BIBLIOFILE
The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power
by Travis Hugh Culley
(Villard, 324 pages, $19.95)

Travis Hugh Culley reads at Powell's, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Friday, April 20.

Travis Hugh Culley's recent memoir, The Immortal Class, brilliantly captures the thrills and textures of working as a bike messenger in Chicago's dense urban landscape. Though he propels the reader through the heady mix of ego and intuition that guides one safely through a messenger's workday, Culley expands beyond a personal focus to display an interest in and concern for his urban environment. By doing so, he easily transcends the negative stereotypes generally allotted to bicycle messengers, finally giving this rarely understood but rich subculture a voice beyond 'zines. This is a welcome portrait of bike culture and its philosophy.

With a searing, near poetic style, Culley takes you through a world that is life-threateningly dangerous, almost always undervalued, and yet hugely in demand by big business. With a supporting cast of the many colorful personalities a messenger encounters in a given workday, Chicago itself becomes the main character. Its history, architecture, people and constituent communities all contribute to a more complete sense of what large-scale American cities are, and what they could become.

Culley's personal growth--from bicycling for necessity to riding with the city's best couriers in an odd-hours alleycat race--also came with a political awakening. His own views of the automobile and the culture that surrounds it easily point out the problems created by a too-heavy reliance on cars and the industries that profit from it. While one may not agree with all Culley's conclusions, once seen through his eyes it is hard to look at cars, bicycles, or city streets the same.

Miranda says that compiling this book has been the source of much joy--and it's a gift he's passed along to us. As I read and enjoy this collection, I'm glad Miranda has broken 18 years of silence to return to poetry. Anthony Kimple

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
by Nicholson Baker
(Random House, 353 pages, $25.95)

Nicholson Baker reads at Powell's, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Monday, April 23.

In the fall of 1999, novelist Nicholson Baker (Vox, The Fermata) hastily formed a nonprofit corporation and used it to spend nearly $100,000 buying old newspapers. Double Fold, both a scathing, eye-opening indictment of our nation's libraries and a call-to-arms, is his explanation of why.

The short answer is "microfilm." We've all used it; we all hate it. We've also, however, naively assumed--though microfilm copies are often faded and illegible, reduce photos and diagrams to Rorschach blobs, and come in slapdash collections missing weeks, months, even years--that the master copies of precious old newspapers and books are safely stored somewhere as part of our country's historical and cultural legacy. What Baker reveals is that, with alarmingly few exceptions, they are not. His impassioned naming of names identifies the motives of those responsible--the Library of Congress and microfilm companies foremost--for convincing the nation's librarians of the ridiculous and demonstrably false notion that old newspapers and books would "turn to dust" if they weren't immediately chopped into microfilmable bits and then tossed. And Baker warns that the tide of destruction continues, with the words "digital image" simply replacing "microfilm."

The near complete disappearance of original copies of beautiful full-color turn-of-the-century newspapers like Hearst's American and Pulitzer's New York World moved Baker to successfully purchase large runs in a blind auction organized when the British Library decided to dump its American newspaper collections. And unlike the Library of Congress, Baker hasn't chopped them up and thrown them out. He's keeping them, so people can someday look at them. It's a pity our nation's libraries don't do the same.
Dan DeWeese

THANKSGIVING
by Michael Dibdin
(Pantheon, 182 pages, $20)

Michael Dibdin reads at Powell's, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651. 7:30 pm Wednesday, April 18.

Michael Dibdin, a Seattle-based Brit, made his name in the genre aisles of Mystery. Since that ghetto is lucrative and sticks up for its own, a crime writer takes no greater risk than when he or she breaks from form to dash toward "literature." Dibdin, a felicitous writer, pulls that elusive trick with Thanksgiving, a bite-sized exploration of obsession and the curse of memory.

Tony, an English journalist living in Seattle, loses his wife, Lucy, in a plane crash. As they met in middle age, Tony knows little about her early life beyond a failed marriage to a '60s relic that produced two children. After her death, Tony flies to Nevada, buys a gun, and heads into the desert to find her scumbag ex-husband. The repulsive ex, Darryl Bob, dies. Tony emerges as the leading suspect. He also seems to be haunted by the dead Lucy.

Though the book involves a pair of murky deaths, a number of white-knuckle moments and one cop, it's not a mystery--except in the oldest sense. You could say that Tony is a detective trying to solve his own life. The red herrings drive him nearly mad, and the real clues are of such devastating import, he can barely stand to stay on the case. Dibdin pushes this investigation of Tony's wobbly soul at a thriller's pace, with a finely honed instinct for suspense developed through a dozen crime novels. There's even a surprise ending of sorts, an elaboration on the genre's traditional startling revelation. Even the staunchest crime-writing advocate should laud this excellent writer's move beyond the ghetto's boundaries. Zach Dundas