Chicago Sun-Times: One-Op'smanship

If you join Oprah's Book Club, you have to read spiritually enriching and intellectually challenging works by literary authors. Man, that Oprah's a tough mentor!

Not me, I don't care if you spend your free time watching reruns of "Emergency" on TV Land. It's your life.

But I do encourage the fine art of reading; in fact, I've been recommending various books since the days when Oprah was doing shows such as (and these are all real titles): "Women Who Turn to Lesbianism," "Best Bodies," "Man Poaching," "Losing a Boyfriend or Husband to a Man-Stealing Relative" and "My Mother Stole My Man!"

Ah, wasn't that a time.

I commend Ms. Winfrey for reaching out with her golden sword and tapping the shoulders of mostly obscure authors, thus catapulting their works to the top of the best seller list. It's a lot better than advising her readers to waste their money on a yuppie cookbook or some trick diet.

Nevertheless, I continue to believe there's room for a more pop- oriented reading group: Roeper's Book Club.

And remember, if you say "Roeper's Book Club" really fast and under your breath, it kinda sounds like "Oprah's Book Club."

"What's that you're reading, a pictorial history of the life and times of Winona Ryder nee Horowitz?"

"Yes, indeed. It's a selection of (mumble here) Roeper's Book Club."

"Great! Here's to remembering your spirit!"

In any event, here are some of the books I've enjoyed over the last several months. Pick and choose as you like.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers (Simon & Schuster, 375 pages, $23). Entire forests have been thinned due to the amount of print accorded to Eggers' brilliantly gimmicky memoir about his complicated combo-platter of a young life, which has been divided between a typically self-involved journey for professional and romantic gratification and the monumentally difficult task of coping with the deaths of his Lake Forest parents and being a "father" to his adolescent brother Toph.

The attention is deserved.

Often employing stylistic conceits such as the opening "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book" (which advises us that "There is no overwhelming need to read the preface"), Eggers sometimes overdoes it with the winkety-wink cleverness, but "AHWOSG" is a home run-not because of the self-conscious promotional campaign or the coy approach, but because it's hilarious, sweet, touching, honest and powerful.

Winona, by the editors of Us magazine (Little, Brown, 144 pages, $24.95). A heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

My Goodness: A Cynic's Short-Lived Search for Sainthood, by Joe Queenan (Hyperion, 208 pages, $231.95). Queenan's enormous gifts as a celebrity-trashing dart thrower are sometimes wasted on his choice of big, fat targets (if you're the Zorro of pop criticism, what's the point of carving up John Tesh?), but he's in All-Star form here as he acknowledges what a professional jerk he's been for lo these many years and vows to change his ways. He'll write only good things, use only environmentally correct products and involve himself only in noble causes.

In other words, he tries to become Susan Sarandon.

Of course, even as Queenan attempts to sidestep all products that benefit from animal testing, even as he tries to honor the most presumptuous and time-consuming requests from readers who want his help in tracking down obscure CDs, even as he wears only clothes not manufactured in sweatshops, he's giving himself ample opportunity to skewer the self-righteous individuals and corporations that love to rub their noble lifestyles in our apathetic faces. Nevertheless, it's great fun to travel along with Queenan on his crusade, though we're quite sure he'll eventually return to "a life of total insensitivity and moral disengagement."

Shut Up and Smile (Supermodels: The Dark Side), by Ian Halperin (Ogo Books, 234 pages, $19.95). Investigative reporter Halperin went undercover and found out that most supermodels are witty, well-read, polite creatures working in a respectable business that is headed by some of the more trustworthy executives you'd ever want to know.

Not really. Turns out the modeling world is populated by lots of shady, seedy characters, and many supermodels are bratty, vapid, drugged, drunk and abused. Who knew?

Halperin has produced an unevenly written, odd little book; for example, the photos are all stretched out, like something from a funhouse mirror. But he tells chilling stories and often names names while painting a picture of the modeling industry that is so lurid you wonder why any parent would encourage a daughter to even think about getting into the business. This is terrifically juicy trash.

ESPN: The Uncensored History, by Michael Freeman (Taylor, 286 pages, $24.95). Freeman, who covers pro football for the New York Times, takes us back to the beginnings of the ubiquitous and multibranched ESPN, when it was a struggling little cable operation in Bristol, Conn., watched by almost no one and taken seriously by about three people. Freeman's exhaustive research and solid reporting skills are flexed throughout as he chronicles the inside story of the power struggles within the corridors of the network.

There's also a stunning section on the near-epidemic of sexual harassment that permeated the network in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the jock mentality made it rough for women on or off the air to simply do their jobs. Freeman pinpoints Mike Tirico, who was handed a three-month suspension in 1992 for his behavior toward female colleagues.

Equally fascinating are the stories of the talented and almost comically narcissistic Keith Olbermann and his frequent screaming matches with executives and co-hosts.

JonBenet: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation, by Steve Thomas (St. Martin's Press, 356 pages, $24.95). A former detective with the Boulder, Colo., Police Department gets his chance to vent with this passionate if not always responsible deconstruction of the Ramsey murder investigation, told from a onetime insider's point of view. Although he can't prove it, Thomas is convinced Patsy Ramsey killed her child in a fit of rage over a bed-wetting episode and then enlisted her husband to aid in the cover-up. (Which, quite frankly, is more plausible than anything the Ramseys offer in their own book, Death of Innocence.)

Weirdest revelation: On two occasions, Boulder cops planted a hidden microphone near JonBenet's grave in Atlanta, hoping to catch the killer making a cemetery confession. On one such stakeout, a "fake but realistic headstone constructed by a movie special effects company" was used to conceal the mike, and the cops were almost found out by a little boy who wandered over and started rocking the cheap knockoff stone back and forth while shouting, "This is made of wood!"

Double Down, by Frederick and Steven Barthelme (Houghton Miffling, 198 pages, $24). Regular visitors to this column might recall it was about a year ago that I wrote about the saga of the Barthelme brothers, whose quiet lives as English professors and writers of critically acclaimed novels and short stories were upturned by their attraction to the slots and blackjack. Not only did they squander more than $250,000 in inheritance money at the riverboat casinos off the Mississippi coast, but they also were accused of conspiring with a dealer to cheat at blackjack.

Working with beautiful precision and typically minimalist fashion, "Rick" and Steve tell how they were nearly consumed by their twin addiction, and they detail their mistreatment at the hands of Mississippi law enforcement officials, who come across as stupid and mean. Interspersed with the gambling nightmare is an effort to come to terms with a series of human losses, including the deaths of their parents and their brother Donald.

The charges against the brothers were dropped in late 1999, but the questions about why two learned, middle-aged men would avoid intimate family issues in favor of losing themselves in the sad world of 3 a.m. blackjack and desperate pulls on a $25 slot machine continue to linger.

Dr. Laura: The Unauthorized Biography, by Vickie L. Bane (St. Martin's Press, 258 pages, $23.95). You'll be interested in this gossipy, breezy bio only if you love Dr. Laura.

Or if you enjoy seeing someone so mean get zinged a bit herself.

Richard Roeper (rroeper@suntimes.com) appears at 8:10 a.m. Tuesday and 8:30 a.m. Wednesday on Channel 32's "Fox Thing in the Morning."