feel of a shield on my chest, and it began to make sense that you wore it over your heart.” And the fact he’s still on the job gives ”Blue Blood” a charge and immediacy unlike any other police book I know.

There is a special pleasure in seeing a writer of Denis Johnson’s caliber try something that is not his specialty. ”Seek,” a collection of his forays into nonfiction, reads like an extended experiment — short and long pieces of journalism and memoir whose subjects range from wars in Africa to cards at his local bar, where the tense is usually past but occasionally present and sometimes both, and where the voice seems continually under construction. Johnson, who uses the fictional first person to impressive effect in stories like those in ”Jesus’ Son,” seems unable to bear the ”I” here, and so, awkwardly, refers to himself as ”the man from Idaho,” as ”Moon One,” even as one of ”a couple of American journalists.” But he is such an adept that even his failures intrigue; and when he succeeds, the results can be spectacular.

The strongest writing here is in two pieces about the war in Liberia that bracket the collection. ”The Civil War in Hell,” first published in Esquire, recounts a visit to the capital in 1990. Monrovia lies in ruins, its remaining inhabitants harrowed by cholera and warring, starving soldiers; the only creatures prospering are the dogs, ”because they feed on human corpses. The people are starving, but the dogs have put on weight.”

The conjuring of nightmare is a staple of Johnson’s fiction, and it’s what he does here, too: the situation in Monrovia would seem to spare him the need to invent. Driven through town to the former compound of a mining company, ”the journalists” find the military leader Prince Johnson in the middle of his morning concert, ”gripping an acoustic guitar and singing ‘Rivers of Babylon,’ a Creole-reggae version of Psalm 137” to his troops. In an interview, they ask him about the death of Samuel K. Doe, the president, a month before. Prince Johnson insists that Doe died of wounds received during his capture, but then reveals matter-of-factly, ” ‘I cut off his ears and made him eat them.’

”The journalists believe they haven’t heard him right. Made him eat what?

” ‘I have a videotape of this interrogation,’ Johnson says suddenly. ‘Would you like to see it?’ ”

The description that follows, as the video is screened on a patio, is astonishing. ”On the screen, Samuel K. Doe, president of Liberia, sits on a floor in his underpants,” it begins, ”his shirt open, his hands tied behind his back, his bleeding legs stretched out before him, bound tightly at the ankles.” To this dystopia of video and reggae alongside timeless barbarism, Johnson is the perfect witness.

Next comes something quite different. ”Hippies,” published last summer in The Paris Review, is a chatty memoir of Johnson’s visit with two friends to a gathering of the Rainbow Family in a national forest in Oregon. ”Tens of thousands of hippies in the woods, seven days of Peace and Love.” Johnson and one of the friends had ”taken our first acid trip together” years before, and one suspects that drugs will figure prominently in the pages ahead, but what makes the journey interesting and unpredictable is the writer’s admission in the second paragraph — apropos of the hippie ethos — I who have had so much of peace and so much of love, I have never really believed in either one.” It is the first of several artful yet startlingly blunt statements Johnson will make about himself in these pages, each of them serving to bring him closer to the reader while, at the same time, establishing his distance from the subject and making clear that he is, in many ways, the anti-hippie. ”I’ve brought a couple hundred dollars in my pocket because . . . I don’t care what they say, I’ve never seen anybody trade dope for anything except sex or cash.”

Johnson and Joey score some mushrooms (”I said I’d split it, but I only gave him about a quarter. Less than a quarter. Yeah. I never quite became a hippie. And I’ll never stop being a junkie”), and the piece concludes with the resulting drug trip. For some reason, descriptions of such trips seldom work in nonfiction and Johnson’s, unfortunately, is no exception. It left me wishing I were immersed instead in the sublimated hallucinations of his novel ”The Name of the World.”

Between ”Hippies” and ”The Small Boys’ Unit,” the concluding piece on Liberia, are eight that range in quality from O.K. to pretty bad. The subjects of several are true believers: an Arizona cult; the flight of the accused abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph; a Christian revivalist motorcycle meet; Kabul, Afghanistan, under the Taliban. In each story are glimpses of the talent that explains why Johnson’s fiction is so widely admired, as well as many pages where I found myself thinking, ”This would never have gotten published if he weren’t Denis Johnson.”

But dwelling on these shortcomings will only delay our arrival at the book’s superb closing piece, ”The Small Boys’ Unit.” In the winter of 1992, Johnson was sent back to Liberia, this time by The New Yorker, with the mission of profiling another Liberian rebel, Charles Taylor, the ‘’self-described president of Liberia.” Through Taylor’s representatives, the magazine had arranged for Johnson to enter Liberia through Ivory Coast and be escorted overland to his rural headquarters.

But the trip is a disaster from the moment nobody meets Johnson at the airport. This is due partly to the elusiveness of Taylor, partly to the frustrations of Africa and partly to the impatience and poor judgment of Johnson himself, about which he is characteristically candid. Against the advice of his local guide, for example, he tries to bribe a police commissioner in Ivory Coast in the hope of getting quick permission to cross the border; the man is offended and tells him he must first go to the capital. But then, across the hall, Johnson’s passport is mistakenly stamped ”Liberia”; he rushes off to the border before the authorities can realize their mistake. This error will result in his arrest when, weeks later, he returns to Ivory Coast.

In Liberia he is kept waiting, waiting, waiting — and Johnson is not a patient man. As he misses a ride to Taylor’s compound and learns that a broken radio will further delay him, he encapsulates his reaction in a short, explosive paragraph that begins, ”My parents raised me to love all the earth’s peoples” and ends with an intimate, ugly fantasy about screaming a racial epithet repeatedly until ”one of these young men emptied a whole clip into me.” It’s the kind of sentiment you would never get from a seasoned correspondent, and if it doesn’t confirm your worst fears about white people from Idaho, it may make you admire Johnson’s candor.

Finally, Johnson nears his quarry. The small boys of the title are Taylor’s personal guard — war orphans whom Taylor has personally cared for and who are said to be fanatically loyal. In their custody is a man they claim is a spy and have been torturing. Johnson decides the man is innocent and, in what he concedes was ”a bizarre gesture,” places his New Yorker ID around the prisoner’s neck and calls out both of their names, and the names of the magazine and the United States, claiming that ”the magic from these names would stand around him against his misfortunes.” His escorts succeed in diverting him to the long-awaited interview with Taylor. It is brief and unenlightening, and at the end of it, Johnson writes: ”My assignment in Liberia was over. As far as I could see at the time and as far as I can see now, I accomplished nothing.”

But it’s worse than that: back in police custody in Ivory Coast, he knows he’s in trouble but doesn’t seem to realize that those who helped him sneak across the border are too; witlessly he gives up their names, and they are arrested. ”A dozen half-naked Liberian men now stood in a line with their hands bound behind them. . . . They all stared at me with sorrow and rage as I passed by.” Recanting undoes only some of the damage. ”I’d come to this place and I was not whole enough or real enough to accept its terms,” he confesses. Johnson’s dark and violent fiction has prepared us for some of what we find in ”Seek,” but ultimately it’s his confrontation with the truth — particularly about himself — that gives the book its flashes of brilliance.

*(It turns out that the author of this book, Nasdijj, was a fake. See the article, “Navahoax,” in L.A. Weekly.)

Talk about a hard life. Nasdijj, the son of migrant workers, was hauled around the West as a boy. His ”cowboy dad” beat and sexually abused him and ”would sell my mom to other migrant men for five bucks.” His mom, for her part, drank ”whole bottles of vodka while she was pregnant, and she was a heavy drinker when she had me,” which is why he has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, or F.A.S. Nasdijj himself has been homeless, declared bankruptcy, never held a job more than a year and, to get by, has eaten canned dog food and written pornography. Given the absence of what we think of as the prerequisites for literary writing—a quiet space, supportive friends, the bills mostly paid—it is a kind of miracle that ”The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams” was written, much less published.

The book’s 20 short, disjointed chapters offer a sometimes riveting, occasionally heartbreaking visit to this man’s life and his wounds. Much of that life has been lived in and around Indian reservations. Most memorable are the passages about his adopted Navajo son, Tommy Nothing Fancy, who, Nasdijj and his wife came to realize, had F.A.S., too. ”Had the Indian social worker said the words ‘fetal alcohol syndrome,’ I don’t know if I would have done any of it differently,” Nasdijj writes. ”He was perfect to me.”

An underweight infant who cried a lot, Tommy was soon ”the terror of schools and teachers and bus drivers and nurses.” In elegiac prose Nasdijj describes taking Tommy on fishing trips across the United States. (”Every man who has a son should give something of himself. This is what the sons are really looking for.”) Tommy suffered from seizures that grew worse and worse; on one such fishing trip, he died of one.

These sections on Tommy—"the one thing I did that was good and didn’t fail”—yield to far more bitter contemplations on writing and race. ”I would rather have my Tom than this writing about him, which is just about all I have now,” Nasdijj says. Getting his thoughts on paper has been a lifelong, consuming vexation for the author, who names as his chief obstacle not F.A.S. but the stifling, overpowering presence of white people. He became a writer, he says, to get even with ”the many white teachers and white editors out there (everywhere) who insisted it could not be done. Not by the stupid mongrel likes of me.”

Race is a complicated matter here, because Nasdijj looks white to the world. His father was white. As for his mother, well, he chooses his words carefully. ”My mother’s people were with the Navajo,” he writes at one point, and at another: ”My mother was a Navajo. Or so she claimed.” What is certain is that the author, steeped in Indian culture, uses ”Navajo” and ”we” interchangeably, and usually refers to Indians as ”us.” He grew up on a sort of racial fault line that invited feelings of hurt and rejection, but along the way he made up his mind: he now refers to his whiteness as ”the part of me that has no culture, that has no people,” and values only the Navajo.

Why a person for whom ”reading and writing are torture” would choose writing as a career remains a bit of a mystery. Nasdijj attributes to his F.A.S. ‘’some rather severe learning disabilities . . . all my craziness, my inability to deal with authority, my perceptual malfunctions (I can read entire books upside down) . . . and my rage.” He has boxes of unpublished novels, and lays their failure to his own inability to comprehend the ways of white society. His breakthrough, though one must read this between the lines, was apparently the publication last year in Esquire of the title chapter about Tommy Nothing Fancy, which was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. And while we cheer the triumph, there’s something extra sad in the knowledge that his success is through writing that depicts his failures. Nowhere is this irony more bitter than when Nasdijj tells us he has been asked to read the Tommy material at literary events, but no longer can: the emotion of it overwhelms him.

This is an outsider’s book; Nasdijj has sympathy for the downtrodden and anger toward the world that marginalizes them. In these pages we meet Native Americans and others who, like the author, don’t fit stereotypes: a Navajo bull rider with AIDS, a pair of young Sioux heroin addicts, male prostitutes in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, a delinquent Indian teenager he mentors, the author’s deaf cousin whose depth, not his debility, is insisted upon. There’s also a white lounge singer with daughters named Molly and Ringwald, with whom the author shares a campground while all of them are effectively homeless. We are introduced to his malcontented high school friends, Bad Nell and Frankie, and meet them when they are grown up. (”She never went to Hollywood. She never challenged the authority of the images. But she did one big . . . thing. She had children and she was kind.”)

The title strikes me as a bit pretentious, as are the handful of places where the author overreaches, apparently in search of profundity. (”And my soul, with its quarantines, its criteria and its prefigurements, a victim of its own picturesque vernacular.”) Information is sometimes repeated carelessly and the story zigzags through time. And while Nasdijj exposes a pain so deep in the Tommy chapters that he breaks your heart, he is stingy with other self-revelation. What was the name of ”the woman who was my wife at the time”? Or the woman who is his wife now? Has he any living relatives? William Least Heat-Moon told readers his regular name was Bill Trogdon, and we assume that the author was not called Nasdijj while he was growing up. But all we’re offered on this matter is a line on the dust jacket saying that Nasdijj is ”Athabaskan for ‘to become again.’ ”

Yet this is a fascinating book, unlike anything you are likely to have read. Comparisons will be made to Lars Eighner’s ”Travels With Lisbeth” and to ”The Broken Cord,” by Michael Dorris, but Nasdijj is sui generis: his book reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society.

Given a stack of 30 long features from the nation’s magazines,a reader could quickly find the one written by Susan Orlean. It would have a narrow focus: the routine of a 10-year-old boy in New Jersey; Saturday night with a lounge band in Portland, Ore.; a grocery store in Queens. It would be stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy for a person you might not have thought about empathetically before—might not have thought about at all. It would be lightly first person, with the few things Orlean revealed about herself things you were probably glad to know, and yet the whole would feel somehow suffused with her personality.

”The Orchid Thief” grew out of an article like those, for The New Yorker. It is Orlean’s first book-length narrative (after two collections, the first one short pieces about New England, the second portraits of Americans celebrating Saturday night). It shows her gifts in full bloom, as well as the challenges, even for such a talented journalist, of writing at this length.

The thief of the title is John Laroche, ‘’skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth.” Orlean had noticed a short article about him in a local paper. Laroche, along with three Seminole assistants, had been caught as they emerged from southern Florida’s Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, a vast swamp, carrying four pillowcases containing more than 200 rare orchids and bromeliads. He planned to clone them by the millions, he explained to the arresting officers, and then sell them to collectors around the world.

As he awaited trial, Orlean decided to hang out with Laroche and learn about him and his world. With her picaresque hero as guide, she is led into the strange society-in-miniature of orchid collectors and propagators. This sort of place is exactly where Orlean likes to be, and soon her terrarium is filled with orchid maniacs like Laroche’s pal Dewey Fisk, whose business, the Philodendron Phreaque, is run out of his house on ”one of those old Florida roads with rain ruts and grassy edges, and rows of one-floor bungalows with screened porches and dead cars and dead bicycles and dead appliances lying out in the open to molder, the way the Seminoles lay out their dead.” And then there is the orchid breeder Martin Motes, a former English professor who misquotes Shakespeare to his customers. And the swells at Miami’s American Orchid Society gala, where Orlean leans against the wall with the black-tied, orchid-loving Earl of Mansfield (”His wife had impressed me in the receiving line because she was so pretty and her hands felt like baby powder”).

Laroche is not a gala benefit type of guy, and he vanishes during this and other long stretches of the book. This is not all bad, because though Orlean is marvelous at describing her wing nut and his esthetic and moral world, there is not nearly enough of him to fill a book. Orlean appears to know this and digresses in long passages into several areas suggested by Laroche and his passion. We learn about the birth of orchid collecting in Victorian England and the exploits of agents sent by aristocrats to acquire specimens in faraway lands; about the Seminole Indians (Laroche was starting a nursery business for them at the time he was caught); about the sometimes fierce rivalries among Miami-area orchid dealers; and about orchid crimes, the largest of which was perhaps a classic Florida land scam that drained large pieces of the Fakahatchee for nothing.

No narrative really unites these passages, and several, like the Fakahatchee itself, through which Orlean slogs on three occasions (once with two convicts on work release), are slow going. What emerges finally as the book’s true subject is the monomania of collectors. As Orlean meets and sizes up a cast of characters that is downright English in its eccentricity, she comments: ”It seemed as if there were hundreds and hundreds of people who were wrapped up in their special passion for the natural world. I still considered Laroche and his schemes exceptional—actually, something beyond exceptional—but he had started to seem more like the end point in a continuum. He was the oddball ultimate of those people who are enthralled by nonhuman living things and who pursue them like lovers.”

Orlean envies them this passion, this organizing principle for life, without sharing it—early on she professes to own not a single plant. Still, she comes to appreciate orchids as you feel a fancier must (and describes one as only she could): ”He reached for a pot that held the cutest plant in the world. . . . I thought I might die if I couldn’t have this one. The background of the petal was the beigey yellow of a legal pad, and over the yellow background was a spray of hot pink pinpoint dots, and the flower was attached to the plant by a stem that was twisted like a stick of licorice. The petals were plump and supple and pleasant to touch. The center of the flower looked like the face of a piglet. I felt as if the plant was looking at me as much as I was looking at it.”

She even appreciates her roguish hero as only a mother might, appearing to forgive him when he returns to her story at the end only to let the air out of it: slapped on the hand by the judge and dropped by the Seminoles, Laroche renounces not only orchids but indeed plants of any kind. His new love: Web-page design and pornography publishing. Orlean puzzles over ”how someone could end such intense desire without leaving a trace.” But she concludes that it’s all in character—Laroche’s earlier infatuations with ice age fossils, turtles and antique mirrors also ended abruptly. He does not even know the phone number of his ex-wife.

It’s unfortunate for the book that Laroche ends up looking like a flake, because the collecting mania that Orlean has so painstakingly described is, like the orchid, a small thing of grandeur, a passion with a pedigree. Serious collectors wait seven years just to see a new plant bloom, and Laroche, lacking constancy, is not in their league. It is despite her thief, and not because of him, that Orlean succeeds in revealing the grandeur of a miniature.

And yet that’s precisely where five authors of this season’s travel books—Minta included—have placed themselves. This genre within a genre has built-in advantages, giving both the reader and the lonely travel writer an interesting companion and immediately providing historical depth. But there are limitations as well: if the writer has no true passion for the traveler being pursued, the strategy may serve simply as an excuse to take a lame trip and write a mediocre book.

That’s not a concern for most of these writers. Perhaps the strongest—and certainly the strangest—of their books is William Dalrymple’s FROM THE HOLY MOUNTAIN: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East (Holt, $30). Dalrymple, the Scottish author of two previous award-winning travelogues, “In Xanadu” and “City of Djinns,” followed the path of the monk John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist, who trekked through the Byzantine Empire in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, when exotic forms of Christian practice were nurtured in fortified monasteries and remote hermitages. Among the monks’ contemporaries were the stylites, ascetics who declaimed the wisdom of God from high atop the pillars where they lived. Another contemporary, coincidentally, was the prophet Mohammed.

Soon after the monks’ journey, Christianity would begin a thousand-year decline in the region, swamped by the great expansion of Islam that continues to this day. When visiting the Phanar, the oldest institution in Istanbul and “the nearest thing the Greek Orthodox have to a Vatican,” Dalrymple is shown a translation of a recent death threat to the Patriarch that was accompanied by a hastily defused bomb. A bit later, he is stunned as the priests conclude an afternoon service minutes after it begins because “not one person occupied the empty pews.” In site after site, he sees monks persecuted and afraid for their lives, as he is himself in several encounters with the soldiers and police of various Islamic states. Thus, Dalrymple reflects, Moschos’s journal, “The Spiritual Meadow,” “could be read less as a dead history book than as the prologue to an unfolding tragedy whose final chapter is still being written.” He also predicts that his retracing of the monks’ journey will allow him “to do what no future generation of travelers would be able to do”—”witness what was in effect the last ebbing twilight of Byzantium.”

Dalrymple, a decidedly learned sort who allows that “at Cambridge I spent my final year specializing in the study of Hiberno-Saxon art,” has a zeal for ecclesiastical arcana that occasionally blinds him to the limits of what might interest the general reader. (“Scholars believe that work produced in the Tur Abdin may well once have provided the inspiration for the very first figurative Christian art in Britain,” he enthuses.) But this passion is leavened by his dark sense of humor and talent as a journalist. On the Syrian border with Turkey, crushed to hear that the presence of Hafez al-Assad’s secret police makes it too dangerous for him to interview a group of Nestorian Christian refugees, he is reassured by a Syrian who once lived in England that there is a large Nestorian community back home in Ealing.

“Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late 20th century,” Dalrymple concludes. “Go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you find they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London.” Dalrymple is the professor whose obscure lectures you attend just so you can hear him talk.

In a more conventional mode but also satisfying is THE SPICE ISLANDS VOYAGE: The Quest for Alfred Wallace, the Man Who Shared Darwin’s Discovery of Evolution (Carroll & Graf, $25), by Tim Severin. An “in the footsteps of” veteran who has also retraced the travels of Genghis Khan, Ulysses, Jason (of Golden Fleece fame), Sinbad and Marco Polo, Severin here pursues Alfred Russel Wallace, the self-effacing collector and cataloguer of foreign fauna who articulated a theory of species origination before Darwin did. Using Wallace’s classic, “The Malay Archipelago,” as his guide, Severin sets sail in the eastern portion of present-day Indonesia with a team of explorers in a specially made boat, intending to go where Wallace went and see what he saw.

Predictably, the exotic species that gave rise to Wallace’s revolutionary ideas are disappearing about as fast as Dalrymple’s Middle Eastern Christians. Severin sounds the alarm, as a good witness should. But what’s more memorable about the book is his deep and obvious sympathy for Wallace, an amiable and bumbling autodidact who spent years pottering around the tropics suffering every conceivable setback while, Severin suggests, the well-connected Darwin dawdled in luxury and conspired to steal Wallace’s thunder. Without advertising it, “The Spice Islands Voyage” is in large part intellectual history. Least interesting is Severin’s own journey, and he seems to recognize it, taking every opportunity to place us alongside Wallace as he discovers a 12-foot python in the thatched roof over his bed, watches the destruction of a ship containing all his specimens from years in the Amazon and crawls through the jungle because of the sores on his feet.

It’s a vanished Eden in the Midwest that Daniel Spurr dreams of in RIVER OF FORGOTTEN DAYS: A Journey Down the Mississippi in Search of La Salle (Holt, $23). His “Pre-America” is a “land before the roads and railways, way back, when the whites were first coming up the rivers looking for fur, copper and the Northwest Passage.” Among these whites, Spurr fixed on Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the explorer of the Great Lakes region, where Spurr grew up, and the first European to float the Mississippi to its mouth. In this book, Spurr caps a 20-year interest in the explorer by retracing La Salle’s route from near Chicago to New Orleans in a rundown, underpowered motorboat called Pearl, accompanied by his 7-year-old son from his current marriage and 24-year-old daughter from a previous one.

Though one senses that the loner La Salle would have been a difficult traveling companion, Spurr makes a fine one, writing candidly about himself and adroitly about what little is known of the years when La Salle made his Mississippi forays—the sinking of a fur-trading ship whose profits were to finance his long trips, his eventual murder at the hands of his men on the Texas coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The problem is that Spurr is preoccupied with ghosts besides La Salle’s. Traveling with his son makes him think of his own deceased father and their many distances. It gives him time to grieve for another son, killed by a train at the age of 12. Spurr apparently wasn’t living with the son, his now-grown daughter and his first wife at the time, and feels guilty about his absence. I like to know whom I’m traveling with and generally approve of the confessional strain in American travel writing, but intimate self-revelation is volatile. With La Salle the main event here, Spurr’s personal story seems to belong in a different book.

The opposite side of the self-revelation coin is found in Stephen Minta’s ON A VOICELESS SHORE: Byron in Greece (Holt, $25). In what is essentially a biography, Minta explores the period that led Lord Byron to write, “If I am a poet, the air of Greece has made me one.” First with his friend John Cam Hobhouse and later by himself, Byron explored Greece and Albania in high Romantic style at the age of 21, accompanied by his personal valet and enough belongings (including seven trunks and even wooden beds) to require 16 horses. Years later, he returned to play a role in the Greek war of independence and—pointlessly, it would appear—died.

Minta, a lecturer in comparative literature at the University of York whose previous book, “Aguirre,” retraced the mad Spaniard’s early travels in 16th-century South America, speaks Greek and uses his long acquaintance with the region to lend texture to Byron’s wanderings. Consider, for example, the book’s graceful opening paragraph: “There is no better time of day, no softer season, no finer approach. Yet it was only by chance that Lord Byron’s first view of Greece came on a morning in late September, as he sailed in from the west across the Ionian Sea.” One longs for a bit more of Minta, clearly a fascinating and intrepid traveler whose first-person interjections are quirky and unpredictable. But his story of Byron finally carries its own weight. Moving deftly between the witty impressions of the poet and Hobhouse as revealed in letters and diary entries, an account of a long visit with the conquering despot Ali Pasha and a consideration of the poet’s status as an early sex tourist (by his own count, he had intercourse with more than 200 Greek boys), “On a Voiceless Shore” is moving and memorable.

It hardly seems fair to compare TRACES OF THOREAU: A Cape Cod Journey (Northeastern University Press, cloth, $42.50; paper, $14.95; available next month) with these other books. Stephen Mulloney, a former television reporter and legislative aide, spent one long night reading Henry David Thoreau’s “Cape Cod,” an account of his walking tours of the Cape in the 1840’s and 50’s, and then two long summer weekends retracing one 30-mile hike along the beach. Nothing happened to him that might not happen to you if you tried the same thing. I recommend the hike.