DISCOVERIES

Naked in Baghdad

The Iraq War

Anne Garrels

Farrar, Straus & Giroux:

220 pp., $22

To air her daily reports from Baghdad between October 2002 and April 2003, National Public Radio correspondent Anne Garrels had to hide her battered, duct-taped satellite phone under her bed so it wouldn’t be confiscated by hotel security or the Ministry of Information. Broadcasting at night, shewould shut off her room lights and crouch naked beside her bed, ready to feign sleep to delay police who might knock on her door. This is not her greatest hardship, but it’s a big one, and it is fascinating to read about the frustrations, large and small, of an intrepid female reporter. There’s the problem of getting and extending visas: Garrels is not above noticing that flirtatious young French reporters use a certain method to achieve this goal. There’s the problem of buying the services of reliable drivers and fixers: Garrels finds a handsome young fixer on her first trip to Baghdad whom she becomes so close to during the war that in the end she admits they “had come to love each other.” There’s the problem of being a woman, which Garrels usually finds is a great advantage in reporting the kinds of stories she is most interested in weaving. She gets access and intimacy, especially in Middle Eastern cultures, in places where men can’t. She includes e-mails her husband sent to friends and family, updating them with what he called “the Brenda Reports” (after Brenda Starr). It’s almost impossible not to feel proud of Garrels, not because of her fearlessness or her vulnerability, but because of her sheer professionalism in the face of chaos.

*

Ghosty Men

The Strange but True Story of the Collyer Brothers and My Uncle Arthur, New York’s Greatest Hoarders

Franz Lidz

Bloomsbury: 144 pp., $19.95

If you grew up in New York and knew anyone who had lived there in the first half of the 20th century, you’d be familiar with the warning: If you keep saving everything, you’ll end up like the Collyer brothers! Homer and Langley Collyer belonged to the last generation of New York’s founding families. They lived out their days in the 12-room home bought by their father in 1909 Harlem, when it was an elegant, whites-only neighborhood of Stanford White mansions and boulevard trotters. They collected more than 140 tons of junk until they both died in 1947. It took police 16 days to find Langley amid the piles of newspapers, boxes, jars, books and pianos. The brothers, who left the house only at night, had lived without gas or electricity for almost 20 years and without a telephone for 30 years. They dressed elegantly in clothes from about 1910. Rumors abounded of their wealth and parsimony. They lived on peanut butter, black bread and meat given them free by a local butcher. Franz Lidz knows a hoarder’s mind intimately. He spent a good deal of time with his Uncle Arthur, who collected socks and other items like false teeth and string, turning, writes Lidz with great admiration, “squalor into an art form.” This is the New York City of Coney Island and flea circuses, of race riots and street sages. Think “The Royal Tenenbaums” meets “Gangs of New York.”

*

Vernon God Little

A Novel

DBC Pierre

Canongate: 278 pp., $23

Vernon LITTLE’S coarse language is a bit of an obstacle in this novel about a Texas boy framed for a horrendous crime. But DBC Pierre is a genius at vernacular. Here is 15-year-old Vernon, a survivor of a school shooting that left an entire town pointing fingers, thinking aloud: “His character used to fit him so clean, like a sports sock, back when we were kings of the universe, when the dirt on a sneaker mattered more than the sneaker itself.” But Vernon is no saint. Everyone believes he did it, even his extremely overweight mother. He needs to know whether God exists, and fast. “Don’t be lookin’ up at no sky for help,” an ax-murderer preacher he meets on death row tells him between cuss words. “Look down here, at us twisted dreamers.”