Nonfiction

There is a history to this sort of outsider-insider exceptionalism. In his primordial incarnation, as memorably anatomized in Anatole Broyard's 1948 essay for Partisan Review, "A Portrait of the Hipster," this dean of the streets was assumed to be of African-American descent. Broyard -- a Creole who in part made his name by trading on his intimate familiarity with black culture, but passed himself off as white -- advanced the claim that the hipster sauntered out of the muck of institutionalized racism. The savvier-than-thou posturing, which became his calling card, was predicated on inverting the power structure that conspired to keep blacks on the periphery of tony society. Philosophic legerdemain assisted him in this feat; he concealed his ignorance by contriving to make others feel theirs. In this way, the hipster charmed or chafed the squares around him with his persona which radiated what Broyard refers to as "a priorism": "[This quality] arose out of a desperate, unquenchable need to know the score; it was a great projection, a primary self-preserving postulate. It meant 'it is given to us to understand.' Carrying his language and his new philosophy like concealed weapons, the hipster set out to conquer the world. He took his stand on the corner and began to direct human traffic."

This patented cool -- a supposed flower of his racial heritage -- would not remain solely at his disposal for long. White kids wanted to aggrandize themselves, too. As Norman Mailer wrote in his controversial 1957 essay for Dissent, "The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster," "there was a new breed of adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts. The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro." The assurance with which Mailer defines the lineaments of black identity, and suggests how easily it can be appropriated, should give one pause.

The aftermath of the civil rights and Vietnam era witnessed the rise of punk, which in turn spurred the emergence of '80s indie culture. These countercultures flowed out of a rejection of what many young people saw as an increasingly corporatized world. On the heels of these movements (which eventually became co-opted by the mainstream, as the documentary "1991: The Year Punk Broke" attests), neighborhoods like Williamsburg in Brooklyn and Wicker Park in Chicago rose to prominence as places that were connected with bohemia and artists. But by the late '90s these locales seemed less identified with a community and more with attitude, prime real estate, or even the brands associated with them. Out of the nexus of these events the hipster regained his strut.

In the spring of 2009, the editorial board of n+1 convened a group of intellectuals to deliver papers and participate in a dialogue with an audience at the New School in Manhattan. "What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation" presents a record of these proceedings as well as responses and reflections occasioned by them. "For once," Grief writes in his introduction, "here is analysis of a cultural phenomenon not learned from TV, or pre-digested." The book's kaleidoscopic mapping of the (typically white) hipster, in his or her many guises (e.g., "the poison conduit" between the "rebel subculture" and "the dominant class" or, in the case of the female hipster, one beholden to the photographic lens), feels so of-the-moment that it may make you cringe at your online profile.

Returning to the subject of hypocrisy, one of the virtues of the book is how the contributors inscribe themselves in the topic of investigation. Thus, with no small display of wit, Christian Lorentzen in his essay, "I Was Wrong," confesses to having profited from "a massive fraud [that] held that there were people called hipsters who followed a creed called hipsterism and existed in a realm known as hipsterdom. The truth was that there was no culture worth speaking of, and the people called hipsters just happened to be young and, more often than not, funny-looking." Or Rob Horning, who writes:

Hipsters reduce the particularity of anything you might be curious about or invested in into the same dreary common denominator of how 'cool' it is perceived to be. Thus hipsterism forces on us a sense of the burden of identity, of constantly having to curate it if only to avoid seeming like a hipster.We keep consuming more, and more cravenly, yet this always seems to us to be the hipster's fault, not our own.

As with almost any book composed by various contributors, there is a range of quality in the offerings -- sometimes within the pieces themselves. Given the recurring motif, which runs throughout a number of the articles, of the hipster as the beneficiary of gentrification, Jennifer Baumgardner's "Williamsburg: Year Zero" seems a tad redundant in its evocation of the author's ambivalence as a participant in, and observer of, gentrification. Yet it remains interesting inasmuch as it broaches the topic of whether all the fuss over stylish men in skinny jeans conceals a latent homophobia.

One of the salient questions that linger in the mind after one emerges from all of this self-reflection is whether, in the panoptic age of the Internet, a counterculture can thrive without corporate interference. I'll leave it to you to ponder this conundrum that apparently entraps us all.

In her new book, "Swallow," Mary Cappello uncovers the stories behind those objects, and the peculiar life story of Chevalier himself. Cappello is a professor at the University of Rhode Island and the author of the bestselling book "Awkward," a meditation on uncomfortableness. Here, she packs her story with surprising imagery and extravagant lyricism, taking a highly literary approach to the subject -- meandering from Chevalier's biography to the odd story of early 1920s women who compulsively ingested pieces of hardware.

Salon spoke to Cappello over the phone from her home in Rhode Island about the complexity of our digestive tracts, sword swallowers' tricks and the fascinating story of a man who couldn't stop consuming dangerous things.

How did you become interested in people who swallow unusual things?


I happened to be making a visit to the Mütter Museum, ostensibly because my partner was writing about peristalsis, and we went to the see this bowel that's there, and rounding a corner we happened upon the collection of foreign bodies. It has this magical quality. You open the drawers -- you don't know what you're going to find there -- and you discover all these objects that people have swallowed or inhaled. Like most people, I was just sort of shocked and amazed by the strangeness of this collection -- the fact that somebody had extracted thousands of these things, and then the fact that the doctor, Chevalier Jackson, had framed each one of them, separately, documenting them very carefully, separating them into types. These objects seem to have a sort of aura; they're not like any other objects.

As you touch on in the book, there's a kind of long-standing cultural fascination specifically with the act of swallowing. In a mythological sense, the story of humanity, through Adam and Eve, started with swallowing. 



Absolutely. And not just with swallowing, but the swallowing of a forbidden object. Sometimes when people learn about the book, they immediately want to present me with stories of people entering objects into other orifices, anuses and genitals, that sort of thing. There's a lot to be said about the relationship between self-penetration of other parts of the body and people who voluntarily or purposely swallow things, but I'm much more interested in the mouth than any other bodily orifice, because the mouth seems to me to be the part of the body in which the most is going on. Language issues from our mouths. We both breathe and eat through it, and it's the seat of knowledge and desire and love. And once you start to investigate the physiology of swallowing, it's, medically speaking, one of the most complex of our physiological processes.

In your research, you encountered lots of stories of people swallowing strange things. Which one stood out the most?

One story that I recount in the book tells of a child who is hiding a coin in her mouth because it's the family's last dime and her father is alcoholic and he's going to spend the dime on liquor when the family needs to eat. The father intends to choke the child to get the dime and then the dime obstructs the passageway and Jackson comes to rescue. It's an amazing story.

The one story from the book that really stuck with me was the story of the "Human Ostrich."

Yes, I read about him in an article that appeared in the Brooklyn Medical Journal for 1922. He would swallow things that members of the audience would pass up to the stage. In the course of an evening, this might amount to 80 pins, a lot of hair pins, and long wire nails, most of which, according to the doctor who wrote about him, he would excrete without harm to himself. One night, however, he accidentally swallowed a 4-foot-long window chain that he had been inserting into his throat and pulling back out (much in the way a sword swallower might with a sword). He arrived at Dr. Hopkins' offices in a great deal of pain, and begged to be operated on. Upon opening his stomach, Hopkins discovers "129 pins, 6 hair-pins, two horseshoe nails, 12 half-inch wire nails, 2 door-keys, 3 chains, and a large ring."

From here on in, the unnamed Human Ostrich decides to give up his career and try to make a living selling pictures of the cut the surgeon's knife inflicted on his stomach, but a few months later he returns to the hospital with more stuff inside him and claims he was forced to swallow things by a group of men who recognize him as the "Human Ostrich" in a bar. Perhaps his compulsion was fed by his audience's need in a symbiotic sort of way. As I put it in the book, "he was forced to swallow hard, sharp bits of the object world by a hungry crowd."

The Mütter Museum isn't the only place with collections of curious swallowed objects. Why are people so interested in exhibiting them?

I think it's partly the nature of that which is incongruous: Something appears where it's not supposed to appear. And there's this sense of, "How did this possibly happen? It seems impossible. How do you possibly swallow a tack? How do you swallow a padlock?" Even if they're accidental, there's something sort of tantalizingly weird about that. I don't know if this is why everyone is drawn to it, but one of the particularly magical charges I find in the collection is that the objects are very commonplace. Something as common as a button is a threat to someone's life.

But human beings have been entertained by people who swallow strange things, who eat beyond capacity, who swallow swords -- and test the human gullet -- for centuries. I've gotten to know a sword swallower as a result of this work, and I really admire and respect what he does. I'm constantly obsessed with the lines between medicine and freak show, or medicine and the circus, and how we come to value one kind of act in the name of science and devalue another. I'm always interested in people's willingness to suspend or subvert or reverse or undo aspects of the body that are considered automatic.

I can't stand watching a sword swallower. It makes me panic and worry that they're going to hurt themselves. There's also something very disconcerting to me about people doing biologically inappropriate things to their insides. Why has this form of entertainment endured?

The very act of sword swallowing calls into question the extent to which the presumably automatic is automatic. What [sword swallower] Dan Meyer's work demonstrates is that you can habituate the body to do certain things. You're led to question the way in which the body does what it does -- that it's not natural so much as it is a response to a series of habituations. We train the body to do the things that it does. I say I get choked up, no pun intended, when I watch Dan Meyer perform because there is something sort of poignant about a human being going to such lengths to elicit a response from other human beings.

How does a sword swallower train his or her body to do that?

It's not a pretty thing to imagine. He has to introduce different kinds of objects into his throat in the course of a day, days morphing into weeks, morphing into months, morphing into years. It takes years of practice, of literally practicing putting things in. And he also has to overcome all these reflexes, from the gag reflex to the wretch reflex.

What was so fascinating about Chevalier Jackson, the doctor responsible for the Mütter Museum's collection?

He was a polymath -- by which I mean he was a physician but he was also a visual artist. He was a woodworker and he designed his own instruments. He was a tremendously skillful writer as well. One of the things that interests me about him is that while he ended up saving thousands of lives, he wasn't drawn to medicine by a desire to save lives. He was drawn to medicine because of his imaginative drift. He wanted to see what the inside of a human body looked like. He was a humanitarian who introduced the Federal Caustic Act to Congress and one of the most ingeniously helpful doctors in the history of medicine. He saved thousands of people's lives by perfecting a technique that most people were too trepidatious or didn't have the patience to develop; he used broncoscopes without anesthesia  to enter the delicate passageways of the upper torso and treat each foreign body as a unique mechanical problem. His technique, I think, is unsurpassed to this day -- there simply are no removers of foreign bodies who have the kind of skill, this awesomely deft skill that Chevalier Jackson had.

But gay suicide is hardly a new problem -- and, by most accounts, homophobia is on the decline in American culture. So why are we suddenly so concerned? As Stuart Biegel, a professor at the UCLA School of Law, explains in his new book, "The Right to be Out," anti-gay prejudice remains a pervasive problem in American schools. Despite tremendous legal strides  over the past two decades, gay students are still punished more severely than their straight counterparts, their pleas for help are often ignored, and, most surprisingly, many LGBT teachers still feel enormous pressure to remain in the closet for fear of reprisal from parents.

Salon spoke to Biegel over the phone about the current state of gay bullying laws, what parents can do if their kids are attacked and the flaws of the "It Gets Better" campaign.

In the last few months there's been a tremendous amount of media attention paid to gay bullying. How important do you think it's been?

I think it's very significant. For a long time, these issues haven't been discussed openly. When people would mention words like gay and lesbian in airports and restaurants they would lower their voices. We're only recently seen what may be a turning of the tide. Now there's less lowering of voices and more comfort in addressing these issues openly in schools and at the dinner table.

But gay suicide isn't anything new --- so why have these recent deaths attracted so much more attention than the ones that have come before?

Suicide has been an issue in LGBT communities for a long time, and LGBT youth have been found to have a suicide rate three to four times higher than their straight counterparts. But I think what's happening now, with this particular rash of suicides is that you have families who have been open about what happened. This goes back a few years, to the mother of Carl Walker-Hoover. There used to be so much shame associated with these suicides. Now my sense is the families are more comfortable opening up about them and the media is more comfortable reporting about them in great detail.

But surely, the culture as a whole has also become far less homophobic than before.

It is on the wane, and you see a lot of data supporting that. But there has been something of a backlash in some places, in light of the sea change in legal recognition of same-sex relationships over the past decade. When Howard Dean signed the first civil union legislation in Vermont in 2000, people couldn't believe it. Ten years later we have civil unions in eight or nine states and legal marriage in nine or 10 countries and five states, including Canada, D.C., Mexico City. This amount of change is unsettling for a lot of people, and the schools are a place where a lot of these values issues are heavily contested. In a number of schools, at this point, we see a situation that might actually be worse than 10 years ago.

How widespread is anti-gay bullying in schools at this point?

It can vary tremendously, not only from district to district, but from school to school with any district. I was the federal court monitor for the San Francisco schools for almost a decade -- from 1997 to 2005 -- and we found in San Francisco, a city that's very gay-friendly, schools that had some really difficult situations with regards to homophobia and peer mistreatment.

What determines whether a school is gay friendly or non-gay friendly?

A lot of it has to do with the school culture as it's evolved over time and a lot of it has to do with whether a school is known to be a sports school. While sports can be incredibly beneficial, in many cases school athletic departments have the largest percentage of homophobia of any department in the school, if you can characterize it that. The leadership of the school as a whole can play a key role: whether the school focuses at all on school climate, on issues of respect and not tolerating the word gay as a pejorative term. But it's not static, and there's a tremendous amount that individual educators can do here.

I’m 26, and my coming out narrative wasn't terribly traumatic -- I don't think I've ever really felt bullied for being gay. I think that's the case for a growing number of young gay people -- and I think it can be fairly easy for us to forget that not everybody had it so easy.

From time to time, I get frustrated reading articles in places like the New York Times that seem to suggest it's over, that kids are doing fine now. You don’t see that after this recent spate of suicides, but for several years before that you had some of the most noteworthy commentators in the country concluding that gay is no big thing anymore, we need to move on. I look at my law students, and my law school is a very gay-friendly place, and it has the Williams Institute, which is the national think tank on sexual orientation and gender identity issues, and you have a lot of openly gay and lesbian students who had coming out experiences such as the one you described for yourself.

But there are others who aren’t even out to their parents, and they’re in their mid-twenties -- they’re openly gay or lesbian on campus and yet for many reasons they’re not out to their family. And this is 2010. There’s tremendous variation from place to place, from community to community, from ethnicity to ethnicity. It’s a stereotype to say it's tougher on the rural communities and in the South and parts of the Midwest — but it is often tougher in these parts than it is on either coast or in urban areas.

Why are school environments so loaded with significance for LGBT kids?

You have to go to school every day and you're often surrounded by people you may not choose to be around. We are an increasingly pluralistic society, especially in the major urban areas of the country, so that diversity is reflected on many levels and in different sets of values that students bring to the table.

How much legal recourse do parents actually have if their kids are bullied in school, and teachers won't do anything about it?

More legal recourse than ever. Basic negligence laws regarding threats and harassment exist everywhere. The Nabozny case in Wisconsin was the first time that an LGBT student won a case against the school district for discrimination. The mistreatment was horrific -- and once that breakthrough happened and the federal courts recognized that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment does apply to the mistreatment of gays and lesbians, LGBT kids started winning these cases all the time, in all parts of the country. Some states have prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and a growing number have also started to prohibit discrimination explicitly on the basis of gender identity and, finally, states such as California have explicit education code provisions addressing the areas of LGBT safety. The law is on the side of the mistreated youth everywhere in the country.

But, as you point out in the book, gay, lesbian and transgendered teachers are actually more legally vulnerable than the students.

There's been so much focus on LGBT youth and rightly so, but not as much focus on educators. In many parts of the country, sizable numbers of parents and particularly size able numbers of folks in conservative religious communities are not comfortable with the idea of a gay or lesbian or transgendered person teaching their kids. Even though in the public sector educators do have the right to be out, there is great pressure on them to remain closeted and keep their identities to themselves. Instead of seeing LGBT educators as a valuable resource who can help LGBT youth, too many school districts are trying to keep them under wraps, so to speak.

That seems ludicrously anachronistic.

No question. As an openly gay man myself who was a public school teacher, and very closeted at the time, I know those pressures. And I agree that they're increasingly anachronistic, but it's a tricky transition period we're in right now.

In recent months, there's been a lot of coverage of Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" campaign. Talking to friends, I think it's fair to say there's a lot of disagreement about whether or not it's the right message to kids. It's obviously good to know that when you're grown up you won't be faced with the same amount of prejudice you are now, but it also seems to suggest that you should just passively wait for things to improve, and a lot of the videos just seem self-congratulatory.

I was just meeting with one of the co-chairs of our law school's LGBT student association the other day, and he mentioned exactly the same thing. I understand the debate. I think it's good that people are taking seriously the notion that we need to do more in this area, but I also think it's important o recognize that if we're passive and let time pass by, things don't necessarily always get better.

At the very least, I think "It Gets Better" has caused a conversation that I don’t think would have occurred otherwise -- and that's good.

I agree. And the Prop. 8 trial and the high profile nature of that campaign and its aftermath also has had a very positive impact. So many conversations are happening at the proverbial dinner table that were not happening before Prop. 8 -- young people talking with the older members of their family about these issues for the first time, and straight young people as well. I’m convinced, and it’s a key part of my book, that increasing openness is only going to help make things better.

Obama recorded his own "It Gets Better" video -- but his record so far on LGBT issues hasn't been what a lot of people have hoped it would be. What are your feelings on that?

Obama is in a very difficult situation. I don't have any intimate or expert knowledge on Obama's presidency, but it does seem to me that if you look at the history of the United States, Obama is the most gay friendly president we've ever had. Having said that, there's no question that he's been able to fulfill only a small number of the promises he made to LGBT people during his campaign. But there is the potential for a lot more to be accomplished, especially if he gets another term, and Sotomayor and Kagan are going to be very supportive of LGBT related cases that have come up on the Supreme Court. I guess I'm the perennial optimist.

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them by Elif Batuman
Think of this charming collection of essays and reportage as an idiosyncratic safari into both academia and Slavomania. Well, except for the hilarious account of Batuman's season spent studying the somewhat mythical Turkic language of "Old Uzbek" in Samarkand, a city whose bookstores carried no publications in what's supposed to be its native classical tongue. It seems that Batuman can't go anywhere without being strong-armed into judging a "best legs" contest at a Hungarian boy's camp, instructed on the finer points of Muscovite ice sculpture or invited to contemplate the metaphysical significance of Aeroflot's lost luggage department. Even in graduate school, she watched as her circle enacted the storyline of a Dostoevski novel titled "The Demons" and befriended the kind of student who ended up joining a monastery. In other words, she's a magnet for eccentrics, and they have never found a more gifted or devoted bard.
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The Big Short by Michael Lewis/I.O.U. by John Lanchester
This one's a tie because, while Lewis' impressively reported account of the careers of several players in the subprime mortgage bond meltdown turns the arcana of the financial crisis into a crackerjack story, there's still a lot of arcana. Anyone who's been dithering around in the humanities for the past couple of decades and has only the fuzziest grasp of high-altitude capitalism will get a lot more out of "The Big Short" if they first read "I.O.U." Lanchester began poking his nose into the finance industry while researching a novel, which is what he ordinary writes (and very well, too). But his astonishment at the high-wire gambits of his sources soon led to gigs writing on the subject for British literary journals. As a result, his primer on the workings of late capitalist finance is lucid, funny and written with exceptional style. The more economically literate might want to jump straight to "The Big Short," which chronicles the adventures of the handful of financiers who spotted the mortgage bubble for the Ponzi scheme it was.
READ SALON'S REVIEW OF "THE BIG SHORT" BY MICHAEL LEWIS
READ SALON'S REVIEW OF "I.O.U" BY JOHN LANCHESTER

Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran -- a Journey Behind the Headlines by Scott Peterson
Peterson's history of Iran since the revolution of 1979 will leave you much better informed about the nation that has become the United States' primary antagonist in one of the world's most volatile regions -- but that's not the main reason to read it. It is above all a captivating epic. Peterson, a reporter who has visited Iran more than 30 times and done extensive interviews with Iranians from all walks of life, weaves the many strands of his subject's individual stories into a narrative of Tolstoyan scope. A fanatical hard-liner, a womanizing businessman, a disillusioned reformer, a party-loving female student and an old Iran hand who dispenses hard-earned insights over endless cups of mint tea are among the many people whose personal experiences during the past three decades contribute to this saga. You will indeed finish "Let the Swords Encircle Me" with a far better understanding of Iran's charismatic but erratic president, its restive younger generation, its tradition of ecstatic martyrdom and its love-hate relationship with America, but you'll be too caught up in the story to notice that until after you're done.
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
In 1951, a sample of cancer cells was taken from an African-American woman in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital. Henrietta Lacks died not long afterward, but her cells live on, proving to be so exceptionally easy to culture that if you were to gather together all the tissue grown from them, the result would weigh 50 million metric tons. Lacks' famous cell line (christened HeLa) is now used in virtually every medical lab in the world, a remarkable scientific success story. Yet, as Skloot thoroughly and sensitively documents, Lacks' own descendants muddle through without health insurance or the education required to understand what their forebear contributed to the world. In fact, the Lackses have had a long, fraught and confused relationship with Johns Hopkins Hospital itself, characterized by mistrust on one side and condescending utilitarianism on the other. Skloot's skillful account of Henrietta's dual legacy is not, however, an indictment of particular researchers or labs. Instead, it masterfully reflects the tricky intersection of science and society and an American medical establishment responsible for both astonishing triumphs and lamentable failures.
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The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
Two decades in the making, Wilkerson's monumental reinterpretation of the Great Migration -- the departure of nearly 40 percent of the South's African-American population for the North between 1915 and 1970 -- demonstrates how history can be transformed by the way we choose to frame its stories. Focusing on three individuals, each of whom moved north during a distinct phase of the migration, Wilkerson describes both the intolerably oppressive conditions they endured below the Mason-Dixon Line and the dreams they pursued in the storied cities above it. These Americans were, like the waves of white European immigrants who arrived in the U.S. during earlier periods, refugees seeking freedom and economic opportunity, and their courage and initiative changed the face of the nation.

I'm not going to pretend that I've read everything or even most of what has been written about McCartney; from what I have read, Sounes' book is easily the best. For one thing, he can write. He has published serviceable biographies of Bob Dylan ("Down the Highway") and Charles Bukowski ("Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life") as well as "The Wicked Game: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and the Story of Modern Golf." For another, Sounes has a proper appreciation of how much sleaze is needed in a book about any pop idol; I would bet that the number of pages given to McCartney's flings with mistresses and groupies trumps those in all other bios combined. (And believe me, when you're fighting your way through countless thousands of words on interpretations of song lyrics and record sales, the sex is a much-needed break.) Finally, "Fab" is, unlike some other McCartney books, entirely unauthorized, yet another thing working in its favor.

Unfortunately, "Fab" has some major things working against it, most obviously whether even the most devoted fan wants to read another book -- even the best book -- about McCartney. Another problem is how one can be a genuine biographer and, at the same time, an honest critic and pretend that virtually all of McCartney's music after splitting with the Beatles isn't sheer dreck. Sounes deals with that problem admirably: He doesn't pretend to like most of McCartney's post-Beatles music. But since the Beatles years end on Page 267, there's an awful lot of bad music to be covered, and he covers it in excruciating detail.

To back up for a moment, Sounes is quite good on Paul's childhood years, his Liverpool working-class background, and his early associations with the other future Beatles. I found some charming details I had never seen before, such as this from George Harrison: "I discovered that he had a trumpet and he found out I had a guitar, and we got together. I was about thirteen. [Paul] was probably late thirteen or fourteen. He was always nine months older than me. Even now, after all these years, he is still nine months older!"

Except for the death of his mother when he was 14, McCartney's youth was distressingly smooth; a few John Lennon-like complications might have made for livelier reading. (His mother inspired many of his songs, most notably "Let It Be.")

The rise to superstardom is presented here, as it has been everywhere else, as meteoric and dizzying. Sounes doesn't have much to add to the story except to tell with a bit more pizazz of  "the pure, innocent joy of making music and seeing it successful." One morning in the spring of 1963, Paul awoke at home in Liverpool to "hear the milkman coming up the garden path whistling a familiar tune, 'From Me to You.' It was the moment that Paul felt he had made it."

It's all pleasant reading, but you probably know where it's all going. If you do, you might wonder why you're going there again, and if you don't you might wonder what all the fuss is really about. Sounes' biggest weakness in telling the story is his inability to give us a fresh focus on the other Beatles: John seems beyond his ken, George is a bit of a dim bulb, and Ringo, the bane of all Beatles biographers, is simply a cipher. Most of the women in Paul's life don't come off well either, Linda Eastman in particular, who "notched up approximately twenty lovers" over a two-year span, "most of whom were famous, including singers Tim Buckley and Jim Morrison." (One must at least give her credit for a musical range at least the equal of Paul's.)

Inevitably, Yoko makes her entrance, the boys split, and Paul's long, dreary stint with Wings and then as a solo artist begins. If this music be your food of love, this is your meat; if not, put on a pot of coffee. Sounes goes to tortuous length to try to make this music interesting. On "Band on the Run," "Forced to remember his songs after muggers stole his demo tapes, Paul laid down a series of minor classics." (I wish the muggers had returned to the scene of the crime.)

The most interesting part of the post-Beatles years occurs just before and after John Lennon's death. On their last meeting: "The next night Paul dropped by the Dakota again. This time he met a less positive reception. As is often the way with men who have known each other as boys, then drifted apart, picking up an old friendship can be difficult." In the last years before Lennon died, the two had little to talk about. Sounes feels that Lennon may have been "a tad jealous of Wings’ success" -- not to say the music, just the success.

Nonetheless, McCartney wept on the morning of Dec. 9, 1980, when a call from his manager informed him that Lennon had been murdered and again when Yoko called to tell him. That, it turns out, is the best side of Paul McCartney, and there's nearly 300 pages to go. There's plenty of tedious detail about what a wretched boss Paul could be as well as a shrewd businessman, but the music itself no longer holds you, so the narrative inevitably begins to wind down.

Ultimately, the movie producer Lord David Puttnam probably makes the most accurate assessment in comparing McCartney with the director Ridley Scott: "both men of immense, immense, immense talent who on their deathbed are likely to look back on their career with some satisfaction, but with some dissatisfaction, in that I'm not sure that either of them -- Ridley and Paul, both very wealthy and everything -- I'm not sure either of them has absolutely delivered what was in them." According to Sounes, Puttnam believes that "in the years since the Beatles, Paul has not been able to summon the crucial extra effort -- he quantifies this an additional 15 per cent -- required to transform good work into something exceptional."

It's hard to believe that Putnam's judgment isn't Sounes' as well, which leads the reader down a long and winding road and leaves us wondering whether a book that is done very well was really worth doing at all.

According to Jacques Vallee, the French-born astronomer and co-author (with Chris Aubeck) of the hypnotic new book "Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times," these stories are important not only because they show that flying things have been capturing our imagination for centuries, but because of what they say about our most cherished beliefs and deepest fears. In the book, Vallee and Aubeck list 500 claims of sightings, in chronological order, between the years 1460 BC and 1879, and argue that the commonalities -- references to light, round shapes, erratic flight and terror in the observer -- offer us real insight into human behavior and our need to find explanation for things we cannot explain.

Salon spoke with Vallee from his home in San Francisco about our religious connection to UFOs, the controversy surrounding his own work -- and our endless cultural obsession with flying objects.

Your book calls "alien contact" humankind's oldest story. How so?

I'm not the only one saying that. If you look at the body of scholarship in anthropology and the history of religions, they talk about the idea that the soul is a human space capsule. Certainly the "Book of the Dead" in Egypt, the Bible, the writing of the mystics, in poems of ancient China, and the "Vedas" in India, the contact between man and creatures, entities, divinities, who travel from space is the main story. This includes humans traveling with them and humans being "abducted," to use a modern term. There is a very rich literature exactly about that; it's the oldest story.

Why is the idea of ancient UFO sightings a controversial one?

Most UFO believers believe the phenomenon began in 1947, when a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw several objects that he described as behaving like saucers skipping on water. And he saw them from his plane flying over Mt. Rainier in the state of Washington. And that was the beginning of the flying saucer era in the media.

I came to a point where I wondered when the phenomenon had begun, and I found a lot of material describing objects that seemed to behave the same way [as UFOs] and entities [resembling aliens] that dated back to the Middle Ages. At that time they were called angels or demons or leprechauns or elves or fairies and so on. So I published a book called "Passport to Magonia" that caused something of a scandal with the believers, because I was shaking that idea that UFOs were a recent phenomenon.

Why did you cut off your research at 1880?

We wanted to cut off the chronology at a point where the modern world hadn't happened yet, ideally at the Industrial Revolution. And we couldn't quite do that, but we got to 1879 which was a time when there were no dirigibles, no airplanes, no CIA, no Air Force, no SR-71s, no secret prototypes, no Area 51 and all of that. I mean, people could certainly be fooled by meteors and comets: They didn't know what comets were; the Aurora Borealis hadn't yet been explained. Some of the cases where people describe a serpent in the sky that destroys villages, we suspect, were tornadoes. But those are fairly easy to screen out. And what you're left with is something very consistent from culture to culture.

What were those consistencies?

One of the things that resonates very well is that witnesses are thunderstruck, awestruck and puzzled. Again and again, they say, "I saw this and am reporting it to you, my Lord, but have no idea what it was and I wish someone would tell me." That's what you find in China, what you find in Medieval France and so on. The other thing that is striking is the objects behave in similar ways. They are seen for a fairly long time, not seconds but minutes or dozen of minutes or hours. In most of the cases, they are described as round and moving not on a continuous trajectory, but coming and going, landing in some cases and taking off again, giving off heat, suddenly giving off light of different colors.

Stephen Hawking has discounted reports of UFOs by suggesting they only appear to "cranks and weirdos?" Why don't you think these ancient witnesses were just delusional?

Because delusions have their own pattern, and these don't seem to fit them. A delusion is usually single-witness and there are many multiple-witness cases in the book. You also have authority figures, astronomers and well-known people making claims. You have Michelangelo seeing a triangle with three lights of different colors in the sky and making a painting of it. It's staggering when you hear modern scientists saying only idiots and crazy people report UFOs. The consuls in ancient Rome made a law that they had to have an annual report on any unexplained aerial phenomena. They were not looking for UFOs, they were looking for astrological warnings of famines, or revolutions and wars and death of emperors and that type of thing. Many of them were copied by historians, and they have survived.

As you mention in the book, the Roman Catholic Church has traditionally been fascinated by these sightings. What's the connection between mystical sightings such as Fatima and Guadalupe and the sightings of unexplained aerial objects?

Unexplained aerial phenomena have played a major role in the imagery of every major religion. Whether it's Islam, the Bible or even Mormonism, with Angel Moroni appearing [to Joseph Smith and other early Mormons]. There's a long and rich history of that imagery being linked to things in the sky or from the sky. When witnesses are confronted with the phenomenon, very often the reaction is one of awe and sometimes terror. Because the sightings seem to transcend our reality, they try to resolve their terror through reference to a spiritual or religious solution.

There was a case in the Air Force files in 1964 where the main witness was a highway patrolman from New Mexico and the Air Force asked Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who was their scientific consultant and my mentor at the time, to go there to investigate. The patrolman asked to talk to a priest before he would talk to Dr. Hynek. That shows you, even now, people have that reaction.

When people are close to the phenomenon, whatever it is, their reality changes. I've had cases where people claimed that when the object came over their car they were driving north, but everything shows they were driving south. Given the perceptions I had at the time, they were sincere and they were truthful. It's no wonder the closest witnesses would put things in a religious or mystical context.

That speaks directly to a key conclusion you make in the book, that all people interpret these phenomena in their own terms. Often, in the past, those terms were religious. Is there a typical interpretation for these encounters in modern times?

Well, if you go to your local library, you will probably find UFO books -- sometimes including my own books -- in science, or New Age, or occult, or in religion, next to books about apparitions of angels or apparitions of the devil and so on. The libraries and bookstores don't quite know what to do with this subject. It will be interesting to see what they'll do with this book.

You make some interesting distinctions in the book between sightings that can be labeled as myths, legends or hoaxes and those that cannot be easily explained away. Where did you draw the line?

When we didn't have a date, where we couldn't determine if there were comets or meteors, we excluded them. And then there were hoaxes, that took us a long time to track down, because some of them were really good. Then there were cases that were borderline, because they were describing something, but completely in a religious context. Even if there is a date, there is a witness and a description, we don't have anything to say about things that are, from the beginning, in a religious context.

There seems to be a very common visceral reaction to the issue of UFOs, whether people believe in them or don't believe them, the reaction tends to be fairly certain. Why do people have such strong reactions?

Especially in journalism, the typical reaction is ridicule. It's a human reaction to ambiguity, because it's a big challenge [to explain] and what people describe is, in many cases, terrifying. Given that you don't have an explanation and there aren't people doing really good research, humor is one way to react. The other way is to jump to some conclusion and become a believer. Or a skeptic, which is another form of irrational belief.