Editor Clay Felker brings together a diverse and rather puzzling agglomeration of pieces published in magazines in 1999 in this anthology. The three pieces of fiction in particular, though they are among the best selections, seem out of place especially given that Felker waxes unlyrically about the way magazine articles wed "factual reporting with traditional literary techniques." Certainly none of these pieces are downright bad, but any collection that begins with "The Best…" needs to do, well its best to live up to that description, and this collection fell a little short overall. (Maybe Felker needs an editor himself, since he used the word "anecdote" where he meant "antidote" in the Preface.)

There are fifteen pieces, and conveniently five of them are skipworthy. "Nick Nolte is Racing the Clock to Repair the Damage", an Esquire piece by Daniel Voll, is necessary reading only for Nolte biographers and obsessed fans. It can be summarized thus: Nick Nolte is a freak who examines his own blood under a professional grade microscope in his home, takes daily self-administered injections of human growth hormone, regular syringes of vitamin B-12 and folic acid and hits of ozone, and when he's really stressed, hooks himself up to an IV bad filled with 13 different vitamins and minerals. (Why doesn't he just eat a bowl of Total ?) Oh yeah, he also smokes Marlboro's. All of this (except the Marlboro's, presumably) is an attempt to correct the years of drug and alcohol abuse.

I'd be lying if I said I read all of Frank Deford's Sports Illustrated piece on former Boston Celtics star Bill Russell. I find Deford's writing style both ponderous and chatty, and neither in a good way, and I have no interest in the basketball stars of antiquity.

Skip Hollandsworth's Texas Monthly article on the horribly understaffed and overworked child abuse investigative team of Austin's Child Protective Services office works well as a piece of straightforward reporting, describing the very young, idealistic, mostly female social workers who have high hopes of being able to make a difference and save children's lives, but end up frustrated, burned out and utterly pessimistic because their caseloads are so huge and unmanageable. Hollandsworth highlights some of the more odious cases of abuse and neglect as well as the investigative team's triage policy that, because resources are so scarce, means a large percentage of children will simply fall through the cracks. What would have made this piece stronger is an in-depth look at one or two particular cases over a longer period of time.

Richard Preston's New Yorker article "The Demon in the Freezer" examines the potential for bio-terrorism using smallpox and the debate in the scientific community over whether to save or destroy the official stocks of the virus that today exist only in laboratories. Smallpox killed at least 300 million people in the 20th century alone, during which time most humans were largely immune to it. Today the World Health Organization has a supply of 500,000 smallpox vaccine doses, or roughly one dose for every 12,000 people on earth.

Officially smallpox exists only in freezers at the CDC in Atlanta and in a Russian virology institute in Siberia. Unofficially, the U.S. government believes the virus may exist in China, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Serbia, and possibly in the possession of Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization.

"How will I know if I have smallpox?" I hear you asking. During the ten day incubation period you will feel normal. Then fever, backache and vomiting hit and tiny red spots will appear all over your body.

The spots turn into blisters, called pustules, and the pustules enlarge, filling with pressurized opalescent pus. The eruption of pustules is sometimes called the splitting of the dermis. The skin doesn't break, but splits horizontally, tearing away from its underlayers. The pustules become hard, bloated sacs the size of peas, encasing the body with pus, and the skin resembles a cobblestone street. (p. 63)

Throughout all this painful splitting, you will remain alert. If you have bloody smallpox, the linings of your throat, stomach, intestines, rectum, and vagina disintegrate. Basically the virus destroys your entire "skin," both exterior and interior. The final phase preceding death is the intestinal bleedout: the lining of the intestines and rectum slips off and is expelled through the anus in pieces or lengths of tube called the tubular cast.

George Saunders' New Yorker story "The Barber's Unhappiness" is a hilarious and wonderfully written tale of a middle-aged hairdresser who lives with his elderly mother and entertains her lady friends when he's not inhabiting his own vibrant fantasy world filled with hot Mexican chicks. He begins to fall for a beautiful girl in his remedial driving school, until she stands up for the first time and he is shocked to see how huge she is:

He felt a little miffed at her for having misled him and a little miffed at himself for having ogled such a fatty. Well, not a fatty, exactly, her body was O.K., it seemed solid enough, it was just too big for her head. If you could somehow reduce the body to put it in scale with the head, or enlarge the head and shrink down the entire package, then you'd have a body that would do justice to that beautiful, beautiful face that he, even now, tidying up his handouts, was regretting having lost. (pp. 147-148)

Three pieces chronicle the horrible ravages of war and their associated war crimes. Janine di Giovanni's "Madness Visible" and Sebastian Junger's "The Forensics of War," both for Vanity Fair, are hideously compelling forays into the war in Kosovo. Di Giovanni's first person account will leave you feeling sick and wretched as she accompanies refugees fleeing through the mountains in winter and visits a 12-year old Muslim boy whose torso has been ripped open by shrapnel from chin to public line; having gotten separated from his father, he has been alone for nine days and the hospital only has enough painkillers to give him one daily injection. He will almost certainly die, alone.

Kenneth Cain's investigation of human rights abuses in Liberia for The Human Rights Quarterly is by far the longest and most scholarly piece, weighing in at 63 pages and 147 endnotes. It is also the most horrifying. Cain describes the evils of the 1990-1997 Liberian civil war, which produced 200,000 casualties and hundreds of thousands of cases of torture, rape, and cannibalism.

Often victims were tortured, mutilated, burned alive, or beheaded (or all four) in front of their family members, including children. Often the same things were then done to the remaining family. Women were raped in front of their husbands, then forced to watch their husbands being tortured and killed. It was the customary task of Liberian women to go into the bush to collect food and firewood, making them much more vulnerable to being seized and raped. One faction had a Small Boys Unit, which recruited and forced boys as young as 7-8 to serve in front line combat operations, commit atrocities against civilian populations, and even commit rapes.

Often pregnant women and babies were targeted. Some fighters amused themselves by gambling on the sex of the unborn baby, then cutting the mother's womb open and pulling out the fetus to see who won the bet. Both were then left to die. Sometimes family members were forced to have sex with each other. Some victims were killed so that their organs could be removed, cooked and eaten. One eyewitness testified to seeing bandits cut off a woman's breast and roast and eat it, leaving her to die of blood loss.

Despite Liberia's war matching the number of casualties in the Yugoslav war, no one has been punished, or even pursued, for these atrocities. Because no specific ethnic group was targeted more than any other, these crimes did not meet the definition of genocide. And because Liberia claims no strategic, geopolitical, or diplomatic significance, the U.S., the international community, even the U.N. had little will or stomach to confront the instigators of the abuses or seek possible solutions, either during the war or after. Charles Taylor, the head of by far the largest faction and initiator of the armed conflict and much of the violence and atrocities, is currently the elected president of Liberia.


The other pieces in this collection are:

"Clock of Ages" by Brian Hayes, from The Sciences
"Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill" by Tom Wolfe, from Forbes ASAP
"Dominion", Robert Stone's New Yorker short story
"The Third and Final Continent", Jhumpa Lahiri's New Yorker short story
"Moment of Truth" by Gary Smith, from Sports Illustrated
Tom Carson's reviews of Saving Private Ryan and Being John Malkovich for Esquire
Anthony Lane's pieces on André Gide and Evelyn Waugh for the New Yorker

(note: Anthony Lane writes film, book and general criticism for the New Yorker, and, in my opinion, is one of the best writers alive. Nobody turns a phrase or crafts a sentence like him, but regretfully space limitations and my fear of short attention spans prevent me from a closer examination of his work here.)



Recommended: Yes