Why are Americans so ignorant of what’s going on in the world outside our borders, even when our own government is playing a key role in those events? That’s a question that dogged Anne Kelleher, a professor of political science at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state, while she was lecturing in Ankara, Turkey, last year on a Fulbright scholarship. “I tried to explain to the teachers and students there why, during the U.S. presidential election, foreign policy wasn’t front and center. For them, it’s unfathomable that the most militarily powerful, the most politically influential country, with the most impact on the global economy, plus a culture that’s transformed the world via its media — how a country with that kind of far-flung influence can choose its leader with no attention to the issues that it faces worldwide.” Kelleher cited a January 2000 Gallup poll in which Americans asked to rank the importance of issues in the presidential campaign relegated the U.S. role in world affairs to 20th place.

Ignorance of history, as well as of current events, can have dire consequences. President George W. Bush’s use of the word “crusade” in describing his planned war on terrorism was a stunning misstep at a time when the U.S. badly needs to reassure the Muslim world that we aren’t on the verge of a new holy war. If that’s not disturbing enough, only a year ago the president’s national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, was talking nonsense to the New York Times and USA Today about Iran trying to spread Islamic fundamentalism to the Taliban and “doing all kinds of things with Pakistan”; Iran, a Shiite Muslim nation, is a foe of the Sunni Muslim governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Sunday, the Times reported that the “outline” of the U.S.’s war plan “often emerges from the private conversations” between Bush and Rice.

Eric Ransdell, a foreign correspondent for nine years in Africa and Asia and currently a documentary filmmaker living in Shanghai, China, blames the American education system for producing know-nothing citizens, people who in turn are unlikely to protest the decline in news coverage of foreign affairs. Recent surveys by such institutions as Harvard and the University of Maryland show that reporting on world events has dramatically shrunk in both the print and broadcast news media.

“For decades we’ve been reading about how American schoolchildren can’t find Mexico or Canada on a map, and yet nothing seems to change,” says Ransdell. “These people who don’t know the difference between Switzerland and Swaziland then become the main consumers of news. And in poll after poll they tell us that they want less foreign news and more of what I call ‘selfish journalism’ — which stocks to buy, sex and beauty tips, 10 steps to a healthier colon and so on. It becomes this horrible feedback loop where people are sent out of our schools in a state of complete ignorance of the rest of the world and then, maybe because they’re embarrassed, clamor for even less information on something they know almost nothing about.”

Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley, says that while “Americans are ever more involved in the world and ever less knowledgeable about it,” it’s the bosses at U.S. media companies who deserve the blame. “The broadcast media has decided to cut back on foreign news coverage in its infinitely craven efforts to pander to the largest and the lowest common denominator. This last week we’ve seen what the broadcast media is capable of when they’re let out of the constraints of ratings and the bottom line mentality. I’m hearing journalists saying ‘Wow, this past two weeks we felt dignified again. We’re able to do what we want to do and know how to do. We had the time and the resources and the suits were off our backs.’”

But even Schell can’t claim that any more than an “elite” of American news consumers craves reporting on world events. “Other people would prefer just to read the ball scores,” he concedes. Ransdell recalls, “When I was at U.S. News & World Report I heard about these focus groups we did with our readers where almost every time foreign news came in dead last in terms of what our audience wanted us to deliver. Mike Ruby and the other editors I was working for at the time all wanted more foreign coverage, more overseas bureaus and a bigger foreign news hole, but what could they do? The fact that as much foreign news finds its way into print and onto television as it does today is, frankly, a miracle given the yodeling ignorance of the American public.”

Editors of Web sites, who can track the actual number of readers who click on each story, confirm that foreign stories simply don’t draw readers. “Until the current crisis, our foreign news stories have generally attracted disappointing numbers of readers,” says Salon executive editor Gary Kamiya.

This national indifference has its foundation in a lack of the most elementary facts. When Osama bin Laden emerged as the prime suspect behind the attacks, demand for maps of Afghanistan and Central Asia reportedly skyrocketed. Kenneth Davis, a writer who has found a niche for himself by filling in the gaps in readers’ knowledge with his “Don’t Know Much About …” book series (including “Don’t Know Much About Geography”), says such rushes are nothing new. “We don’t usually know where these places are when the troops hit the beaches. It was no different in 1945, when people were scrambling to learn about Normandy.”

The roots of Americans’ global cluelessness are tangled. Davis traces a recent worsening of the problem “over the last 30 or 40 years” back to our educational system. “Geography is no longer taught in a lot of schools. It got morphed into something called ‘social studies,’ along with history and political science. As less actual geography was taught, we then had a lot of teachers who don’t know geography.” Although Davis feels geography is currently enjoying a revival at the elementary school level, most adult Americans were educated during the decline. “A vast number of Americans are utterly lost when it comes to knowing where we are in the world,” he explains.

Davis also blames the traditional “dry, boring” method of teaching geography — the old “principal products of Peru” approach — for the disinterest many people feel in the topic. Combining geography with history and other subjects into a dumbed-down category called “social studies” may have been a well-meaning attempt to make it more interesting, but the truth is that many Americans are also sorely lacking in rudimentary historical literacy. Kelleher, who at her “midsize, midlevel, comprehensive university” sees a great many average American college freshmen, says, “You find that a large cross section of students, even when you mention major events of world history — and I’m just talking about European history, things like the Renaissance — will give you blank stares.”

Some outsiders see American’s lack of interest in world affairs as springing from our national character as well as our educational shortcomings. Jonathan Clarke, a former British diplomat who is a foreign affairs scholar at the Cato Institute and writes a syndicated column about foreign policy for the Los Angeles Times, observes that some of this disregard results from the country’s “geographical isolation between the two oceans and with friendly neighbors. In Britain, you’re up against foreign affairs all the time. In America, you can go about your business without relating to the rest of the world, at least on the level of detail. You have to have some reason to know about foreign affairs and most Americans don’t need to.” Not, at least, until Sept. 11, when a nightmare version of “foreign affairs” showed up at America’s doorstep.

It’s also true, says Davis, that a certain isolationist tendency “goes back to the beginning of American political history. Washington and Jefferson talked about the dangers of foreign entanglements.” Clarke sees that vein of thought as a key part of America’s identity: “The first waves of people coming to the U.S. and many of the subsequent ones were people fleeing conflicts. And so when they came to the U.S., they said, ‘We don’t want to hear about that stuff anymore. We don’t want to be involved with choosing between, for example, Catholic and Protestant. We left that behind.’ People don’t want to carry with them the woes of Cambodia or wherever. The U.S. is an oasis, a cultural escape from quarrels that, when you get to the U.S., seem a bit petty. When the former Yugoslavia broke up, we said to them ‘Come on, grow up. Your differences are not that significant.’ Americans think they are beyond that sort of thing.”

But not, as we have bitterly learned, beyond the reach of those conflicts. In fact, the U.S. has long been deeply involved in the political affairs of the regions that the Sept. 11 hijackers hail from. Past U.S. actions have contributed to conditions that have allowed terrorism to flourish. In Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. withdrew from the region entirely once Soviet troops left in 1989, ignoring pleas from Afghans for help in getting their war-devastated country back on its feet. In the resulting anarchy, the Taliban took over, and Afghans continue to resent the U.S. for letting them bear the brunt of Western efforts to contain communism.

“I remember when that happened,” says Clarke. “We had people in the British diplomatic corps going to the Americans every day saying you can’t just walk away. They got absolutely no response.”

One of the ugly ironies of Osama bin Laden’s declared war on American citizens is that he is, in a way, calling us on one of our points of pride. Although many Americans aren’t fully aware of their nation’s policies, and the impact of those policies in the Middle East and Asia, if ours truly is a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” then aren’t we responsible for its actions?

If more Americans do decide, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, to get up to speed on geopolitics, they’re in for a rude awakening. Vivienne Walt, a South Africa-born U.S. citizen currently living in Paris and covering international news for a variety of American newspapers, sees Americans’ understanding of their role in world affairs as hobbled by political naiveté. “Americans have an extremely positive view of their country and political system,” she observes. Unfortunately, though, most Americans aren’t paying close enough attention to object when U.S. policy goes against that view. There’s a big gap between what many starry-eyed Americans perceive to be their nation’s noble role in world affairs and the routine self-interest that guides most governments’ foreign policy — including our own.

“One of the great grievances about America is that they’re supporting the Saudi [regime],” says Walt. “The Saudis themselves feel that America is supposed to stand for democracy, yet here they are propping up the totally repressive government they live under as long as it supports their economic interests. Here’s this huge power built on notions of freedom and democracy, yet they are living in an awful country with a terrible government and there’s no American support for change there.” (Most of the hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks appear to have been Saudis.)

Walt thinks Americans get a bad rap for having the kind of provincial outlook common in other Western nations (“if you go to some little town in Burgundy or in the heartland of France or the middle of England, people are exceptionally parochial”), but she nevertheless feels that “America sets itself up for its own fall. It proclaims freedom and democracy as central to what it stands for, so when they’re propping up someone horrible it’s very glaring. The French support the worst people in the world, but no one makes a fuss about it.”

Most observers agree that once the American public can be convinced to pay attention to problems in other countries, their concern is genuine. “When they do get exposed to the issues,” says Walt, “Americans seem to care very much. They get intrigued and want to help. In France, people are so blasé and cynical.” But even that practical impulse has its drawbacks. “Americans like straight answers to problems,” says Kelleher. “They’re the activist problem-solvers of the world. If there’s a problem out there, Americans think it should be fixed. And Americans like a situation that can be fixed in the foreseeable future. Look at terrorism: Does it lend itself to that kind of fix? No.” The complicated, delicate, sometimes centuries-old political conflicts of the Middle East seem custom-designed to exasperate an impatient people with little interest in the past.

In the past, the American public’s response to the maddening complexities of geopolitics has been to turn away, leaving the nation’s diplomatic elites to craft and execute U.S. foreign policy in a nearly scrutiny-free zone. That attitude now seems woefully outdated. With their own safety on the line, will American citizens finally give geopolitics the attention it deserves? Clarke hopes so. “If you look back to the most ill-informed action in U.S. foreign policy over the past 50 years,” he says, “I’d have to say it was the [Gulf of] Tonkin Resolution, and it was the elite who did that. All the guys you thought would take a more measured approach didn’t. So you can’t lay all the blame on ignorant Joe Six Pack.”

Kelleher sees the response to the current crisis as “going in two different directions. Some moderate, well-meaning people want to get their minds around the issues in the region. The second reaction will be a strong ‘Let’s bomb the Middle East. This is Christian vs. Muslim. Why bother to understand the people and why bother working with all the nations in the region to build a political position and strategize with them?’” She calls this second reaction “almost a glory in ignorance. It’s a pride in not understanding complexity in political issues,” arising in part from a long-standing anti-intellectual strain in American society.

Now, with the 21st century off to a shaky start, that prejudice may be one more dangerous luxury we can no longer afford. “When you start asking questions,” says Kelleher, “like Who are we going to bomb? Are we going to land ground troops? What are the ramifications of these actions? Who do we alienate? And the answer is the very people we need in order to effect an anti-terrorist policy: Arabs — to have to think through that is irritating because you need to know something, and people do not like to be confronted with their own ignorance.”

Because chick lit (whatever it is — or was) provoked so many ideologically fraught arguments about the values placed on women’s vs. men’s tastes, high- vs. lowbrow culture, comedy vs. drama and so on, it’s tempting to read particular significance into its decline. As the first species of popular fiction to treat its heroines’ professional aspirations as seriously as their romantic prospects, chick lit flourished at a time when ambitious young women poured into a robust job market, seeking both love and success, often with a heaping serving of pricey commodities on the side. A concept like the “Shopaholic” series (one of the most popular and least charming exemplars of the breed) smells decidedly off in the face of 8.3 percent unemployment.

Still, many pop-fiction genres have brief shelf lives. When I was a kid, the local drugstore where I bought Giant SweeTarts and Chick-O-Sticks had three rotating carousels of mass-market paperbacks. At least half of these sported covers on which a huge, shadowy house loomed against a stormy sky while a woman wearing a nightgown and a frightened expression fled into the foreground.

These were gothics, a subgenre of romantic suspense, which was (sort of) a subgenre of romance. (Also: The gothic is not to be confused with the venerable literary mode referred to as the Gothic.) Taking their pattern from original works like Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” the drugstore paperback gothics were highly formulaic tales of shy young women who came to work in stately manors full of strange doings and ominous secrets. These novels were once a mainstay of the pulp market, and publishers churned them out. (The Marxist critic Raymond Williams was said to be very fond of them.)

You can still find battered old gothics in junk shops and used bookstores, but as an instantly identifiable genre they’re no longer being published. Other expired genres, one-time staples of train-station book stalls and corner newsstands, include the exotic adventure yarn (perfected by writers like H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs) and the inspirational rags-to-riches bildungsroman now identified exclusively with Horatio Alger. Other genres, like the western, are still being published, but just barely.

What kills a genre isn’t always clear. Supposedly, the readership for the western turned to urban crime fiction sometime in the 1970s. Why? Were they simply tired of cowboys and gunslingers, or had the myth of the Old West been too thoroughly undermined by counterculture critics and Native American activists? Other genres, like a certain flavor of softcore fictional titillation epitomized by the stewardess “memoir” “Coffee, Tea or Me?” — naughty, but not quite explicit enough to qualify as “adult books” — were made superfluous by the increased availability of straightforward porn.

Meanwhile, still other genres become so successful they metastasize, splitting into multiple subgenres. The cozy mystery, perfected by Agatha Christie with her Miss Marple stories, has spawned a dizzying assortment of variations based on homey hobbies. There are baking mysteries, gardening mysteries and knitting mysteries. Paranormal romance — a hugely popular fusion of fantasy/horror, romance and (often) detective fiction — has cycled through creatures ranging from the predominant vampires to werewolves, fairies, demons, djinn and even dragons as the heroine’s love interest.

Perhaps the generation of women who spent the late ’90s and early 2000s reading about publicists flirting with their handsome bosses and hitting sample sales with their girlfriends has moved on to unfettered fantasies of supernaturally endowed lovers. Maybe they turned to more serious, movie-of-the-week problem novels like Picoult’s. Or they’ve already tired of all that and switched to dystopian YA, becoming part of the untold numbers of adult readers who have vaulted series like “The Hunger Games” to the bestseller lists. Who can say which of these genres will, like the police procedural or the regency romance, stick around for decades and which, like chick lit, will float away Mary Poppins-style with the next change in the wind? (Bear in mind that Mary Poppins kept coming back; horror fiction has died and risen from the grave several times.)

At the peak of its popularity, chick lit provoked all kinds of agitation: Earnest feminist brow-furrowing and spirited defenses of good, clean feminine fun; anti-chick lit anthologies and pro-chick lit anthologies; authors up in arms at having novels they viewed as literary packaged with the frothy illustrations of a more lucrative genre and authors who embraced the chick lit label flying into high dudgeon at seeing it dissed. Its specter continues to haunt women writers; the biographer Douglas Brinkley was recently lambasted for dismissing Jodi Kantor’s “The Obamas” as “chick nonfiction” in the New York Times.

One of the most heated panel discussions I’ve ever participated in was on chick lit; audience members stood up and dressed down several of the speakers, something that rarely happens at literary events. Since journalism thrives on just this sort of ephemeral controversy, I’m kind of sorry to see it go. A decade from now I’ll probably pick up a yellowing paperback with a bubble-gum pink cover in some dusty country junk shop and struggle to remember what all the fuss was about.

Further reading

Jennifer Coburn of the San Diego Union Tribune on the decline of chick lit

The Independent newspaper reports on falling sales for “chick-lit” authors

The Atlantic argues that the demise of chick lit has been greatly exaggerated

Mediaite on the kerfuffle over Douglas Brinkley’s review of Jodi Kantor’s “The Obamas.”

For all that, however, “Anatomy of Injustice” is also a blistering indictment of the death penalty. Assuming, dear reader, that you are yourself an opponent of capital punishment, it will only further cement your objections. It’s also a great book to hand to your less reflective or informed friends and relatives, the ones who may still support executions. Bonner, a Pulitzer-winning reporter who has long covered the issue for the New York Times and other publications, delivers a crackerjack feat of storytelling that steadily administers the truth about capital punishment like a slow, toxic IV drip.

The story begins with the discovery of a body in 1982: Handsome, well-off Dorothy Edwards, a 76-year-old widow and resident of rural Greenwood, S.C., who “could have passed for 56.” Her battered corpse was found in her closet by a neighbor. He helpfully pointed out to the police a beeping alarm clock, a full pot of automatically brewed coffee and an open copy of TV guide — all conspicuously pointing to a time of death — before suggesting that the 23-year-old man who’d recently washed Edwards’ windows seemed a likely culprit. Within days, the police had arrested Edward Lee Elmore, a soft-spoken, docile laborer of very limited intelligence, with the feeblest excuse for probable cause: Edwards had written Elmore a check and one of his fingerprints was found on the windows she’d paid him to clean. Do I even need to tell you that Edwards was white and Elmore black?

After that came a mockery of criminal investigation followed by a mockery of justice. The police failed to photograph the bed where they claimed Edwards had been brutally raped or to retain the bedsheets as evidence. Other evidence passed through an unusually large number of hands (some of them unaffiliated with the investigation), or disappeared and then eventually reappeared (or not). No one bothered to check out that so-helpful neighbor who discovered the body and recommended a suspect. The medical examiner delivered a convenient but highly improbable time of death in a report that an expert would later liken to the work of a “first-year intern.”

As for the public defenders initially assigned to Elmore’s case, one was a racist who referred to his client as “a red-headed nigger.” The other was, in the words of a detective convinced of Elmore’s guilt, “drunk through the whole trial.” The judge made no secret of wishing to wrap things up quickly. He allowed the father of a prosecutor’s best friend to sit on the jury and incorrectly informed the jurors that those who didn’t support the death penalty were obligated to recuse themselves. He also plainly indicated that he considered Elmore to be guilty. The locally powerful lead prosecutor engaged in a colorful array of misconduct. In a week, Elmore was sentenced to death.

Elmore’s advocates succeeded in overturning his conviction twice. He was awarded two additional trials. In the first he was assigned the same incompetent defense attorneys (Bonner describes it as a “video replay” of the original trial) and in the second (which was allowed to contest the sentencing only) a committed but inexperience defender was unable to outwit a wily, unscrupulous prosecutor to mitigate the penalty. Elmore’s case changed that young lawyer’s views on capital punishment by showing him a legal system plagued by outright finagling: “not human error,” he told Bonner, “but human manipulation … We don’t have the right as a civilized society to pass this judgment.”

Eventually, Elmore’s case came to the South Carolina Death Penalty Resource Center and Diana Holt, a freshly minted attorney at age 36. Holt had overcome a childhood and youth marred by sexual abuse, drugs and divorce. She was convinced of Elmore’s innocence and the further she and her colleagues pursued inquiries that should have been made by his original defense team, the more convinced they became.

Bonner is clear that most convicts on death row are guilty; at issue is not whether they committed the crime, but whether mitigating circumstances — in particular, mental deficiency — argue for life without parole. That death sentences will be appealed is taken for granted, but what Bonner underlines is the institutional defensiveness and inertia that makes those sentences so difficult to overturn. South Carolina judges were extremely reluctant to admit that South Carolina state attorneys and law enforcement could be negligent or deceitful, or their fellow judges remiss. A state attorney (like the one assigned to Elmore’s appeal) might one day expound on a prosecutor’s solemn duty to pursue justice not just victories, then battle fiercely to uphold a conviction even he can see is unjust.

Perhaps most appalling to the average citizen, the emergence of persuasive evidence of innocence after a conviction is often irrelevant to the appeals process. A condemned man’s defenders must instead rely on persuading judges that his constitutional rights were violated during his arrest or trial. “Innocence alone does not entitle a defendant to a new trial,” Bonner explains. While there are good reasons for this principle, it has led to such grotesqueries as a state lawyer arguing before the Missouri Supreme Court that an innocent man ought to be executed even if the court found “absolute” evidence exonerating him of the crime. (To their credit, the justices on that court ruled that “It is difficult to imagine a more manifestly unjust and unconstitutional result than permitting the execution of an innocent person.” Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court apparently disagree.)

In Bonner’s expert hands, the twists and turns of Elmore’s appeals, and the gradual discovery of the travesties in the original investigation and trial by Holt’s team, make for excruciatingly suspenseful reading. Perhaps some observers might object to the application of true-crime-style narrative devices to an issue so grave. But we love crime novels and courtroom dramas for the same reasons that we ought to care about the perversion that is capital punishment in America; all of us, deep down, want to see justice done. If it takes a Hollywood story line to get us to pay more attention to the contrast between our favorite fictions and the world we live in, then that seems fair enough.

Still, the dream of interactive books lives on, despite a series of digital disappointments ranging from hypertext fiction to CD-ROMs to experimental Web novels to current ventures in social reading. Previously, I wrote about the inherent tensions between interactivity and narrative in enhanced fiction e-books. Indeed, there’s little evidence that images, videos, sound effects or clickable doohickeys add anything of value in the eyes of most readers of prose fiction. As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, the enhanced e-book of Stephen King’s novel “11/22/63″ contained a 13-minute film by King himself, yet only 45,000 readers were willing to shell out the extra $2 to get it, compared to 300,000 who bought the unadorned e-book ($14.99) or the 1 million purchasers of the print edition ($35). King’s publisher expressed doubts that enhanced e-books were worth the extra trouble and expense.

Nonfiction, however, is another matter. While some developers labor in vain to improve upon the immersive storytelling of novelists like King, others are taking factual material that might have once been published between hard covers and turning it into strange and wondrous new creations. The most successfully enhanced e-book is the one you may not even recognize as a book.

The first among these were introductory science apps like “The Elements” (used to showcase the iPad’s potential when the device was first released) and astronomy apps like “Solar System for iPad” and “Solar Walk.” A recent release, “Back in Time,” lets the user turn the hands of a cosmic clock and scroll through a series of images to explore a timeline of the history of the universe. All of these books — for that’s the category they’re given in Apple’s App Store — use touch-responsive 3-D animation and other model-like features to help the reader visualize concepts well outside their everyday experience: vast distances in time or space, the motion of the planets and the relationship between molecular structure and palpable objects. Technically, I know that the earth’s tilted axis as it orbits the sun determines the changing seasons, but “Solar Walk” allows me to see it happen.

The popularity of science apps like “The Elements” no doubt encouraged Apple to move aggressively into digital textbook publishing with its recent upgrade to iBooks. The iBookstore, with its too-broad categories and abysmal metadata, has failed to emerge as a contender among retailers of trade e-books. Apple now seems to be concentrating its energies on the education market. IBooks titles can incorporate an array of visual, audio and video features, which make it possible for publishers to create books like “The Elements” for older students. Sometimes the results add little more than eye candy, sometimes not. The sample book released with the upgrade, “Life on Earth” by E.O. Wilson, sports a lot of beautiful photographs and videos, few of which are particularly informative, but the animations of cell activity do help make the weird-looking structures of the microscopic world comprehensible.

Whole categories of routine instructional books are in the process of being digitally revolutionized. Cookbooks can include demonstration videos for beginners and advanced forms of recipe organization for more practiced cooks. You can better learn to lift hand weights or fix a car or do card tricks from a combination of text and video. There’s not much glamour or art in enhancing such practical titles, but there’s a lot of common sense. The linearity of stories may be fundamental to the pleasure they offer, but in books like these, linearity was always merely arbitrary, imposed by the print book form. Hardly anyone reads them one page at a time, in order, from cover to cover.

Even a work of substantive narrative nonfiction, however, can be genuinely enriched with some basic multimedia add-ons. The enhanced edition of Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” comes with several short videos featuring the Mumbai slum dwellers who serve as the main characters in that remarkable book. These films form a moving version of the photographic inserts traditionally tipped into the center of biographies and histories. You can’t read the book without wanting to know what these people look like. However, since most readers deciding which version to buy haven’t read the book yet, it will be interesting to see how many are willing to spring the extra buck for the edition with the videos.

Boo shot the footage on a Flip camera as part of her research. Once upon a time (say, two years ago), these videos might have been offered for free on the author’s or publisher’s website. But not every nonfiction author just happens to have a lot of documentary images and video on hand, waiting to be repurposed for publication. The great problem with any e-book enhancement is cost. Original artwork, video and animation must be commissioned or the right to use preexisting works obtained. That gets expensive — really expensive. Voice-overs and readings call for the skills of professional actors. The whole kit and caboodle then has to be inserted into the text, which depending on how well-integrated it is, may require the expertise of programmers.

Most authors and book publishers aren’t in the business of producing this sort of thing. Add to that a prevailing attitude among consumers that e-books ought to be cheaper than their print counterparts — no matter what extras they include — and there’s not much incentive for book publishers or authors to take the trouble. As understandable as this reluctance may be from a business perspective, it’s still disappointing. Imagine how much more enlightening, say, a book on popular physics or the military campaigns of Alexander the Great or the current fiscal crisis might be with a few well-considered moving or interactive images.

An example, and one of the few enhanced e-books considered a genuine success, is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland,” an examination of the popular right-wing response to the counterculture of the 1960s. The enhanced e-book edition includes 27 clips, taken from CBS News archives, illustrating key events in a highly televised period of American history. Each clip is embedded in the page that refers to it. But bear in mind that the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, is a division of CBS, which surely made it much easier to obtain the rights to use those clips.

“Nixonland” started with a (celebrated) text, then added video. NBC News recently announced the formation of a digital book publishing division that works in reverse. It will produce titles on current events and personalities with the clips as the springboard, and then incorporate text from published books, NBC staff writers and freelancers. Companies who already know how to make videos, animated graphics and complex websites have the edge when it comes to publishing multimedia e-books. All they have to do is hire some professional writers. Traditional book publishers, on the other hand, have to figure out how to commission several types of visual media despite having little experience in working with anything but text. Besides, writing is cheap, right?

Not so fast. Complaints from app consumers about the weak writing in some otherwise spectacular digital books suggest that corner-cutting in this department is rife. Programmer- or designer-driven works often borrow text from Wikipedia and other public-domain sources, and this does not go unnoticed. One happy exception is the recently published “Skulls by Simon Winchester,” an app by Touch Press, the company responsible for “The Elements” and last year’s groundbreaking T.S. Eliot e-book, “The Waste Land.” The ever-debonair Winchester, bestselling author of “The Professor and the Madman,” not only wrote the text that accompanies the app’s 300 rotatable images of human and animal skulls (as well as artifacts representing the human head) — he also reads it. The result is informative and thoughtful as well as gorgeous and diverting. More, please.

Further reading

The Wall Street Journal on enhanced e-books

Both of these novels ask questions as difficult as those posed by any serious writer: Why do we suffer, why must we die, and what meaning can be found in any of it? More important, they are not afraid to respond to these questions unflinchingly. These books are often — very often — funny, but they aren’t frivolous. I can think of a dozen acclaimed contemporary adult novelists who blunder through this territory, wallowing in sinkholes of sentiment, tangling their narratives in thickets of saccharine fabulism. It makes no sense that the maudlin goo that is “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” should be classified as a work for adults, when “The Fault in Our Stars,” a far more mature rumination on the same themes, is regarded as a children’s book. Likewise, why should grown-ups be subjected to the cutesy “The Life of Pi” while teenagers get to revel in an astringent fable like “There Is No Dog”?

“The Fault in Our Stars” is told in the first person, with the sort of fresh, irreverent voice that inevitably gets compared to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. This story, however, comes from a character infinitely more appealing than Holden. Her name is Hazel Lancaster, and she is dying. The thyroid cancer that will eventually kill her is being held in abeyance by an experimental drug, but she still needs an oxygen tank, and she spends a lot of time worrying that she’s an emotional “grenade” for her parents. “There is only one thing shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re 16,” she observes, “and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” She’d prefer to limit the damage.

And yet, who could help but love her? Certainly not Augustus Waters, a survivor of osteosarcoma with a replacement leg he calls Old Prosty. The two meet at a support group, where they are suitably skeptical about the inspirational mottoes and the covert competition to end up among the 20 percent who’ll still be alive in five years. A tender, bookish, wisecracking romance ensues, fueled in part by the couple’s shared enthusiasm for a novel, “An Imperial Affliction,” Hazel’s favorite, yet something she mostly “can’t tell people about, one of those books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”

“An Imperial Affliction” ends in the middle of a sentence, and while Hazel thinks she knows why, she still wishes she could find out what happens to its characters. The author, who has written nothing else, lives reclusively in Amsterdam. The two young people hatch a plan to visit him and extract the answers to Hazel’s questions. It’s a quest complicated by the difficulty of traveling with oxygen tanks and prosthetics, but enabled by the sort of favors Hazel sardonically refers to as “cancer perks.” There will be grenades, but not in the places where you expect them.

The sparkling, satirical “There Is No Dog” extrapolates from a clever premise: If this world — “not just full of suffering” but “full of perversity, of things that go horribly wrong more or less at random. For the hell of it” — has a creator, the only deity messed up enough to have made it must be a teenage boy. His name is Bob, and he’s petulant, self-absorbed and hormone-addled. Most of the actual work gets done by the middle-aged Mr. B, a put-upon administrative second banana who spends his time frantically trying to limit the damage caused by Bob’s moods and negligence.

Bob got punted this job (“miles off the beaten track in a lonely and somewhat run-down part of the universe”) by his feckless mother, Mona, who won it in a celestial poker game. His initial efforts at creating light consisted of “fireworks, sparklers and neon tubes that circled the globe like weird tangled rainbows,” all of which Bob regarded as “very cool” even though they didn’t work. (The functional aspects of the solar system were executed by Mr. B while Bob napped.) Creating humanity in his own image (“one big fat recipe for disaster”) is this creator’s crowning misdeed and results in a long history of Bob falling in love with mortal women, an emotion whose agonizing ups and downs trigger bizarre weather and other natural disasters. “There is No Dog” begins just as a lovely assistant zookeeper named Lucy comes to Bob’s amorous and catastrophic attention.

Rosoff gets an impressive amount of mileage out of what might otherwise seem like a joke. This is largely due to a lively extended cast of characters who include Lucy’s mother, the dispirited vicar who pines for her, Mona’s terrifying poker buddy and his thoughtful daughter, Estelle. There’s also Bob’s neglected pet (“I don’t ignore him! Just last night I made him bring me some food!”) the Eck, an endearingly hapless “penguiny” creature, the last of his kind, in danger of being eaten by Estelle’s father.

It’s debatable whether Rosoff’s shrewd, trim prose might not occasionally fly just over the heads of teen readers. (Lucy’s mother is memorably described as “having the air of an expensive pony — sturdy, alert and well-groomed.”) But it’s rather thrilling to know that stylists of her caliber have dedicated themselves to writing for young readers, and that it doesn’t even seem to occur to her to pander to them. Not much in today’s culture inspires hope for the future — or at least not credibly so — but I count the knowledge that so many teenagers read and love books like “The Fault in Our Stars” and “There Is No Dog” as one of the bright spots.

“The Lifespan of a Fact” by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal documents the epic fact checking of “What Happens There,” an essay D’Agata wrote about a teenager who committed suicide by jumping from the observation deck of a Las Vegas hotel. Their exchanges merit publication in part because D’Agata is the leading light of a literary movement (largely confined to MFA programs in creative nonfiction) advancing the “lyric essay,” a form that combines elements of poetry with the prose essay. D’Agata has been militant in asserting his liberty as an artist to alter, invent or ignore facts in writing his essays, as well as critical of the eruptions of outrage that greet the increasingly commonplace discovery that some celebrated memoirist has embellished or fabricated parts of his or her work.

If this face-off between a meticulous establisher of truth and a bold champion of poetic license strikes you as a bit contrived, then I say: well spotted! A provocative excerpt from the book appeared in Harper’s last week, featuring each man performing his role to the hilt. Fingal pettifogs obsessively over whether there are 31 or 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas and D’Agata makes the absurdly highhanded pronouncement that “the rhythm of ‘thirty-four’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘thirty-one,’ so I changed it.” Several of D’Agata’s most dickish replies have been cherry-picked for inclusion.

This excerpt is not a fair representation of the book, but then the book itself is a travesty of the fact-checking process. The impression has been given that Fingal is a paid fact checker for Harper’s, the magazine that originally commissioned D’Agata’s essay. Actually, he was an intern for the Believer magazine, a literary journal that picked up the piece after Harper’s declined to publish it and that encourages its interns to volunteer for ambitious projects and pursue them independently. When Fingal tells D’Agata, early on, “It’s the job I was assigned to do, so I have to do it,” he is — ironically enough — not being strictly accurate.

Any lingering impression that Fingal is a put-upon toiler in the boiler room of journalism dissolves as he introduces more and more tedious digressions and unfunny wisecracks into an ever-burgeoning pissing match. Many of Fingal’s quibbles — such as asking D’Agata for notes on a guided bus tour he took as a college student in 1994, or insisting that the mountains southeast of Vegas look “brownish” to him, rather than “black” as D’Agata described them — are so over-the-top that the writer’s snappishness becomes understandable.

Fact checking, contrary to vague popular perceptions, is something of an art; not only does each publication have its own policy for substantiating facts, but each checker has his or her own approach. Nevertheless, there are many constants. Fingal’s method is eccentric, to say the least. For example, he tracks down and transcribes the National Institutes of Health’s definition of a drug that one of D’Agata’s quoted sources mentions only in passing, yet he never seems to have contacted any of the sources themselves, either to check their quotes or to verify their titles or biographical details. Much of what he does is unnecessary by even the most rigorous of magazine fact-checking standards (and glossy-magazine fact checking is as rigorous as it gets), and yet he neglects some basic techniques of verification.

D’Agata is no better advocate for his position. He offers the “rhythm” defense more than once, and when Fingal raises legitimate questions about his attempt to present suicide as a universal taboo across cultures and historical periods, he stoops to the retort, “Wow Jim, your penis must be so much bigger than mine.” (Although it must be said that this is a pretty fair characterization of the tenor of their arguments.) It’s not until late in the game that D’Agata engages Fingal in a substantive discussion of what he’s trying to do, best stated as “taking liberties” to make “a better work of art — and thus a better experience for the reader — than I could if I just stuck to the facts.”

The bonehead comments-thread response to this assertion is “There’s a name for that: fiction.” But there are enough confirmed facts in “What Happens There” — real names, people, places and events — that it doesn’t constitute fiction, either. Of course, the whole dispute could be fairly easily defused by labeling D’Agata’s work as a lyric essay and including an editor’s note (for the many readers as yet unfamiliar with the genre) explaining that it contains factual material but is not restricted to factual material. That describes most contemporary poetry, after all. A magazine like Harper’s might decide that it isn’t comfortable publishing prose works of this kind, but no reader could claim to have been misled.

Such a reasonable solution, however, would severely reduce the opportunities to grandstand about how today’s readers don’t “have enough deep experiences with art to know that that is what art is for: to break us open, to make us raw, to destabilize our understanding of ourselves and of our world so that we can experience both anew, with fresh eyes,” and so on. (Why is it that people defending purportedly innovative art always seem to fall back on the most shopworn cliches and the hokiest Romantic-hero narratives to do so?) D’Agata’s rhetoric in this section of “The Lifespan of a Fact” is so overblown in comparison to the substance of his quarrels with Fingal that the effect is comical. The freedom to remove a “clunky” comma from the name of a school or to “streamline” quotes from a newspaper interview seems unlikely to catapult a piece from a pedestrian bit of reporting to a “an enactment of the experience of trying to find meaning.”

Nevertheless, a case can be made for what D’Agata wants to do, and in his defense he maintains throughout “The Lifespan of a Fact” that he doesn’t claim to write “nonfiction” or “journalism,” and has never espoused or promised factual accuracy in his essays. However, he is (in “What Happens There”) writing about the death of a real person, a boy named Levi Presley, and Fingal suggests that the “gravity” of this subject urges greater fidelity to accuracy in each detail. D’Agata replies, “The important thing here is the search for meaning … I am seeking truth here, but not necessarily accuracy.”

Here is the crux of the matter and one in which fact checking plays an overlooked role. When I first read “What Happens Here,” long before I became aware of D’Agata’s provocateur status, I could barely finish it, and abandoned the rest of the book. The authorial voice was insufferable — preening and self-important. Many writers are indeed vain, but the good ones are able to keep this from infecting their work. Vanity has the effect of blinding an artist to the very truths D’Agata intends to pursue.

No genre scourges a writer’s delusions of grandeur and omnipotence more fiercely than nonfiction. The fact checker is its whip. Yes, as Fingal discovers in the final pages of “The Lifespan of a Fact,” even official records can contradict each other and sometimes the truth is impossible to determine. But most of the friction between D’Agata and Fingal in “The Lifespan of a Fact” doesn’t involved disputed facts, only aesthetically inconvenient ones. D’Agata would prefer that his interpretation and depiction of reality not be encumbered by having to accommodate such facts. He thinks his essays are better because he refuses to do so.

What effect does it have on a writer to be constantly confronted with facts that interfere with his or her stories about the world? It can certainly be maddening, as many a writer subjected to the ministrations of an overzealous fact checker can testify. It can mean 30-minute conversations about utterly meaningless quibbles. Fact checkers can also save your ass, a service that may not mean much to someone like D’Agata, who doesn’t care about being accurate, but which I have deeply appreciated every time I’ve benefited from it.

Mostly, however, fact checking — not just the experience of being fact-checked but often the mere expectation of it — makes you pay more attention to the world around you. It compels you to stop insisting on what you want things to be and to come to terms with what they are. It is, above all, a humbling experience, a perpetual process of correction that, far from instilling a false sense of certainty, makes you ever more alert to the myriad ways you can screw things up by falling in love with your own ideas or accepting a conventional truth at face value.

To me, this seems far more likely to break a person open and destabilize his understanding of himself and the world than hopping on D’Agata’s magic carpet ride of Art. The pity is that more nonwriters aren’t subjected to fact checking. It may not be fun, but it’s good for you.