Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Mulling over interesting magazine offerings

Friday, July 28, 2000 | 9:10 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

Shelf Life: Is it the Tiger Woods of obscure book-punditry columns (dominating swing, textbook short game), or the Lance Armstrong of obscure book-punditry columns (implacable grit, looks good in Lycra)?

Actually, Shelf Life is more like Doc Gooden: over the hill but still in the game, throwing junk but at least getting it over the plate. Which, to turn a short explanation into a long metaphor, is my way of saying I'm tossing you a screwball this week. No book review -- who has time to read a whole book? Not me! Instead we'll survey some current magazine articles you miss at your intellectual peril.

Top of the list: William Langewiesche's "The Shipbreakers," the cover story in the August Atlantic Monthly. It doesn't sound promising in summary -- the subject is Alang, a wretched open sewer of a city in coastal India, where the chief industry is dismantling the decrepit ships of the world. It's a filthy, toxic, often lethal, financially iffy business, handled by a workforce of the disposable poor. Sounds like a bad Mother Jones screed in the offing.

Yet Langewiesche, through patient reporting, sharp observation and loads of empathy, turns it into a marvel of journalism (particularly by the wizened standards of contemporary magazine reporting). It has plenty of Big Picture -- shipbreaking is a resonant example of the First World exporting its dirty work to the huddled masses of the Third -- yet is studded with enough capsule portraits of participants and kibbitzers -- from Alang's harbor master, suspicious of foreign reporters, to Greenpeace do-gooders unwilling to tally the human cost of their altruistic campaigns, to Washington sound-biters to conflicted Indian businessmen -- to give the piece a strong sense of humanity. Langewiesche hears them out, weighs their cases, passes his judgments cleanly.

The writing is evocative but admirably restrained. Langewiesche doesn't pump up the pathos any more than is justified by what he observes (which, frankly, is heartbreaking enough; his descriptions of India's pollution are, literally, breathtaking), although there are moments of hard-earned lyricism: "Toward the stern," he writes of his stroll through a ship being cut apart, "where sunlight streamed through rough-cut ventilation holes and struck the oil-blackened walls, the towering engine room had the Gothic beauty of a cathedral."

Las Vegas figures prominently in Walter Kirn's dispatch from inside the crumbling Reform Party, published in the August GQ. It's a punchy account of several Reform Party confabs (including one here in March) at which the party's deterioration is made progressively more clear; it's sad and funny at the same time.

Kirn begins his odyssey in more or less complete solidarity with the free-thinkers, disillusioned populists and major-party dropouts who bulked up the Reform Party after Ross Perot got the ball rolling and went nuts. He dislikes the Republicrats (or do you prefer Demopublicans?) as much as any talk-radio crank, and thinks the Reformers might pry open the narrow options presented by the system. "The two major-party front-runners were bratty purebreds ripe for a grassroots comeuppance. I couldn't wait."

Of course, you've read enough magazine stories to realize, the moment he declares his sympathies, that by article's end he'll be equally disillusioned by the Reform Party and will reach some grudging accord with the establishment. That's the standard arc of these things.

He does exactly that. But the article is worth reading anyway, for the epigrammatic verve of Kirn's writing and his smart reporter's eye. He watches as his pack of crazy dreamers is overrun by the slick manipulations of Pat Buchanan and the media circus of Donald Trump, then made irrelevant by the nutty obsessions and delusions of its more extreme members. In the process the party forfeits the promise of meaningful voter revolt first harnessed by Jesse Ventura. At least Kirn can be hilarious, as he is about the Donald: "Trump's way of dealing with the character issue is to stipulate that he doesn't have one."

Also in GQ is a gripping story by Peter Richmond about ex-ballplayer John Montefusco who, before he was put out to pasture by a hip condition, was the hotshot pitcher "The Count of Montefusco."

After baseball his life spiraled into financial desperation and charges of rape and assault filed by his wife, Dory. Richmond makes a strong case that the Count was manipulated by his cunning wife (although he gives her her say), whom he loved absolutely but who stood to inherit her father's big bucks if she divorced Montefusco. It's a gem of a story.

New Yorker writer Tad Friend touches down in Las Vegas in the July 31 issue of the highbrow New York weekly. His story, "The Harriet-the-Spy Club," concerns a one-time Las Vegas plastic surgeon, Bob Bierenbaum, who is suspected of the long-ago murder of his first wife. But this isn't a whodunit. The real subject is gossip, and how Bierenbaum's revelation of the case to one girlfriend (who promised not to tell anyone, and, naturally, did) generated concentric rings of tarted-up rumormongering. Old gal pals lunched together, subjecting every facet of his personality to new interpretations in light of what they were hearing.

"Out of stray factoids and hesitant impressions emerges a hard mass of what everyone knows to be true," Friend writes, parsing the dynamics of gossip. "Imagination supplies the missing pieces, and repetition turns these pieces into facts; gossip achieves its shape and amplitude only in the continual retelling. The best stories about us are told by perfect strangers."

It may not have the Gothic beauty of a cathedral, but it's fun and enlightening and didn't take long to read, which is important when you need time to practice your screwball.