THE SECRET PARTS OF FORTUNE: Three Decades of Intense Investigation and Edgy Enthusiasm.

• Author: Noah, Timothy
• Position: Review

THE SECRET PARTS OF FORTUNE: Three Decades of Intense Investigation and Edgy Enthusiasm by Ron Rosenbaum Random House, $29.95

RON ROSENBAUM IS MY favorite practitioner of mass-mar, glossy-magazine journalism. He might have a serious rival. If Tom Wolfe were still a frequent writer of magazine nonfiction--but even then Rosenbaum would probably be my favorite. Like Wolfe, Rosenbaum has stretched the boundaries of the form--but at a time when the form is especially resistant to accommodating anything that isn't a celebrity profile. In magazines like Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone, Rosenbaum has written on such subjects as the obscure later fiction of Charles Portis (known to most people, when he is known at all, as the author of True Grit); the doctrinal disputes among the translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Byzantine conspiracy theories of a flaky investigative journalist named Danny Casolaro who committed suicide (or was he murdered?) while on the verge, he claimed, of breaking his biggest story; and an evangelical preacher's claim that he can get the Lord to fill cavities at revival meetings.

Glossy magazines, of course, aren't completely inhospitable to running stories on quirky and/or challenging subjects. But I can't think of a magazine writer, other than Wolfe, who's explored so wide a variety of disciplines and subcultures over the last three working, for the most part, outside the ratified precincts of The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and the tiny handful of other unprofitable prestige magazines.

Rosenbaum currently writes a weekly column for the New York Observer called "The Edgy Enthusiast." It isn't quite as good as his long magazine pieces, but it's one of my favorite columns (and it has influenced the way I write my own daily online column). Rosenbaum started his column while writing Explaining Hitler, his gripping book about the inability of scholars and artists to account for Hitler's evil. Because of the darkness of his subject, Rosenbaum decided his column would be "all praise all the time" That is, he would focus on books, films, music, and other things that struck him as "beautiful, brilliant, redemptive." Since the supply of such matter is always short at any given time, he doesn't confine himself to contemporary subjects; he'll write about Lucretius one week, Shakespeare the next, Rosanne Cash the week after that. Inevitably, over time, Rosenbaum has ended up writing now and then about things he hates...