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

• Author: Ivins, Molly

by Jim Hightower HarperCollins, $23

Jim Hightower of Texas, one of the nation's most outspoken populists, has hauled off and leveled a roundhouse swing straight at the snout of American corporations. And none too soon. Not only has the corporate oligarchy taken over pretty much everything--politics, media, sports, science, food, and the environment, just for starters--but we've also forgotten what real populism sounds like. Pat Buchanan, God save us, is regularly referred to by the Washington press corps as a "populist."

Now comes Hightower, all wool and a yard wide, who studied under the late Ralph Yarborough and other carriers of the true torch. Some of what Hightower has to tell us is not new--students of Morton Mintz, Bill Greider, and the handful of other serious muckrakers still practicing the craft will not be amazed to learn of daily corporate malfeasance. Even so, much of Hightower's work is as astonishingly original as it is wide in scope.

Debunking Breast Cancer Awareness Month is certainly novel: Who could be against Breast Cancer Awareness? Try finding out that Breast Cancer Awareness Month has been sponsored since its inception by Imperial Chemical Industries, one of the world's largest producers of organochlorines. Organochlorines? Increasingly suspected as a cause of breast cancer? Yup, the same. Every poster, pamphlet, and advertisement used for Breast Cancer Awareness Month all these years has been approved, or vetoed, by Imperial Chemical Industries. Hightower, a great pursuer of corporate connections, also finds that one of Imperial's corporate offspring manufactures a highly controversial drug that is the leading treatment for breast cancer, despite its serious side effects. They get you coming, and they get you going.

The book is studded with this kind of information: Who pollutes? Who profits? Who gives to campaigns? What do they get in return? Who benefits? Who pays?

Between 75 and 80 percent of the American people do not have college degrees and they earn less than $50,000 a year. Almost no one writes for them. Except Jim Hightower. One of Hightower's all-time better ideas (and he has quite a few) is that the media should either replace its daily dwelling on the Dow Jones Average (two full pages of stock quotations in most newspapers) with the Doug Jones Average, Doug Jones standing for the average American. How's ol' Doug doin' today? Anything happen helpful to him? Interest rates fall? Price of Spam up? Any heavy...