Lynn Snowden must have had fun. Let others become slaves to the workaday world; she became its master, taking on nine jobs—by choice—in the course of a year. Her adventures prove her adept at showing up, catlike, in wildly different situations and provide a breezy panorama of the American workplace.
Snowden worked as a roadie with the heavy metal band Skid Row, wrote advertising copy, taught high school math, served cocktails, worked as a publicist, cleaned house and carpooled kids, counseled rape victims, strip-teased and hand-molded chocolates. "I wanted to examine persistent myths about jobs," she writes, "the people in them and women in the workplace in general."
Snowden's strength, however, lies in her vivid, often comical, reporting, not in her insights—a casualty, perhaps, of spending only a month at each job. How surprising is it, for example, that touring with a band is dirty, exhausting work or that teachers can be "glorified baby-sitters?"
Occasionally Snowden meshes with the job, becoming less of an observer and letting the experience consume her. As a stripper at the Bourbon Burlesque in New Orleans, she effectively captures the lives of women who have become defined, even trapped, by their work. Although some of them loathe both men and sex, they have mastered the "salesmanship" of stripping, turning a $2 tip into $20 with a smile and a glance.
Snowden is best when she becomes totally immersed in the job. At a rape crisis center in Austin, Texas, she capably empathizes with victims and writes eloquently about the anguish of listening to the stories of their assaults. She admits that the demands of the job felt like a "giant wave" sweeping her out to sea. As a writer in this environment, she thrives. (Norton, $22)
by Donald Katz
Remember when athletic shoes were sneakers and the athletes who wore them became heroes because of their great feats on the field? Perhaps those days haven't disappeared entirely, but in Just Do It, Donald Katz suggests how they have begun to slip into the past. The culprit? The incredible marketing muscle and engineering prowess of an Oregon athletic shoe company called Nike.
A chronicle of an American success, Just Do It is essentially the story of how Phil Knight, Nike's reclusive founder, turned a tiny start-up operation into a $4 billion pop fashion behemoth. Katz, author of two previous nonfiction bestsellers, Home Fires and The Big Store, covers Nike's various victories and defeats—the comings and goings of Michael Jordan, Shaquille O'Neal, Charles Barkley and a dozen other athletes who pride themselves on having a Nike "attitude." He also tells the story of the company's research, marketing and manufacturing methods, adding tales of corporate derring-do with arch rivals Adidas and Reebok. But somewhere along the way Katz drops the ball, losing sight of the great Nike paradox: The more megabucks the company spends trying to re-create the halcyon days when money didn't matter, the more it contaminates the field of sports. (Random House, $23)
by Tom Clancy
The end of the Cold War, while an obvious boon to mankind in general, is nonetheless not the best news for an author of fending-off-the-Red-threat techno-thrillers.
In Debt of Honor, Clancy tries to bridge the gap with a frenzy of subplots and detours. The various crises he keeps in the air in these 766 pages include rape charges against a sitting Vice President; a vicious U.S.-Japan trade war followed by a U.S.-Japan shooting war; the irrelevant capture by two CIA operatives of a Mideast drug terrorist; preparations for a war between the U.S. and India (over Sri Lanka); a stock-market crash; a crusade against defective automobile gas tanks; and the destruction of the world's last two nuclear missiles.
More or less at the center of all this—though he disappears for pages at a time—is Clancy's upwardly mobile hero, Jack Ryan, who starts the novel as a national security adviser and ends up as Vice President.
While he has never pretended to be a great stylist, Clancy seems increasingly clumsy as a writer. He also burdens the reader with gratuitous lectures on such subjects as the Federal Reserve System, computers and real estate. You may get whiplash from the furious topic-hopping (rare is the page that doesn't span three continents), but you won't be bored. Aside to Paramount: Don't even think about making this book into a movie with less than $50 million and a cast of 5,000. (Putnam, $25.95)
by Kathy Cronkite
I have a disease. It's called depression," Cronkite writes in the introduction to this collection of interviews with fellow sufferers, among them Mike Wallace, Dick Clark, Joan Rivers and Kitty Dukakis.
Cronkite, daughter of Walter, the retired CBS anchorman, writes about subjects she knows well. Her previous book, On the Edge of the Spotlight (1981), explored the lives of children of celebrities. Here Cronkite artfully mixes statistical information, interviews with medical specialists and personal accounts by people who have been afflicted with the disease.
Recalling his bouts with near-suicidal depression, William Styron observes, "You don't emerge suddenly as some kind of remarkable new person, you know. That's a myth, that somehow it converts you into a new, luminous human being." Dick Clark describes dark times as a teen with acne. "I would get home and close the door and stay there until I had to come out the next day."
And Rod Steiger offers this: "Depression is like a fine mist that enters through the pores of your skin over a period of months and then maybe years. It's growing and it's not stoppable without help." Cronkite has embarked on a worthy mission, and for some her book may be the first step to recovery. (Doubleday, $22.50)
>Lynn Snowden
JILL OF ALL TRADES
"I REALLY WANTED TO BE A COP, BUT the New York City police department wouldn't hear of it; they're not going to issue a badge just because you really want them to," says freelance journalist Lynn Snowden, who had to scratch that profession off her wish list while mapping out Nine Lives. Too tall to be a jockey and too trim to make it on American Gladiators, Snowden wanted a résumé with a broad mix: high pay, low pay, blue-collar, white-collar, "highly reputable to downright sleazy." Her quest took her to nine cities, where she usually lodged in hotels and sometimes worked without pay just for the experience.
"If I had to pick one of these jobs to do for the rest of my life, teaching was the most satisfying, though I was ridiculously underpaid," says Snowden, who supplemented her salary with her book advance. Schlepping drinks to rowdy tourists in Las Vegas was by far the most demeaning job, stripping the most lucrative ($300 on a good night), and molding candy dinosaurs in a New England chocolate factory the hardest to come by (manufacturers are skittish about employees purloining secrets).
What job does she miss most? Touring as a heavy-metal-band roadie. "Once the spirit to keep myself clean was broken," she says, "I had a fabulous time sleeping in my clothes and forgetting about my moisturizer." Now out plugging her book, Snowden, who is separated and lives in Manhattan, has decided that "writing is the dream job. You get to sit down, you don't need an alarm clock or special clothes. All you have to do is think. Every time I read about a writer complaining of writer's block, I want to say, Try factor work.' "
>DAVE BARRY IS NOT MAKING THIS UP
WRITING AGAINST A WEEKLY DEADLINE inevitably means that there are some duds in the Barry corpus, but at his best—on circumcision, for instance, or recycling cowboy underwear—he is almost Swiftian, though narrator Arte Johnson tends to signal the jokes too emphatically. (Dove, $16.95)
EMMA This memorable dramatizaton of Jane Austen's classic of courtship and caste in 19th-century England demonstrates once more why BBC radio remains one of that country's national treasures. (Bantam, $22)
HAVING OUR SAY: THE DELANEY SISTERS' FIRST 100 YEARS One-hundred-and-four-year-old Sadie Delaney and her sister Bessie, a mere 102, recount their experiences as middle-class blacks from the days of Jim Crow to the present in a recent best-seller. Whoopi Goldberg reads with an infectious relish for the sisters' guts and grace. (Audio Renaissance, $16.95)
SECOND NATURE A young man raised by wolves in northern Michigan is the natural suspect when a murder is discovered in the Long Island, N.Y., community where he is sheltered. Kate Nelligan keeps perfect control of the characters and pacing to maintain writer Alice Hoffman's nifty way with suspense. (Simon and Schuster, $17)
- Contributors:
- Thomas Curwen,
- Craig Bromberg,
- Ralph Novak,
- Lisa Kay Greissinger,
- Kristin McMurran,
- Ben Harte.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
