Zombification: Stories from National Public Radio

Codrescu ( Road Scholar ) is well-known as a freewheeling editorialist of the American radio airwaves, and as a kind of American consciousness: his alternative sensibility gets and loses its bearings cogently, searching for fresh perspectives. This stubborn and amusing miscellany collects the author's NPR commentaries from 1989 to 1993. The Romanian-born poet and commentator is briskly topical and, occasionally, puckishly silly; one supposes that Codrescu sometimes takes seriousness unseriously mainly in order to make the most of it. But on the other hand, he can go dizzy in earnest, rather like a musical improviser. The two tendencies let him consider paradoxes crisply and rhythmically. This can mean fantasizing about filling Chicago's Sears Tower with ``the largest commune in the world'' or complaining that autobiography ``has become a form for the rich and famous, as if the rest of us have no lives at all.'' The limits of Codrescu's oral form do become apparent, as most entries here fill no more than a full page. So we want more description, analysis and shenanigans--but listen anyway. (July)