Ginsberg might’ve responded by saying, as he did in a 1986 essay included here, that when San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore published “Howl” 50 years ago, changing America was part of the plan: “I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy,” he wrote, adding that he also “thought to disseminate a poem so strong that a clean Saxon four-letter word might enter high school anthologies permanently and deflate tendencies toward authoritarian strong-arming.” Indeed Ginsberg’s ecstatic eruption of a poem, with its fucks and cocks and infamous opening lines—“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked”—has been anthologized, lionized, internationalized and scrutinized by everyone from Whitman scholars and gay-rights activists to spoken-word performers and public prosecutors (in 1957, “Howl” and its publisher beat obscenity charges in a San Francisco court).

But still—the poem that changed America? A case might be made for such a claim, but this uneven collection of essays (most of which have all the critical distance of a fanzine) doesn’t make it—unless “poem” refers not just to “Howl” but to Ginsberg and the whole Beat movement; and “changed” simply means “had an emotional effect on”; and “America” is limited to literati and former friends of Ginsberg, such as the contributors to this volume.

Editor Jason Shinder explains in his introduction that “unlike the myriad of critical texts” about the poem, this one delivers “personal narratives.” His claim is misleading: The collection’s meatiest essays are pure lit-crit, offering astute close readings that avoid academic jargon but are unlikely to captivate a general readership. Marjorie Perloff analyzes the poem’s “language of modernism,” including “le mot juste, the objective correlative, the use of complex semantic and rhetorical figures.” To Eliot Katz, Ginsberg is a brand of political poet; to Alicia Ostriker, he’s a Jewish one: “If his personal style is an American incarnation of the Yiddish personality, his moral power descends in a direct line from the power of Hebrew prophecy.” Since there’s something deliciously defiant in eruditely explicating a text that was dismissed by the establishment of its day—Norman Podhoretz panned “Howl” in The New Republic and the Partisan Review; Lionel Trilling found it “just plain dull”; Richard Eberhart, in The New York Times Book Review, called it “a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit, assuming that the louder you shout the more likely you are to be heard”—most of these contemporary critical readings bear a triumphant undertone, as if to say, with all due respect: “Take that, Mr. Trilling!”

The book’s personal essays, on the other hand, vary in tone from reverent to rapturous. Some—including those by Jane Kramer, Vivian Gornick, Amiri Baraka and Eileen Myles—are odes to Ginsberg himself. Though they share sweet memories of the man behind the poem, most aren’t quite essays but sketches that often feel truncated. Amiri Baraka’s piece, for instance, is peppered with captivating tidbits that merely tease: “The gap between Black nationalism and Tibetan Buddhism. I wanted to make War, Allen to make peace,” he writes.

Other personal essays are not about the poet but the poet’s effect on, well, another poet (or writer). Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins discovered via Ginsberg that “it wasn’t an utter waste of time for a Catholic high school boy from the suburbs to try to sound in his poems like a downtown homosexual Jewish beatnik.” Rick Moody reminisces about his days in the Providence rock scene of the 70’s and suggests that “Howl” was “a great article of constitution of the punk rock years.” Considering the range of musical connections drawn here—“Howl” is linked in form and content to punk rock and folk rock and even hip-hop—one wonders why more diverse figures, as opposed to just writers and poets, aren’t offered the opportunity to affirm the poem’s lasting resonance. Surely there are, say, rockers or rappers or Def Poetry Jam performers who found inspiration in Ginsberg’s rebel yell; why not let them vouch for the poem’s contemporary impact?

A little more diversity might have steered this collection clear of its greatest flaw: repetition. Too often, the essays end up staging an informal competition: Who can say the same thing—“He rebelled against conformity and repression, and this moved me”—in the most evocative fashion?

Here are the losing contestants: Eliot Katz’s too-technical description of “Howl” as “a long reverberating social critique that illuminates a new multidimensional field of political, psychological, cultural, and militaristic repression,” and Marge Piercy’s tired metaphor: “Poetry seems to close down periodically to something safe and barely felt. Then comes a poet who thrusts the door open with a great shocking bang.”

Here are the winners: Luc Sante’s characterization of “Howl” as “the last poem to hit the world with the impact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song,” or Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s portrait of the Beat movement as “the uprising of the garbage dumps of the suburbs, as if tin cans, broken bicycles, and rusted cars erupted with a roar like Vesuvius’ lava at the smug Pompeii of soullessness.”

But all the talk of Ginsberg-as-rebel eventually turns tedious; it also strikes this reader (I’m on the cusp of Generations X and Y) as gratingly nostalgic: wistful musings about how glorious things were back in the heyday of counterculture. Robert Pinsky’s assertion that “if ‘Howl’ were published for the first time tomorrow, it would be sensational and challenging” is liable to leave anyone weaned on explicit expression and censorship controversies—on songs such as N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police,” or Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” or the Oscar-winning “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”—feeling skeptical, to say the least.

Thomas Frank aptly summed up the state of my generation’s “counterculture” in Commodify Your Dissent (1997): “The rebel race continues today regardless,” he wrote, “with ever-heightening shit-references calculated to scare Jesse Helms, talk about sex and smack that is supposed to bring the electricity of real life, and ever-more determined defiance of the repressive rules and mores of the American 1950’s—rules and mores that by now we know only from movies.” Post-boomer generations grapple cynically with the fine and often artificial line between mainstream and underground, repressed and liberated; we know Allen Ginsberg as, yes, the man who “chant[ed] in the park surrounded by hippies in beads and feathers” (as Luc Sante puts it)—but we also know him as the guy in those 90’s-era Gap ads.

None of this is to undermine the value of “Howl” today; on the contrary, it’s to suggest that the poem is, in a present-day context, more multifaceted than ever—and more multifaceted than much of this book allows.

Two essays (out of 26) are exceptions to the rule: They shrewdly interrogate the well-hashed Ginsberg-versus-Cold-War-repression party line. Phillip Lopate offers an honest reaction to Ginsberg’s rebel persona—“what about all those working stiffs who would not end up raving lunatics, who could not afford to drop out, were we automatically judged mediocre and condemned to a lower status than ‘the best minds,’ by dint of neglecting or refusing to fall apart?” And David Gates tries to reconcile the fact that “Howl” has become an American classic with the notion that “much of [the poem’s] power comes from its sense of censorious readership, which does not agree that, for instance, the ‘tongue and cock and hand and asshole’ are holy.” That kind of discussion lets “Howl” reverberate in contemporary America, at a time when our “angelheaded hipsters” aren’t cruising “the negro streets at dawn,” but drinking lattes in Williamsburg or reading Ginsberg and Kerouac on the Lower East Side.

Baz Dreisinger is an assistant professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

Ginsberg might’ve responded by saying, as he did in a 1986 essay included here, that when San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore published “Howl” 50 years ago, changing America was part of the plan: “I was curious to leave behind after my generation an emotional time bomb that would continue exploding in U.S. consciousness in case our military-industrial-nationalist complex solidified into a repressive police bureaucracy,” he wrote, adding that he also “thought to disseminate a poem so strong that a clean Saxon four-letter word might enter high school anthologies permanently and deflate tendencies toward authoritarian strong-arming.” Indeed Ginsberg’s ecstatic eruption of a poem, with its fucks and cocks and infamous opening lines—“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness, starving hysterical naked”—has been anthologized, lionized, internationalized and scrutinized by everyone from Whitman scholars and gay-rights activists to spoken-word performers and public prosecutors (in 1957, “Howl” and its publisher beat obscenity charges in a San Francisco court).

But still—the poem that changed America? A case might be made for such a claim, but this uneven collection of essays (most of which have all the critical distance of a fanzine) doesn’t make it—unless “poem” refers not just to “Howl” but to Ginsberg and the whole Beat movement; and “changed” simply means “had an emotional effect on”; and “America” is limited to literati and former friends of Ginsberg, such as the contributors to this volume.

Editor Jason Shinder explains in his introduction that “unlike the myriad of critical texts” about the poem, this one delivers “personal narratives.” His claim is misleading: The collection’s meatiest essays are pure lit-crit, offering astute close readings that avoid academic jargon but are unlikely to captivate a general readership. Marjorie Perloff analyzes the poem’s “language of modernism,” including “ le mot juste, the objective correlative, the use of complex semantic and rhetorical figures.” To Eliot Katz, Ginsberg is a brand of political poet; to Alicia Ostriker, he’s a Jewish one: “If his personal style is an American incarnation of the Yiddish personality, his moral power descends in a direct line from the power of Hebrew prophecy.” Since there’s something deliciously defiant in eruditely explicating a text that was dismissed by the establishment of its day—Norman Podhoretz panned “Howl” in The New Republic and the Partisan Review; Lionel Trilling found it “just plain dull”; Richard Eberhart, in The New York Times Book Review, called it “a howl against everything in our mechanistic civilization which kills the spirit, assuming that the louder you shout the more likely you are to be heard”—most of these contemporary critical readings bear a triumphant undertone, as if to say, with all due respect: “Take that, Mr. Trilling!”

The book’s personal essays, on the other hand, vary in tone from reverent to rapturous. Some—including those by Jane Kramer, Vivian Gornick, Amiri Baraka and Eileen Myles—are odes to Ginsberg himself. Though they share sweet memories of the man behind the poem, most aren’t quite essays but sketches that often feel truncated. Amiri Baraka’s piece, for instance, is peppered with captivating tidbits that merely tease: “The gap between Black nationalism and Tibetan Buddhism. I wanted to make War, Allen to make peace,” he writes.

Other personal essays are not about the poet but the poet’s effect on, well, another poet (or writer). Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins discovered via Ginsberg that “it wasn’t an utter waste of time for a Catholic high school boy from the suburbs to try to sound in his poems like a downtown homosexual Jewish beatnik.” Rick Moody reminisces about his days in the Providence rock scene of the 70’s and suggests that “Howl” was “a great article of constitution of the punk rock years.” Considering the range of musical connections drawn here—“Howl” is linked in form and content to punk rock and folk rock and even hip-hop—one wonders why more diverse figures, as opposed to just writers and poets, aren’t offered the opportunity to affirm the poem’s lasting resonance. Surely there are, say, rockers or rappers or Def Poetry Jam performers who found inspiration in Ginsberg’s rebel yell; why not let them vouch for the poem’s contemporary impact?

A little more diversity might have steered this collection clear of its greatest flaw: repetition. Too often, the essays end up staging an informal competition: Who can say the same thing—“He rebelled against conformity and repression, and this moved me”—in the most evocative fashion?

Here are the losing contestants: Eliot Katz’s too-technical description of “Howl” as “a long reverberating social critique that illuminates a new multidimensional field of political, psychological, cultural, and militaristic repression,” and Marge Piercy’s tired metaphor: “Poetry seems to close down periodically to something safe and barely felt. Then comes a poet who thrusts the door open with a great shocking bang.”

Here are the winners: Luc Sante’s characterization of “Howl” as “the last poem to hit the world with the impact of news and grip it with the tenacity of a pop song,” or Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s portrait of the Beat movement as “the uprising of the garbage dumps of the suburbs, as if tin cans, broken bicycles, and rusted cars erupted with a roar like Vesuvius’ lava at the smug Pompeii of soullessness.”

But all the talk of Ginsberg-as-rebel eventually turns tedious; it also strikes this reader (I’m on the cusp of Generations X and Y) as gratingly nostalgic: wistful musings about how glorious things were back in the heyday of counterculture. Robert Pinsky’s assertion that “if ‘Howl’ were published for the first time tomorrow, it would be sensational and challenging” is liable to leave anyone weaned on explicit expression and censorship controversies—on songs such as N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police,” or Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” or the Oscar-winning “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp”—feeling skeptical, to say the least.

Thomas Frank aptly summed up the state of my generation’s “counterculture” in Commodify Your Dissent (1997): “The rebel race continues today regardless,” he wrote, “with ever-heightening shit-references calculated to scare Jesse Helms, talk about sex and smack that is supposed to bring the electricity of real life, and ever-more determined defiance of the repressive rules and mores of the American 1950’s—rules and mores that by now we know only from movies.” Post-boomer generations grapple cynically with the fine and often artificial line between mainstream and underground, repressed and liberated; we know Allen Ginsberg as, yes, the man who “chant[ed] in the park surrounded by hippies in beads and feathers” (as Luc Sante puts it)—but we also know him as the guy in those 90’s-era Gap ads.

None of this is to undermine the value of “Howl” today; on the contrary, it’s to suggest that the poem is, in a present-day context, more multifaceted than ever—and more multifaceted than much of this book allows.

Two essays (out of 26) are exceptions to the rule: They shrewdly interrogate the well-hashed Ginsberg-versus-Cold-War-repression party line. Phillip Lopate offers an honest reaction to Ginsberg’s rebel persona—“what about all those working stiffs who would not end up raving lunatics, who could not afford to drop out, were we automatically judged mediocre and condemned to a lower status than ‘the best minds,’ by dint of neglecting or refusing to fall apart?” And David Gates tries to reconcile the fact that “Howl” has become an American classic with the notion that “much of [the poem’s] power comes from its sense of censorious readership, which does not agree that, for instance, the ‘tongue and cock and hand and asshole’ are holy.” That kind of discussion lets “Howl” reverberate in contemporary America, at a time when our “angelheaded hipsters” aren’t cruising “the negro streets at dawn,” but drinking lattes in Williamsburg or reading Ginsberg and Kerouac on the Lower East Side.

Baz Dreisinger is an assistant professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York.

I’ve never taken a Caribbean cruise, and I probably never will. It’s David Foster Wallace’s fault. His 1995 essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”—an uproarious dissection of seven nights aboard Celebrity Cruise Inc.’s 47,255-ton Zenith (rechristened, in his account, the Nadir)—was enough to convince me that “fun ship” is an oxymoron.

“I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh,” Mr. Wallace muses. “I have been addressed as ‘Mon’ in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide.” And he faced an ugly truth at every port: “I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy: the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore.”

On page after withering page, however, Mr. Wallace finds the “floating wedding cakes” worthy of scrutiny. So does journalist Kristoffer Garin, whose Devils on the Deep Blue Sea is both an overwhelming history and an underwhelming exposé of the cruise industry.

Such scrutiny is merited: The subject is big. Literally. Mr. Garin opens his book with a Melvillian description of an entity larger than five Goodyear blimps, too obese for the Panama Canal, home to 700 gallons of ice cream, 20,000 cans of beer and 2,500 toilets: Behold the Voyager of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship, “a great white mechanical whale nosing its way back to Miami through the ocean dawn, its belly stuffed with the celebrants of American leisure.”

The subject is also big in the metaphorical sense: Cruising is a $13 billion industry, the fastest-growing sector of the leisure market, an activity undertaken by more than 10 million Americans each year. Mr. Wallace delivers a wry sociological analysis of what this industry peddles—“a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that’s marketed under configurations of the verb ‘to pamper’”—but Mr. Garin offers a blow-by-blow account of capitalists and corporations that, unless you’re riveted by yet another American-dream-theme story about “what happens when little guys become big guys,” will leave you feeling that his approach has, well, missed the boat.

Mr. Garin begins by recounting the cruise industry’s exotic lineage. Its “grandfather” is F. Leslie Fraser, a Jamaican plantation owner who, between hobnobbing with Errol Flynn and General Rafael Trujillo, launched the first Miami-based pleasure cruise line in the 1950’s. His concept begat the “modern cruise industry’s founding fathers”: a Norwegian, Knut Kloster, and an Israeli, Ted Arison. The son of wealthy shipowners, Arison was a WWII veteran who smuggled Jews into Palestine, fought in the war for Israeli independence, emigrated from America (because, says Mr. Garin, he “wanted to be a self-made man”) and was eulogized by The Jerusalem Post as the “world’s richest Jew.”

But before that, Arison was Kloster’s partner in Norwegian Caribbean Lines. Their venture was successful, so successful that financial disputes drove a wedge between them. In 1971, Arison launched his own company, which pioneered the marketing scheme that redefined tackiness as we know it: the “fun ship” concept, which meant selling the ship, not the port of call, and catering to the lower, not upper tier of the market. It meant the birth, in other words, of the Wal-Mart of the sea: Carnival Cruise Lines, which now has a market capitalization of $36 billion and control of over 50 percent of the market.

From the start-up sagas of the 60’s, to the Love Boat era launched in 1977—when the television premiere of a “glorious, unapologetic shlockfest” became the best advertising cruise lines couldn’t buy—to the “Me Decade,” when bigger, fatter ships (and customers) proved that size does matter, Devils on the Deep Blue Sea traces the rise of the current industry trinity: Norwegian, Carnival and Royal Caribbean. But really it’s the story of Carnival, its rise from penny-pinching underdog to corporate behemoth (during the past decade, it rapaciously gobbled up rival cruise companies).

As if hungry for a good reason to feel queasy about cruising, Mr. Garin explores the industry’s dirty underbelly. Pollution scandals and public-health outbreaks on board “the Good Ship Kaopectate” (as Newsday put it) made for sensationalist media fodder in the 90’s—but by 2000, Mr. Garin admits, fewer than 8 percent of cruise lines were failing health inspections, and environmental violations had been dramatically curtailed.

Mr. Garin explains the flag-of-convenience system, by which cruise lines register their ships in countries like Liberia or Panama and “enjoy virtually every benefit and protection of operating as an American company … without being asked to shoulder any of the responsibilities commonly understood to accompany the privilege.” This system has two nasty side effects: a loss in hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars (if Wal-Mart were earning at Carnival’s margins it would’ve banked $65 billion in profits, more than Exxon-Mobil, Citigroup, General Electric and Bank of America combined), and sub-par labor laws for cruise workers.

There’s no mitigating the injustice of the former; on the latter, however, Mr. Garin’s data doesn’t deliver: “In the context of the global pool of unskilled labor, even the worst of cruise ship life stacks up fairly well against the factories of East and South Asia,” he concedes. “By the standards of today’s world, if a cruise ship is indeed a sweatshop—and most of them probably fit the bill—it’s a relatively benevolent one.”

There is a vantage point from which 21,000 pounds of suntanned, seaborne flesh is most unmitigatedly ugly—but it’s not an American one, and it’s not one to which Mr. Garin devotes enough grumbling.

He tells us, in passing, that Knut Kloster was a closet leftie who couldn’t shake the radical notion that—gasp!—Caribbean islands “were home to vibrant, contemporary cultures—not just fun-and-sun playgrounds for fat Americans to visit and photograph.” So Kloster schemed up ways to take the racist, colonialist sting out of cruising: Jamaican family-in-residence programs; “meet the people” island excursions; a plan to give Jamaican coffee-factory workers, whom tourists photographed as if they were exotic objects, cameras with which to photograph their wide-eyed observers right back.

The cruise industry, after all, came of age in the late 70’s, when phrases like “tourism is whorism” were on the lips of Caribbean leaders—like Jamaica’s Michael Manley—who were hardly propagators of pro-American sentiment. How the industry navigated and still navigates this sociopolitical seascape, how it gets away with folding rich and varied island cultures into a single, rum-soaked tanning bed—these are compelling subjects that Mr. Garin touches on only briefly.

Mostly he recaps the standard line: Cruises shamefully shortchange the islands, which spend lots (on ports) and get little (in paltry spending by wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am visitors). Mr. Garin recounts the Caribbean Community’s efforts, beginning in 1992, to band together and demand hikes in the per-head taxes paid to them by the cruise industry. No such luck. By simply dropping one island from the itinerary, the industry sent a blunt message: Your island could be next. Paltry profits, after all, are better than none.

When Mr. Garin quotes the prime minister of St. Lucia fuming that the Caribbean “would no longer accept mirrors and baubles for the use of its patrimony,” he suddenly makes talk of Ted Arison’s corporate takeovers seem small. A deeper, richer subject was at his fingertips, but Mr. Garin mimics the cruise lines he criticizes: He treats the islands as a sideshow, when they really should be the main attraction.

Baz Dreisinger is a journalist and professor of English at the City University of New York.

I’ve never taken a Caribbean cruise, and I probably never will. It’s David Foster Wallace’s fault. His 1995 essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”—an uproarious dissection of seven nights aboard Celebrity Cruise Inc.’s 47,255-ton Zenith (rechristened, in his account, the Nadir)—was enough to convince me that “fun ship” is an oxymoron.

“I have smelled what suntan lotion smells like spread over 21000 pounds of hot flesh,” Mr. Wallace muses. “I have been addressed as ‘Mon’ in three different nations. I have watched 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide.” And he faced an ugly truth at every port: “I am an American tourist, and am thus ex officio large, fleshy, red, loud, coarse, condescending, self-absorbed, spoiled, appearance-conscious, ashamed, despairing, and greedy: the world’s only known species of bovine carnivore.”

On page after withering page, however, Mr. Wallace finds the “floating wedding cakes” worthy of scrutiny. So does journalist Kristoffer Garin, whose Devils on the Deep Blue Sea is both an overwhelming history and an underwhelming exposé of the cruise industry.

Such scrutiny is merited: The subject is big. Literally. Mr. Garin opens his book with a Melvillian description of an entity larger than five Goodyear blimps, too obese for the Panama Canal, home to 700 gallons of ice cream, 20,000 cans of beer and 2,500 toilets: Behold the Voyager of the Seas, the world’s largest cruise ship, “a great white mechanical whale nosing its way back to Miami through the ocean dawn, its belly stuffed with the celebrants of American leisure.”

The subject is also big in the metaphorical sense: Cruising is a $13 billion industry, the fastest-growing sector of the leisure market, an activity undertaken by more than 10 million Americans each year. Mr. Wallace delivers a wry sociological analysis of what this industry peddles—“a blend of relaxation and stimulation, stressless indulgence and frantic tourism, that special mix of servility and condescension that’s marketed under configurations of the verb ‘to pamper’”—but Mr. Garin offers a blow-by-blow account of capitalists and corporations that, unless you’re riveted by yet another American-dream-theme story about “what happens when little guys become big guys,” will leave you feeling that his approach has, well, missed the boat.

Mr. Garin begins by recounting the cruise industry’s exotic lineage. Its “grandfather” is F. Leslie Fraser, a Jamaican plantation owner who, between hobnobbing with Errol Flynn and General Rafael Trujillo, launched the first Miami-based pleasure cruise line in the 1950’s. His concept begat the “modern cruise industry’s founding fathers”: a Norwegian, Knut Kloster, and an Israeli, Ted Arison. The son of wealthy shipowners, Arison was a WWII veteran who smuggled Jews into Palestine, fought in the war for Israeli independence, emigrated from America (because, says Mr. Garin, he “wanted to be a self-made man”) and was eulogized by The Jerusalem Post as the “world’s richest Jew.”

But before that, Arison was Kloster’s partner in Norwegian Caribbean Lines. Their venture was successful, so successful that financial disputes drove a wedge between them. In 1971, Arison launched his own company, which pioneered the marketing scheme that redefined tackiness as we know it: the “fun ship” concept, which meant selling the ship, not the port of call, and catering to the lower, not upper tier of the market. It meant the birth, in other words, of the Wal-Mart of the sea: Carnival Cruise Lines, which now has a market capitalization of $36 billion and control of over 50 percent of the market.

From the start-up sagas of the 60’s, to the Love Boat era launched in 1977—when the television premiere of a “glorious, unapologetic shlockfest” became the best advertising cruise lines couldn’t buy—to the “Me Decade,” when bigger, fatter ships (and customers) proved that size does matter, Devils on the Deep Blue Sea traces the rise of the current industry trinity: Norwegian, Carnival and Royal Caribbean. But really it’s the story of Carnival, its rise from penny-pinching underdog to corporate behemoth (during the past decade, it rapaciously gobbled up rival cruise companies).

As if hungry for a good reason to feel queasy about cruising, Mr. Garin explores the industry’s dirty underbelly. Pollution scandals and public-health outbreaks on board “the Good Ship Kaopectate” (as Newsday put it) made for sensationalist media fodder in the 90’s—but by 2000, Mr. Garin admits, fewer than 8 percent of cruise lines were failing health inspections, and environmental violations had been dramatically curtailed.

Mr. Garin explains the flag-of-convenience system, by which cruise lines register their ships in countries like Liberia or Panama and “enjoy virtually every benefit and protection of operating as an American company … without being asked to shoulder any of the responsibilities commonly understood to accompany the privilege.” This system has two nasty side effects: a loss in hundreds of millions of U.S. tax dollars (if Wal-Mart were earning at Carnival’s margins it would’ve banked $65 billion in profits, more than Exxon-Mobil, Citigroup, General Electric and Bank of America combined), and sub-par labor laws for cruise workers. There’s no mitigating the injustice of the former; on the latter, however, Mr. Garin’s data doesn’t deliver: “In the context of the global pool of unskilled labor, even the worst of cruise ship life stacks up fairly well against the factories of East and South Asia,” he concedes. “By the standards of today’s world, if a cruise ship is indeed a sweatshop—and most of them probably fit the bill—it’s a relatively benevolent one.”

There is a vantage point from which 21,000 pounds of suntanned, seaborne flesh is most unmitigatedly ugly—but it’s not an American one, and it’s not one to which Mr. Garin devotes enough grumbling.

He tells us, in passing, that Knut Kloster was a closet leftie who couldn’t shake the radical notion that—gasp!—Caribbean islands “were home to vibrant, contemporary cultures—not just fun-and-sun playgrounds for fat Americans to visit and photograph.” So Kloster schemed up ways to take the racist, colonialist sting out of cruising: Jamaican family-in-residence programs; “meet the people” island excursions; a plan to give Jamaican coffee-factory workers, whom tourists photographed as if they were exotic objects, cameras with which to photograph their wide-eyed observers right back. The cruise industry, after all, came of age in the late 70’s, when phrases like “tourism is whorism” were on the lips of Caribbean leaders—like Jamaica’s Michael Manley—who were hardly propagators of pro-American sentiment. How the industry navigated and still navigates this sociopolitical seascape, how it gets away with folding rich and varied island cultures into a single, rum-soaked tanning bed—these are compelling subjects that Mr. Garin touches on only briefly. Mostly he recaps the standard line: Cruises shamefully shortchange the islands, which spend lots (on ports) and get little (in paltry spending by wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am visitors). Mr. Garin recounts the Caribbean Community’s efforts, beginning in 1992, to band together and demand hikes in the per-head taxes paid to them by the cruise industry. No such luck. By simply dropping one island from the itinerary, the industry sent a blunt message: Your island could be next. Paltry profits, after all, are better than none.

When Mr. Garin quotes the prime minister of St. Lucia fuming that the Caribbean “would no longer accept mirrors and baubles for the use of its patrimony,” he suddenly makes talk of Ted Arison’s corporate takeovers seem small. A deeper, richer subject was at his fingertips, but Mr. Garin mimics the cruise lines he criticizes: He treats the islands as a sideshow, when they really should be the main attraction.

Baz Dreisinger is a journalist and professor of English at the City University of New York.

He's back again: Intrepid explorer David Brooks has returned from that faraway place known as suburban America, a fantastic land where cars are big, malls bigger and super-value meals tremendous.

His maiden voyage resulted in Bobos in Paradise (2000), a best-seller that wryly mapped the mores of "the new upper class." He came home with a functional phrase to add to our lexicon: In the style of Thorstein Veblen's "conspicuous consumption" or Max Weber's "Protestant ethic," he brilliantly coined "Bobo," for "bourgeois bohemian." He argued that onetime opposite sorts, the "espresso-sipping artist" and the "cappuccino-gulping banker," have lately converged and landed in a wealthy suburb near you. Before Bobos, there was no easy way to classify a hemp-bracelet-wearing corporate exec who, between lucrative deals, reads Kerouac and sips free-trade coffee. Nor was there a clinical term for, say, me: an Ivy League–educated Bobo who finds her byline in a high-toned publication such as the one you're reading, but can't afford even the heel on a Manolo Blahnik (Mr. Brooks' diagnosis: "SIDS"-Status-Income Disequilibrium Syndrome).

The explorer doubles as social taxonomist: In the time it takes the rest of us to say hi, Mr. Brooks translates a room of people into a diagram of types. Call it, as Mr. Brooks does in his new book, "comic sociology." A worthy sequel to Bobos, On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense is engaging, consistently entertaining and occasionally schizophrenic: In his sweeping assessment of that creature known as "the American," Mr. Brooks pokes with one hand and pats with another.

While Bobos set its sights on one segment of the American class system, On Paradise Drive has a broader, three-part plan: depict today's middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs; determine what motivates their inhabitants to climb the corporate ladder so avidly; render judgment by responding to a question: Are we Americans "as shallow as we look?"

Why expend energy on a question reflexively answered in the affirmative? That's the whole point: Time-honored traditions have dismissed suburban America as monotonous and synthetic-think Babbitt or The Organization Man, The Graduate or American Beauty-but Mr. Brooks wants to take a fresh look at the land of wide lawns and narrow minds and then put his finger on the "force" that impels Americans to work harder and longer, wheeling and dealing on their cell phones as they restlessly move here and there in search of success. "How," Mr. Brooks asks, "does this force-how does being American-shape us?"

Off to the suburbs we go, camouflaged in a minivan driven by Mr. Brooks, at his drollest in tour-guide mode. Statistics are his compass: Noting that half of all Hispanics, 40 percent of African-Americans and 46 percent of those under the poverty line are suburb dwellers, Mr. Brooks does away with the notion that suburbia is white and wealthy. Then he does away with "suburbia," in the singular: Suburbs come in genres, he explains, arranged in something like concentric circles.

We infiltrate. Exiting the urban "cool zone"-where hipper-than-thou artistes read identical alternative weeklies and suffer from "dreadlock envy"-we enter the "crunchy suburbs," home to "countercultural urbanites" who've become parents (which means "the energy that once went into sex and raving now goes into salads"). Onward to the wealthier "professional zones," where the mantra is "fight a war, gain a restaurant," and then the strip-mall-heavy "immigrant enclaves" whose ways have gone "unnoticed by the general culture." We reach the affluent "suburban core," home of ultra-organized, hyper-efficient "Homo suburbianus." Finally, we conclude our road trip far out in the "exurbs," not a landscape but a man-made "organism" in which demographics flash back to the 1950's: squarely middle-class families, a matched pair of parents and a couple of kids.

If you're getting carsick, pop a Dramamine; Mr. Brooks is only revving up. After digging into setting, he hones in on protagonists. "The middle-class suburbanites chased private happiness, but their country has an inescapably public role," he writes. "They find themselves under attack for reasons they haven't thought much about. They have to act on the world stage, which is a place that doesn't interest most of them." Americans, Mr. Brooks proposes, are the "Cosmic Blonde of nations," a "thyroid nation" and "bimbo to the world." We're "the convertible nation, ripping off our tube tops, yipping like banshees as we cruise down the freeway from cineplex to surf shop."

Poking fun at the clueless American is nothing new: Henry James did it in Daisy Miller; Nabokov refined the art in Lolita. Mr. Brooks' jibes are perfectly familiar, especially now that America-bashing has become a global sport. That's O.K.: Mr. Brooks is a master satirist, and I never tire of his analytical rant. He expertly maps out the American life span, an overactive treadmill he dubs the "Achievatron": Children, born to "Ubermoms" who pore over play dates and nursery-school applications, pass educational years in pre-professional, grade-grubbing frenzy, after which the lucky ones become "Wireless Man," scurrying from flight to flight in hopes of doing The Company proud, of earning more and achieving more and simply, well, being more.

Mr. Brooks knows that his account resembles the "chorus of bemoaning" produced by American scholars since at least 1950, that "mountain of cultural pessimism" in which Americans are alternately diagnosed as narcissists or conformists or materialists. As if to avoid being the constant curmudgeon ("I sometimes think I've made a whole career out of self-loathing," he confessed in Bobos), Mr. Brooks hits satirical crescendos but then backs off; he cushions his jabs with a redemptive reading of an America hooked on aspiration.

Sure, Americans can be absurd and fanatical. But in our suburban striving, he continues, you'll find a "zeal for permanent self-improvement" and a "capacity to see the present from the vantage point of the future." Mr. Brooks argues that Americans, bewitched by a "paradise spell," are trying to live out a dream: "I would like to think that an idealist flame does burn in every split level, that everyday American life is shaped by grand metaphysical visions," Mr. Brooks muses. "I would like to believe that we are all driven by some spiritual impulsion of which we are perhaps not even aware."

Well, I'd like to believe that, too, but I don't. Or rather, I'm not completely convinced of it-partly because Mr. Brooks is too skilled a satirist for his own good. His optimistic analysis may have the ring of truth-Americans have long had their heads in a dream-but it's overshadowed by the preceding pages of potent, tart critique. Like classic American jeremiads, On Paradise Drive speaks doom in order ultimately to speak redemption. But Mr. Brooks' critical molehills are ultimately more convincing than his inspirational mountain.

In the end, Mr. Brooks seems genuinely torn between the half-full and the half-empty. "If middle America is so stupid, vulgar, self-absorbed, and materialistic, which it often is, then how can America itself be so great?" he asks.

Great in theory or great in practice? In theory, suburban America's "Achievatron" might just add up to more than cupidity. Our impulse to strive and progress could indeed be touched with glory, and Mr. Brooks' "paradise spell" could be a Romantic enterprise in which "material things are shot through with enchantment."

But in practice, the inexhaustible treadmill of American life-not to mention the narcissism and naïveté that fuel it-are anything but glorious. Side effects include exhaustion, imperialism and a shoddy quality of life that's nearly leisure-free. Living in the future tense might make for a hell of an exciting narrative-but during those moments when you're not fooled by the promise of a happy ending, it leaves you disgruntled in the here and now.

Baz Dreisinger is a writer and an adjunct professor of English at the City University of New York.

In the oft-quoted scene from Annie Hall , Woody Allen's Alvy Singer recalls being asked, "Did you eat?" and hearing instead "Jew, eat?" It earns a hefty laugh; in kvetch- cum -comedy, nothing is funnier than the paranoid Jew who sees "Jew" in everything.

But what if he's not paranoid? What if Jewishness does have a clandestine presence in everything-or at least in everything related to American pop culture? A school of academic cultural studies makes just such a claim: Milking the Jews' historical role as prolific purveyors of popular entertainment-from vaudeville to "legitimate" theater, from the burgeoning big screen to the modern-day small one-books like Neal Gabler's An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988) or Michael Rogin's Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (1996) see classic films and television shows as testing grounds for Jewish notions of America and the place that Jews have made for themselves here. Scholars have insinuated Jewish subtexts into narratives galore-from the obviously Jewish ( The Jazz Singer ) to the seemingly WASP-ish ( It's a Wonderful Life ).

The latest addition to this school of cultural studies-in homage to Woody Allen, let's call it the "Jew, eat?" approach-is Andrea Most's Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical . Arguing that between 1925 and 1951, "first- and second-generation American Jewish writers, composers, and performers used the theater to fashion their own identities as Americans," Ms. Most, an assistant professor of English at the University of Toronto, rereads Broadway musicals with an eye for Jewish themes and figures, finding Jews where no one thought to look: in Sitting Bull, from Annie Get Your Gun (he "understands the wisdom of Jewish experience in America"); in Annie Oakley (her "transformation offers a nostalgic rendering of the path many an immigrant Jew traveled"); in the Asians of The King and I (they "replace Jews as the model minority of the future").

Mining for Jews can be laborious-and sometimes too rewarding (look hard enough for something and you start seeing it everywhere). But Ms. Most's lucid, engaging and convincing argument can't be denied.

Begin with one ironic fact: At summer camps across the country, all-American boys and girls roast marshmallows, belt out the national anthem, salute Old Glory-and stage musicals produced by the likes of Israel Baline, Jacob and Israel Gershowitz and Asa Yoelson (better known as Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin and Al Jolson). Jews were drawn to theater from their early days as Americans, a fact that Irving Howe attributed to the meritocracy of the stage, where talent trumped class.

Like African-Americans-the other half of the American pop-culture equation, unfortunately a meager presence in Making Americans -Jews were primed for the performing arts because they, not quite American and not quite white, possessed a double consciousness, a sense of belonging and yet not belonging to the U.S. of A. Whether immigrants (Berlin, the Gershwins) or Americanized children of immigrants (Rodgers and Hart), Jewish composers and performers were racial and ethnic chameleons, conjuring not only their legacy but also what they, as green Americans, wanted for their legacy.

Thus was born classic Americana, set in the Wild West or the frontier and populated by a motley crew so politically incorrect that it's a wonder they still appear on PBS: white-bread sharpshooters, cowboys and Indians, black minstrels, bumbling immigrants. Under Ms. Most's scrutiny, plays like Annie Get Your Gun , Oklahoma! and South Pacific -whose heroes constantly disguise and rehash their identities-become veiled meditations on race and assimilation. They're love stories, yes, but they're really sagas, writes Ms. Most, about "outsiders who need to be converted, assimilated, or accepted into the group." By negotiating a truce between "difference and community," Broadway musicals present the American Jew's "vision of a utopian liberal society."

Jews, though, often write cagily about Jews (even on Seinfeld , where "Jew" is subsumed by the broader category of "New York," Jerry never officially "outed" himself). Overtly Jewish characters-in Donaldson and Kahn's Whoopee! (1928) or George and Ira Gershwin's Girl Crazy (1930)-gave way in the late 30's to stand-ins like Oklahoma! 's Ali Hakim, the outsider figure who might as well be Jewish: A "theatrical, assimilable ethnic ('white') immigrant," Hakim must distance himself from Jud, the "realistic, unassimilable, and racially characterized ('dark') man."

By playing Jewishness against blackness-ethnicity against race-Jews insisted they could indeed be absorbed into the American fold. Many critics have wrung their hands about the historical link between Jews and blackface: Wearing burnt cork, were Jews identifying with "otherness" or, by putting a black face on and then taking it off, distancing themselves from it? Both, says Ms. Most: Musical comedies, rife with contradictory messages, presented Jews as white and un-white at simultaneous stage moments. Composers painted an all-inclusive picture of America, all the while limiting this inclusivity to whites.

But just hold on a New York minute: Broadway plays are plays. Racial commentary aside, they prompt us to clap our hands, sing along, root for the underdog and purchase cheesy souvenirs. Making Americans keeps the play as play in mind by arguing that the very form of musical comedy-the split between song and dialogue-is inscribed with the notion of e pluribus unum . Tension between singing and speaking produces what Ms. Most calls the "assimilation effect": assimilation of an enthralled audience into the play and of individual characters, performing solo and then in lockstep with the ensemble, into the stage community.

Ms. Most's musicals are meta-musicals, offering commentary on how theater, in a democracy, ought to operate. She's convincing in the case of Babes in Arms (1937)-a play about young people putting on a play, which Ms. Most sees as a statement on "the political and social purpose theater could serve in 1930s American culture," and which she rightly sets in the context of the New Deal, unionization, and 30's Hollywood.

But this kind of analysis becomes a tad arduous in the book's later chapters. Ms. Most's take on Oklahoma! is brilliant and novel, but Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific buckle under the weight of subtext-heavy readings. Self-sufficient Annie becomes not only Jewish, so to speak, but Emersonian, and also representative of postwar feminism. "There's No Business Like Show Business" becomes a patriotic song in which "acting in the theater" is "a metaphor for being an American." Golly! All last summer at camp, Junior thought he was singing about cowboys!

Kidding aside, though Ms. Most's readings are generally believable, original and entertaining, it would serve her well to acknowledge that symbols eventually empty out-and become, quite simply, stock narrative elements. By the time the 40's rolled around, composers-armed with a repertoire of characters and themes that were cemented into musical theater-employed them less as a statement about race and ethnicity in America and more because they worked . They belonged to a time-tested formula, one that sold tickets and earned encores. And what good capitalist-I mean good American -would tamper with that?

Baz Dreisinger, a New York–based journalist, teaches English at the City University of New York.

If scandals have their seasons, nothing suits summer like a steamy dose of adultery. This season we celebrate a cuckold, Hillary Clinton, whose top-dollar memoir renewed interest in the most delicious illicit affair of the 90's. And we malign an adulterer (and accused rapist), Kobe Bryant, the basketball superstar whose stony-faced mug shot graces tabloids everywhere.

One imagines Laura Kipnis-a professor of television, radio and film at Northwestern University and the author of Against Love: A Polemic -rubbing her hands in glee as she contemplates Mr. Bryant and his wronged wife, sad and repentant, giving yet another press conference. Her glee stems not from Schadenfreude but from delight at her own prescience: According to Against Love , public adultery scandals remain staples of American culture because adulterers are what all of us-restless, bored and numbed by the humdrum of our stable relationships-secretly wish to be. The public "impalement" of adulterers, especially Presidential ones, is a crucifixion in which others suffer for the very sin that we guilt-ridden masses yearn to commit.

The sin, Ms. Kipnis continues-brace yourself now for the book's clincher-that we ought to commit.

Ms. Kipnis has written a joyous, incisive tract in praise of adultery-and, as her title lays bare, against love. Why? For one, because no one else has. "Even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love," Ms. Kipnis writes. Everybody loves love: We all "prostrate ourselves at love's portals, anxious for entry, like social strivers waiting at the ropeline outside some exclusive club." So it's easy to accuse Ms. Kipnis of playing the devil's advocate. It's easy to argue that Against Love plays switcheroo with totem and taboo just to give us a little thrill.

Easy, that is, until Ms. Kipnis-a witty and pliant thinker-wins you over. Against Love proves delightfully paradoxical: didactic and playful, intellectual and entertaining, high-brow yet eminently readable. The book is a polemic ("the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z Boy lounger"), a word slapped on Against Love like a disclaimer. Polemics, often intentionally over the top, must be taken with a grain of salt. They're not for everyone: "Feel free to leave," Ms. Kipnis graciously proposes, "if this is not your story-you for whom long-term coupledom is a source of optimism and renewal, not emotional anesthesia."

"Long-term coupledom"-Ms. Kipnis pens the phrase with one hand and holds her nose with the other. Against Love isn't against love itself, but against love's socially sanctioned incarnation, its "mandatory barracks": domestic arrangements in which we pledge body and soul to each other forevermore. A more exact title would have been Against Domestic Coupledom , but Against Love makes the better bumper sticker.

Ms. Kipnis' argument is clear and pointed. When it comes to relationships, the mantra is "Love takes work." But when, she asks, "did the rhetoric of the factory become the default language of love"? Love, that thing of joy and leisure, has become more labor than pleasure, thus making Marx's Capital the marriage manual of our time. Sex, that act of passion and spontaneity, is transformed by long-term relationships into mechanical procedure, performed on occasions when duty calls. "When monogamy becomes labor, when desire is organized contractually, with accounts kept and fidelity extracted like labor from employees," Ms. Kipnis asks, "is this really what we mean by a Good Relationship?"

Only adultery-Ms. Kipnis' superhero in the scarlet-lettered cape-saves us from emotional paralysis. Adultery resuscitates flaccid souls and comatose libidos: "Using love to escape love," Ms. Kipnis calls it. "It's kind of like smoking and wearing a nicotine patch at the same time."

With Against Love , Ms. Kipnis-a video artist turned essayist and social critic-has written a follow-up to her last book, whose title also reveled in shock value. Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America argued against the criminalizing of fantasy in America and defended porn as a functional outlet for it; Against Love sets its claws on the social institution, marriage, that reins in our fantasies and unfettered desires. This dynamic-human desire repressed by social convention-ought to sound familiar: Ms. Kipnis is riffing off Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents , in which society's handmaidens are sublimation and repression.

Freud and Marx, with his analysis of labor's psychological effects, belong to Ms. Kipnis' holy trinity of theorists; the third is Foucault, who famously explored society's subtle means of policing its citizens. What is marriage, Ms. Kipnis asks, but the ultimate in state-sponsored social control, leaving us tamed, bored, repressed-in short, easily manipulated and passive citizens? Domestic coupledom-like soma in Huxley's Brave New World -is "boot camp for compliant citizenship"; adultery, on the other hand, turns us "from upstanding citizen to crafty embezzler: siphoning off ever-larger increments of this precious commodity, time, from its rightful owners-mate, job, children, housepets."

This is fairly radical stuff, and Ms. Kipnis seems aware that many would dismiss it as hyper-intellectual cant. So she has a strategy for making believers of us: She mostly avoids high-brow name-dropping, skips elaborate argument and historical exegesis-but dazzles us with a barrage of metaphor.

Adultery is "the municipal dumpster for coupled life's toxic waste of strife and unhappiness." It turns us from laborers to "amateur collagists" or "scavengers and improvisers, constructing odd assemblages out of detritus and leftovers: a few scraps of time and some dormant emotions are stuck together to create something unforeseen, to have new experiences."

Domestic love, on the other hand, is "denture adhesive. Yes, it's supposed to hold things in place; yes, it's awkward for everyone when it doesn't; but unfortunately there are some things that glue just won't glue." Coupledom's "enforcement wing" is self-help culture and therapy-the "world's most expensive lubricant," because therapy tries to get it out of us, that thing we've been bottling up and which needs to be released. Therapy absurdly informs us that the solution to the problem of marriage feeling like work is to work harder at marriage.

Tolstoy claimed that "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Ms. Kipnis would strenuously disagree. She sets forth a Chomskian universal "grammar" for unhappy coupledom: It includes the "You always/I never routine"; its euphemisms are "compromise" or "getting along"; its basic unit of speech is the interdiction, which produces a long list of what you, you poor coupled sap, can't do (a gem: "you can't be simplistic, even when things are simple").

Against Love goes national with a trip to the White House: Monicagate, for Ms. Kipnis, is a prime example of "spousal politics," in which a politician's worth is measured by his qualities as a husband. Bill Clinton's highly charged infidelity hearings were a "national bloodletting" in which, Ms. Kipnis observes, a nation of would-be adulterers failed to ask the most profound question of all: Why, for heaven's sake, was our President "risking so much for so little"?

We didn't ask because the answer is too unsettling. Grappling with Mr. Clinton's motives (the source lies somewhere in his "other" head) would mean grappling with the fact that good sense, good logic and "good" marriages only take us so far. Desire, on the other hand, reigns supreme; hence Ms. Kipnis' paean to it.

But here's a pressing question: Ought desire to reign? Ms. Kipnis' clever metaphors and shrewd analyses are a pleasure, but they leave us vacillating between extremes. Is there only the misery of domestic coupledom or the ephemeral joy of adulterous lust, Kevin Spacey in American Beauty or Diane Lane in Unfaithful ? It's rather fitting that a book about the insatiability of desire left me mildly unsatisfied, hungry for some solution to the problem Ms. Kipnis wisely lays out.

To be fair, I was warned: Against Love is a polemic, and polemics hardly ever offer middle-of-the-road solutions. "Maybe no one can be against love, but it's still possible to flirt with the idea," Ms. Kipnis says in closing. And intellectual flirtations, like polemics, "oscillate between affirming and denying the genuineness of their positions." This is not cop-out, but cunning strategy: If Ms. Kipnis blazes forth with fire, brimstone and academic gravitas against love and marriage, she'll be dismissed as an extremist or-heavens no!-a radical feminist. Flirtations, however, make us smile, not retreat.

Flirtations titillate, but they're doomed to end. And so we return, hot and bothered, to the mundane shelter of our daily lives. When we cool down, we remember the other word for a flirt: a tease.

Baz Dreisinger, an adjunct professor at CUNY, is working on her first book.

Al Sharpton recently had a meeting with Al Sharpton. It was, he says, one of the most important events of his adult life, and it occurred in prison, during a 90-day sentence for protesting U.S. military bases in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Where else would it occur? Can we forget Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Nelson Mandela? Political leaders have long found prison a fitting locale for rebirth (and an ideal literary device for declaring, "Out with the old me, in with the new"). After 90 days of monk-like fasting, reflection and study, Al has emerged, primed to be President. But is he really ready for a national campaign? Take the New York attitude out of Al Sharpton and you're left with bland political rhetoric. In his quest for a bigger piece of the pie, he had better stay true to the Big Apple in him.

Al on America is an unabashed bid for your vote in 2004 (the book could very well have been titled Al for America ). During a first-class flight to Phoenix, Mr. Sharpton tells us in chapter one, he found himself chatting with the man next to him, a stand-in for Middle America. Halfway through the conversation, the man leaned over and declared, "You don't seem so extreme." Music to Mr. Sharpton's ears. "What's so extreme about a nonviolent Christian minister asking the courts and our judicial system to work for all people?" Slipping in and out of the third person, he reminds us, "There have been many misconceptions about Al Sharpton. I am not a rabble-rouser. I am not an ambulance chaser. I am not a troublemaker. I am not an anti-Semite or a racist. I am not unpatriotic." Not, in other words, the radical demagogue that you, Average White American, thought he was. And he's written a book to prove it.

The rhetoric in Al on America will, for the most part, shock only conservatives; Mr. Sharpton's proposed policies follow standard liberal lines. He opposes the death penalty and school vouchers, and wants higher pay for teachers. He devotes a chapter to asserting that church and state ought to remain separate (which takes any sting out of "Reverend" Sharpton), and his economic assessments stem from the simple belief that the rich ought to pay the government more than the poor do (he suggests, for instance, eliminating estate taxes for estates under $500,0000). He'd like to see a Palestinian state and an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba. And as for 9/11, he rehashes the standard (and tiresome) "I told you so" routine: "America is beginning to reap what it has sown."

Unfortunately, Al on America is mere political cant. It's an extended pamphlet, not serious analysis. Though Mr. Sharpton makes many wise proposals, he bathes them in the sort of hazy generalities that political campaigns are made of. What, for instance, does it mean when he calls for the U.S. to "strengthen its African policy"? He's eager to "maintain a strong military," but to use it only when "absolutely necessary"; there are no examples of when "absolutely necessary" might apply. Here's one of the two Constitutional amendments Mr. Sharpton proposes: "the right of legal residents of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of age, citizenry, or prison record." That has a nice democratic ring to it, but does he really mean to offer voting rights to small children and green-card aliens?

Instead of analysis, Mr. Sharpton offers up simple, usually appealing declarations about the is and the ought . He has mastered the voice that American oratory is famous for: plain style (reminiscent of Puritan sermons), repetition that builds to a climax (echoing Martin Luther King), and a homily or anecdote at every turn (providing the sort of homespun wisdom that, as someone like Lincoln knew, appeals to everyman).

Some of these verbal flourishes are true gems. On slavery reparations: "If your grandmother stole a million dollars and your family was able to build an empire on that stolen money, do you owe a debt to the person you stole it from?" On black self-empowerment: "If I come from behind this podium and knock you onto the floor, that's on me. If I come back a week later and you're still on the floor, that's on you." On the argument that misogynistic hip-hop is merely a mirror to society: "Well, I don't know about you, but I use a mirror to correct what's wrong with me. I don't look in the mirror and see my hair messed up and my teeth need brushing and just walk out of the house that way." Best of all, on our President: "Bush has the kind of leadership that, when he gets to a fork in the road, he chooses the fork."

Al on America tells us much that we already knew about Al Sharpton the man (he's been groomed and mentored by Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Jesse Jackson and James Brown, who, according to Mr. Sharpton, "had more impact on my life than any civil rights leader-maybe even my own mother"), and a little that we didn't: He was having coffee at Junior's in downtown Brooklyn on the morning of 9/11, and he never watched Seinfeld (evidence that blacks and whites, he rightly argues, still inhabit separate cultural spheres). He'd rather, as he told a disapproving junior-high-school teacher, be a dead lion than a living dog, because "a dog, no matter how long he lives, will never be anything but a dog. But that lion, while he was alive, he was king of the jungle. He stood for something."

During pinnacle moments of his still-evolving political career, Mr. Sharpton has indeed been leonine. For many New Yorkers, his leadership during the Diallo trial transformed him from a Ras the Exhorter figure-the character in Ellison's Invisible Man who stood on street corners, wildly boding doom-into a potent human-rights leader whose efforts helped dismantle the NYPD's controversial Street Crimes Unit. He's had his share of low points, too: the Tawana Brawley case, about which Mr. Sharpton says he has no regrets, and the Freddy's incident and the anti-Semitic flare-ups, which he calls overblown and no worse than that of Nixon and Billy Graham. (Is that supposed to be comforting?) Al on America also offers the Sharpton account of the 2001 New York Mayoral campaign, a dramatic tale starring Mark Green, Roberto Ramirez and Fernando Ferrer, sprinkled with numerous accusations of race-baiting and featuring a top-secret meeting between Mr. Sharpton, Harvey Weinstein and Bill Clinton.

Mr. Sharpton's noble mission is to "rip the veil off Northern established liberal racism," to prove that racism "is not just a Southern redneck problem. This is an American problem." This is a Baldwin-esque Al Sharpton at his best. Al on America begins with a whimper and ends with a bang: It opens with patriotic pap about "faith in America," about "why they hate us," about his agenda no longer centering on "black America or minority America. It's now about America." The book ends not with an address to America but a plea to black America to "take responsibility for ourselves." It's a fiery, inspired and inspiring chapter in which Mr. Sharpton's true voice emerges loud and clear: "When I deal with the white power structure, it's on my terms. When I deal with City Hall or the White House, I do so on my terms." This is the Sharpton that New Yorkers know and love or hate; it is also, sadly, the Sharpton that will have difficulty winning the average American's vote.

Baz Dreisinger is a post-doctoral fellow at UCLA's Center for African-American Studies.