Them: Adventures with Extremists.

• Author: Heard, Alex
• Position: Extremist Sports

THEM: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson Picador, $24.00

NOW PROBABLY ISN'T THE BEST time to release a hip, ironic book about how funny extremists can be, what with the ongoing tremors over anthrax, airline safety, and international terror networks manned by ferocious Islamic Jew-haters. Still, it would be a shame if Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures With Extremists gets overlooked just because the national mood has shifted to no-kidding-allowed. There's hilarious reporting in here, and though Ronson isn't entirely sure about what to make of it all, he manages to serve up a fair amount of wisdom with the laughs.

Having worked this beat myself, I ask only three things of books about fringe people. First, the writer has m hit the road and put himself eyeball-to-bulging eyeball with his subjects. (Sounds obvious, but academics who theorize about the fringe often prefer to confine their research to the library, where you can't get hurt or hollered at.) Second, he should serve up solidly reported tales that deftly combine "funny" with "alarming," because that's the way it is out there--99 percent of the time, kooks are harmless, even strangely likeable, but there's always the nerve-tweaking possibility that their silly or offensive rants will translate into serious, violent action. Finally, the writing should advance an idea that's more nuanced than this all-too-common theme: "These people are weird, I'm here, let's sneer."

Ronson does just fine with the first two--his travels in Europe, the U.S., and Africa bring him in close contact with an amazing range of characters, among them Omar Bakri Mohammed (a notorious, Britain-based Islamic fundamentalist who describes himself as Osama bin Laden's "man in London," and who has been under close scrutiny since September 11); Rachel Weaver, daughter of Randy Weaver and a survivor of the F.B.I. siege of Ruby Ridge; and David Icke, a former soccer player who's gained infamy in Britain by insisting that most world leaders are, in fact, 12-foot lizards in disguise.

Ronson trips up on the question of what it all means, possibly because he's trying too hard to find a coherent narrative thread through a collection of experiences that, by nature, defy coherence. The driving motive is a quest. A British journalist/humorist and documentary filmmaker who is also Jewish, Ronson decided several years ago to travel the world to meet Jew-obsessed Islamic fundamentalists, American neo-Nazis, and so forth--at first...