Discoveries

The Exception to the Rulers

Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them

Amy Goodman with David Goodman

Hyperion: 342 pp., $21.95

Say what you like about Amy Goodman, host of the national independent news show “Democracy Now!” (“ ‘Hostile, combative, and even disrespectful’ -- President Bill Clinton,” reads a blurb on the jacket flap), but there’s no question she’s brave. “The Exception to the Rulers” opens in East Timor in 1991, when Goodman and New Yorker writer Allan Nairn found themselves in the middle of a confrontation between Indonesian troops and a group of mourners at Santa Cruz cemetery. Thinking they could shame the soldiers into decency, Goodman and Nairn moved to the front, microphone held high. It didn’t work. The troops opened fire, Nairn’s skull was fractured and the two barely escaped.

Goodman believes that “a democratic media” can bring about a better future; that “freedom Bush style” means “freedom to know what they want us to know”; that “the silenced majority” -- people outside governmental and corporate spheres -- “is finding its voice.” In this spirit, she and her brother David take a quick spin, chapter by chapter, around the world, finding links between U.S. politicians, corporate interests and foreign elites. There’s the “oilygarchy,” a web of relationships between the Bush family and the Saudis; the oil business in Nigeria (“A U.S.-backed dictatorship is an oil corporation’s best friend”); the CIA funds that helped train Osama Bin Laden and his followers in the 1980s. Closer to home, they write about how Bush “exploited 9/11”; about the unbalanced reporting of the war, particularly by embedded reporters (“Shouldn’t reporters be embedded in Iraqi communities and hospitals?”); about persecution of Middle Eastern students jailed in the U.S. after Sept. 11 for taking too few courses (arousing suspicions of their possible terrorist activities).

This is an uncomfortable book; not trusting one’s government is like not trusting one’s parents. But without Amy Goodman, the emissions of the media would be more particle than wave.

*

Enchantments

A Novel

Linda Ferri, translated from the Italian by John Casey

Knopf: 134 pp., $18.95

This tale of growing up in France and Italy testifies to the pleasures of the examined life. Linda Ferri reminds us that happy memories lie dormant (just like unhappy ones), a comfort in hard times, a source of strength as we grow old. Like her unnamed narrator, Ferri was born in Italy. The novel’s family -- two brothers, two sisters -- moves to France but returns each summer to a Tuscan villa surrounded by gypsies, real and imagined. “The French seem like the grandparents of the Italians,” the narrator remembers. “I wouldn’t give up spaghetti, not even if I were dead,” she blurts out at a family gathering. Her father loves horses and cars. Her mother, an American, tells the half-believing children that she is the granddaughter of Sitting Bull. Yes, it’s all too good to be true. Yes, it will collapse. But “Enchantments” shows us how simply a life is made, minute by minute, scene by scene.

*

Area Woman Blows Gasket

And Other Tales From the Domestic Frontier

Patricia Pearson

Bloomsbury: 224 pp., $22.95

“Facts fly out of the media damnably fast, with spectacular aimlessness, and pundits who try to pursue those facts develop something less like wisdom and more like ADD.” Patricia Pearson’s modus operandi is to track the most obscure and absurd of these facts to their lairs and crack them into their least divisible parts. The organic food industry, male behavior, Christmas commercialism and the feminine art of multi-tasking are some of the rich veins Pearson mines in these screamingly funny essays. “Buy Toothpaste, Call Dad, Plan Funeral for Self,” “Shakespeare’s Nanny” and “Is That a Cheerio Stuck to My Pants or Are You Just Happy to See Me?” are merely three of the deadliest. No aspect of modern American life escapes Pearson’s inquiring mind.