Books about the famous and the fascinating

The very reason nonfiction is so fascinating is what makes it really hard to write a short introduction here. Anything and everything can make a great topic for a nonfiction book, whether the book is written as a memoir, a biography, a scholarly work or as pure entertainment.

This fall, we've got books about the famous — famous real people (Jimi Hendrix, Spike Lee, Terry Fox, Joan Didion) and about the fictional famous (Nancy Drew). We've got books about real people who aren't really famous (Zainab Salbi, who grew up in the shadow of Saddam Hussein) and about real places (Cuba's Tropicana Nightclub, New Orleans before the floods came).

And two authors who made their marks with nonfiction books have returned with new works, taking their original topic and twisting it, changing it. Barbara Ehrenreich goes undercover not as a minimum-wage worker, but as an unemployed white-collar worker. And Mary Roach, who explored what happens to our body after we die in the hilarious "Stiff," now checks out the stage of our souls in "Spook." The dead, the living, the famous, the regular Joes, they're all here.    —Gael Fashingbauer Cooper

Undercover and unemployed
Like Morgan Spurlock of "Super Size Me" and TV's "30 Days," Barbara Ehrenreich doesn't just report on a subject from afar. She throws herself into it, as with her best-selling "Nickel and Dimed," in which she went undercover as a waitress, Wal-Mart worker, cleaning lady and nursing-home aide to discover how tough it is to survive in low-wage work. Now she does it again in "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream" (Metropolitan Books, $23).

This time, Ehrenreich tackles the role of a white-collar worker who finds herself unemployed at mid-life. She enrolls in career coaching programs that mix New Age gobbledygook with "Who Moved My Cheese?"-like business buzzwords. She takes personality tests that are explained to her via Elvis and "Wizard of Oz" dolls. She gets her colors done, her resume reworked. Yet in the end, after seven months of hunting, the jobs she's offered are one selling Mary Kay Cosmetics, and a commission-only sales job from AFLAC. Neither job offers a salary, benefits, or even a set workplace.

This book isn't as easy to relate to as "Nickel and Dimed." We've all been unemployed, but not everyone has gone after a new job with the help of these services, which makes Ehrenreich's struggles feel a bit removed. Some may argue with her methodology — since she's playing a role, she's unable to throw herself wholeheartedly into the job search, using past personal contacts and successes. But she still manages to expose the tough path of the midlife job-hunter, and the ridiculous ways in which the desperate can be exploited and shaken down for their dwindling cash reserves. And as in "Nickel and Dimed," Ehrenreich is a charming tour guide, witty and sharp, often laugh-out-loud funny, and never preachy or dull.     —G.F.C.

Shadow of Saddam
Zainab Salbi grew up knowing Saddam Hussein, came to Chicago for an arranged marriage, ultimately married for love, founded a nonprofit agency for victims of rape, nursed her ailing mother, and has now written a book. In “Between Two Worlds: Escape From Tyranny: Growing Up In The Shadow Of Saddam” (Gotham, $26), she offers a thoroughly absorbing, personal tale.

Salbi’s portraits of her parents are especially wrenching, and are remarkably even-handed given the painful choices she saw them make. This is primarily a family story, and the intrusion of Saddam Hussein into Salbi’s home life never stops seeming sadly disruptive, just as it evidently was for her.

An autobiography of a life as challenging as Salbi’s is delicate, as it can easily lapse into pathos. Salbi never makes that mistake, as her contemplative, frank style — she is not afraid to use straightforward, surprisingly effective phrasing like, “I really, really, really wanted to go home” at just the right moment — keeps the story from getting dry or self-conscious.

Even if it did not contain desperately needed wisdom about sorely misunderstood world events — which it does — Salbi’s story would make for a great book. As it is, it also makes for an important book.    —Linda Holmes

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