There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.

• Author: Feldman, Michael

by Jim Hightower HarperCollins. 292 pages. $23.00.

Here in Wisconsin, just a half-hour drive from Madison (former radical campus and current hotbed of student rest), lies Baraboo, home of the Crane Foundation, dedicated to the rescue and promulgation of endangered species of cranes. Since cranes, like so many of us, have trouble breeding in captivity, a volunteer at the Foundation flaps his arms, wiggles his ears, and flies into a passable imitation of a male in display to get the female--who must think she has now seen it all--to go into estrus. If, as rumored, the Crane Foundation is soon to be taken over by The Progressive to preserve and multiply the endangered Siberian Leftist, Jim Hightower will undoubtedly be called in to perform the mating dance. While extinction looms as a real possibility, his performance will be mildly amusing and full of down-home barnyard references, not unlike his new book, There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road but Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.

Jim Hightower is from Texas where, if you're not colorful at an early age (you know the drill: "as hot as-----," "tougher than a-----," "about as useful as a-----"), they'll stuff you into the sack with the superfluous barn cats and down the well you'll go.

Governor Bush escaped this childhood fate for the same reason Saddam Hussein is still feasting on frozen Kuwaiti zoo ibex: His father is really from Maine. Hightower's father was the real thing, though, a certifiable Texan, as revealed in the chapter "Daddy's Philosophy" (a Texan refers to his "daddy" all his life; the next generation of progressive Hightowers may well begin their anecdotes, "As my two daddies used to say. . . ."). Jim's daddy started Little League in Denison, and believed that "everybody does better when everybody does better." Young Jim misrepresented this as a prairie-populist call-to-arms and not simply the kind of truism parents are always coming up with. (Just yesterday I told my six-year-old, "I don't like doing some things either, but I do them." I sure hope she doesn't base her life on this.)

Humor is a funny thing. Hopefully. As a humorist, Hightower falls somewhere between Garrison Keillor and Woody Guthrie, had he never picked up a guitar...