The reality, when I made two trips to Afghanistan in 2002 to teach English and buy supplies for schools, was otherwise. From schoolboys at play to university students, Cabinet ministers to legendary commanders, Afghans were quieter, gentler and more self-contained than Americans. One young man confided that to him and his friends in northern Afghanistan, Americans’ body language and loud voices seemed exaggerated, like the gestures of stage actors.

It was hard to pity the women when I lived with an extended Uzbek Afghan family in Mazar-i-Sharif and Maimana for a couple of weeks. A withered 80-year-old widow sat bala, or at the head of the room, and she was the only person who smoked. The family’s resources were lavished on a bright teenage daughter, who had her own room and computer and was preparing for her university entrance exam. And the men were tender with their children and treated their wives, sisters and mothers with dignity. I felt at home more quickly than I ever have in an American household, and the fondness and respect I saw between young and old and men and women gave me new yardsticks for my own life.

Still, I often found myself unable to leave my American ways behind. When I asked my English students what they would buy their mothers if they were given $20, burqas (more properly called chadoris) were the gift of choice; when I asked what improvements the girls sought at Balkh University, they mentioned a changing room to put on their chadoris at the end of the school day. I was surprised at my own vehemence when I suggested that they throw the chadoris out instead. Later, then-deputy women’s minister Tajwar Kakar complained to me that the only topic female journalists wanted to discuss was the veil — not education, not job-training, just the veil. If I’ve finally gotten beyond this fixation it’s because I’ve started to suspect that it’s about projection, and that our deeply divided feelings about our own sexual culture makes Westerners so eager to attack other ways.

Whatever a Westerner writes about Afghanistan is going to be gravely wrong in some respects. But as long as we write with the awareness that we are probably projecting as much as we are describing, we might as well go ahead. After all, the goal of psychoanalysis is learning to recognize the transference and countertransference, not to stop us from ever falling in love again. Or in less specialized vocabulary, we’re not OK, they’re not OK and that’s OK too.

But for the way she nails the physical details, Norwegian journalist Asne Seierstad’s account of a large, unhappy Afghan family in “The Bookseller of Kabul” would seem to describe another country entirely. Seierstad has an eye for what looms large when you’re in a bad mood: the slipshod construction of Afghan houses, with gaping holes in windows and ill-fitting doors, the dubious sanitary arrangements, the grease in some of the food. She’s good at details, though either she or her translator never met a cliché they didn’t like. But of the many Westerners I know who’ve lived in Afghanistan, Seierstad seems among the least sympathetic to the country and culture.

In the spring after the defeat of the Taliban, the 33-year-old war correspondent lived for several months in the household of a 50-ish bookstore owner she calls Sultan Khan. She says at the start, “I was incredibly well treated; the family was generous and open,” but continues:

“I have rarely been as angry as I was with the Khan family, and I have rarely quarreled as much as I did there. Nor have I had the urge to hit anyone as much as I did there. The same thing was continually provoking me: the manner in which men treated women.”

Seierstad doubtless expects her readers to be nodding in agreement — we already know the truth about Afghan women, don’t we? — and, sure enough, “The Bookseller of Kabul” has broken all records for Scandinavian book sales, with a half million copies sold. This is a concrete demonstration that Orientalism is by no means out of style, even when handled by hands as crude as Seierstad’s.

Her choice to narrate from a God’s eye viewpoint — she does not appear in the story — allows Seierstad to cloak speculation and condescension with a veneer of journalistic veracity. Seierstad delivers the sensationalism she knows Westerners will lap up, describing Khan’s courtship of the 16-year-old who became his second wife, together with an obligatory Taliban book-burning, within the first nine pages. Seierstad has used omniscient narration to make it appear that these events, which she did not witness, are as objectively reported as the family’s cuisine.

“Seems like things are pretty bad over there,” a smart writer friend said to me with a grave look after finishing “The Bookseller of Kabul,” and doubtless many Western readers will assume that Seierstad is revealing the (single) “truth” about Afghan marriages and families.

Yes, like most Westerners, I find some of the bare facts Seierstad presents — notably how Sultan Khan takes a 16-year-old bride, Sonya, without consulting his middle-aged first wife, Sharifa — appallingly cruel. But isn’t it reasonable to think that the first marriage might have had some problems? The middle-aged Afghan men I met had grown old with their wives; polygamy is uncommon. And since Seierstad herself portrays the marriage between Khan and Sonya as relatively happy both in bed and out, Khan might have some good qualities Seierstad misses. Would we let a reporter get away with these sloppy tactics in America?

Perhaps because she deep-down believes that the people she is among are unfathomable savages, Seierstad never tries to find out why they do the things she describes. Sultan Khan himself remains an enigma, a man who endured two prison terms for selling books by immersing himself in Persian poetry, yet pulled his sons out of school to mind his shops. But Seierstad was too busy restraining her desire to hit Khan to find out who he is, or to try to explain his contradictions.

As the owner of the fabulously well-stocked and ridiculously pricey bookstore in the Kabul Intercontinental, Sultan Khan is easily identifiable in Kabul as a real man named Mohammed Shah Rais, and unsurprisingly, Rais isn’t happy. He insists that “The Bookseller of Kabul” defames his family and especially the honor of its women, and, most unusually, he’s seeking to sue Seierstad in Norway. News reports aren’t clear on the details of the case, or on what constitutes defamation under Norwegian law, but it seems that while Seierstad has dedicated $300,000 of her royalties to the Norwegian Afghan Committee, she paid the family nothing.

There aren’t any hard and fast rules about the ethics of these situations, but if Seierstad were truly concerned about the women and children of the “Khan” family, giving each of the adult women $10,000 or $20,000 would release them from dependence on the man Seierstad is eager to convince us is a monster. But this would imply that Seierstad cared for these particular human beings, as opposed to using them as props to demonstrate her preexisting opinions of Afghan society. In the plump publicity pack accompanying my copy of her book, one of several photos of Seierstad shows her with a group of Afghan women in a courtyard. Presumably they’re the women of the family, yet they’re not identified, as befits anonymous “victims.”

Of course, Seierstad’s experience isn’t invalid just because it was very different from mine. But even if Rais is a monster, that doesn’t entitle Seierstad to make sweeping generalizations about Afghan marriage. “In Afghanistan, a woman’s longing for love is taboo,” she writes. For love outside of marriage, yes. But surely not for a loving marriage. What would Seierstad make of the old Uzbek saying, meant to come from one aged spouse to another: “I hope we meet in the afterlife, because 50 years together was not enough”? The people who passed that down for generations cannot have thought of women as simply “objects to be bartered or sold,” even though the marriages they had in mind were arranged. And if body language, eye contact and tone of voice mean anything, the marriages I saw compared favorably with American marriages in terms of affection and, especially, respect.

Because Seierstad devotes so much space to sneering accounts of marriage negotiations, it’s worth adding a thought or two. In the Khan family, she notes, marrying one’s relatives is preferable. Here’s one place Seierstad didn’t generalize enough: In Afghanistan as a whole, most people marry their relatives when they can, and the marriage with a paternal first cousin is the most sought after. But in many ways this system protects women more than, say, Indian practices. Usually the spouses have known each other all their lives, and the new house the bride moves into contains relatives who are much less likely to abuse her than if she were marrying a stranger.

However alien the tradition of cousin-marriage may seem to Americans, for centuries it was the norm, and not only in the Arab world where it persists. As Germaine Tillion points out in her brilliant “The Republic of Cousins,” cousin marriage was the norm in the entire Mediterranean basin, including southern France and Italy, and among Jews. (Two of my mother’s older cousins married their first cousins, just 70 years ago). It’s even prevalent in Jane Austen’s novels.

Seierstad also stumbles in her account of the family’s social level. It’s misleading to give them the surname “Khan”, which in Afghanistan denotes old landed families who need not work for a living. Rais (which means “leader” in Farsi, and was probably a name taken during his ascent) is an upwardly mobile peasant from an illiterate village family — not a “good” family by Afghan standards, where genealogies may arch back a thousand years or more.

It’s true that the lives of the women of the Khan family don’t compare favorably with their best-case Western counterparts, educated, financially independent women with loving husbands and stable children. But the lives of the women of the Khan family don’t compare favorably with those of the Mazar household I visited either. Seierstad commits the major sin of writing about Afghanistan while failing to take into account her biases as an observer. Most Afghan women, I suspect, would find the lives of privileged, young professional women in chick-lit novels — working painfully long hours at jobs of questionable meaning and worth, living alone in a tiny apartment, dating boorish men, estranged from their family — lonely and pointless.

Additionally, Seierstad never considers that the family’s strained tempers or her own simmering rage might have something to do with the crowded conditions of the Khan family, whose three-room apartment in a once upscale but now decrepit Russian-built housing block housed as many as a dozen people. Would an Afghan journalist who lived with a Norwegian family in similar conditions report that all was sweetness and light? (My similar-sized Uzbek host family, by contrast, lived in a spacious house of more than a dozen rooms in an uncrowded area outlying Mazar-i-Sharif.)

This sort of parochialism and unwillingness to challenge one’s assumptions — together with a language barrier nearly all journalists are too lazy to cross — helps explain the uselessness of most writing about Afghanistan by outsiders. More interesting insights into Afghans, especially Afghan women, tend to come from anthropologists with good language skills (Benedicte Grima’s excellent “The Performance of Emotion Among Pashto Women,” which studies Afghan refugee women in Pakistan, or Charles Lindholm’s somewhat heavy-handed “Generosity and Jealousy,” about Swat Pashtuns) or those who went to Afghanistan to do a job rather than prove an ideological point, and spoke at least a little Farsi (Rosanne Klass’ elegant memoir of 1950s Kabul, “Land of the High Flags,” or Mary Smith’s artless, moving account of the women of the Hazara Jat in “Before the Taliban”).

But the best epigram I’ve ever seen about Afghans comes from the first Afghan-American novelist, San Francisco physician Khaled Hosseini. “Afghans cherish customs but abhor rules,” says a character in his moving debut, “The Kite Runner.” When you consider that Westerners are nearly the opposite, the inevitable collision of cultural styles becomes clearer.

Hosseini’s epigram can be unpacked to explain what I came to see as the Afghans’ tragic national flaw: risk-aversion. Coasting on the familiar tide of custom, insulated from the need for organized institutions by their hundred cousins, Afghans have been motivated to develop only the merest skeleton of a civil society. A tendency toward consensual decision-making and risk-aversion means stasis. Especially for those born into higher-status families, there’s more to be lost by trying and failing than there is to be gained by trying and succeeding.

Oddly enough, this propensity for risk-aversion, rather than a propensity to violence, may be the best explanation for Afghanistan’s often-decried “warlordism”: When thinking big is outlawed, only outlaws will think big. Most “warlords” in Afghan society are strivers from poorly connected, low-status families. Meanwhile, Afghan’s khan class — the landed gentry — collect advanced degrees and impressive job titles like ornaments, and treat government posts with tremendous casualness.

Precisely because few people want to rock the boat, it’s easily tipped over when someone does. Bad geopolitical luck, combined with the lack of strong civil institutions, leave custom and the gun as the two easy alternatives. Afghans can’t seem to stop killing each other because, like a couple in a bad marriage, they’ve never tried the scary venture of learning how to have survivable fights.

We Americans, on the other hand, don’t leave much to the realm of habit; we interrogate and debate everything; we are never satisfied. While we have created an immensely rich culture and a civil society that makes good on many of the utopian promises of 5,000 years of dreamers — religious freedom! Legal equality of the sexes! Universal education! — all too often we have the taste of ashes in our mouths. Cherishing rules over customs does not do much for the heart, and Afghans seem to understand this.

If you’ve ever thought much about numbers or talked with a preschooler learning to count, you’ve probably encountered some of the questions that led to Cantor’s discovery a century ago. How many natural numbers are there? (Naturals are just the numbers we count with: 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on up forever.) And what about the even naturals: 2, 4, 6, 8 and so on? Infinitely many in both cases, right? OK, but are there more naturals than evens? Clearly every even natural number is a natural number, but there are plenty of naturals that aren’t even — namely the odds: 3, 5, 7, 9 and so on. Does that mean that the set of naturals is bigger than the set of even naturals?

What about the positive rational numbers — fractions like 1/2, 17/23, 15/3? Are there more of those than the naturals? After all, the rationals include the naturals, since any natural number can be written as a fraction in lots of different ways (for example, 2 is 2/1, 4/2, 6/3 and so on). And what about the real numbers, which include the integers and the rationals, but also weird numbers like pi and the square root of 2, which can’t be written as fractions — are there more of those? Are there more points on a circle than there are seconds in eternity? How would you even begin to think about answering such questions?

Using reasoning that I’ve always thought of as his Squiggly Argument, Cantor proved that despite all the apparently extra fractions, there are just as many natural numbers as there are rational numbers. But don’t jump to the conclusion that all infinities are the same size — the gorgeous Diagonal Proof shows that there are more real numbers than naturals. A lot more — infinitely many more, mind-bogglingly many more. And Cantor used the same method of argument to prove that there are not just two sizes of infinity, but mind-bogglingly infinitely many. His work on these infinitely large numbers, called cardinals and ordinals, raised questions that ultimately shook math to its foundations.

Yet Cantor’s diagonal argument, in its essence, is so beautifully simple that even someone who hasn’t yet entirely mastered trigonometry can understand it. I know, because I did, and so can you, whoever you are. I’ve often wanted to share the thrill with my intelligent but mathematically innocent friends and family — English teachers, textile designers, photo editors, Internet journalists, soccer moms, wedding guests — and I’ve succeeded, too, whenever I can get them to stay put. Being stuck in an elevator together helps. But elevators don’t stall that often, so I was delighted to learn that the gloriously articulate novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace had written a history of infinity, with Cantor’s Diagonal Proof as its climax. Now at last, I thought, I’ll be able to spread the bliss without being treated like the Ancient Mariner.

Well, not really. “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity,” though bristling with felicities, isn’t for the mathematically timid. (Wallace doesn’t use the word “infinity,” but rather the sideways-8 symbol for it, which cannot be replicated in ASCII code.) In fact, it’s hard to figure out just who the book is for. I relished Wallace’s passionately erudite tone and the many exciting mathematical moments he helped me revisit, but there was nothing in “Everything” that I hadn’t learned as an undergraduate math major. On the other hand, readers who haven’t taken at least two semesters of calculus will probably have a hard time keeping up, despite Wallace’s many protestations to the contrary. If you enjoyed math but quit after calculus because you didn’t have room in your schedule; if you’ve forgotten quite a bit over the past few decades and want a stylish reminder; if you regret having focused on the discipline’s real-world applications and wish you’d paid more attention to its philosophical issues; or if you’re the captain of your middle school math team and have begun working through your big sister’s calculus book because you’re bored, then you’ll love this book. Everyone else, try it anyway and prove me wrong. (Go ahead — this elevator isn’t going anywhere.)

Appropriately enough for a book based on paradoxes, “Everything’s” chief virtues double as drawbacks. Wallace doesn’t try to hide the difficulty of his subject behind real-world examples, as many math writers do — instead, he tackles it straight on. Unlike science, math isn’t really about the real world: It’s about itself, its own assumptions and the conclusions they lead to logically. The sections of “Everything” in which Wallace discusses the philosophical urges and ways of thinking that underlie math are as charming as they are insightful. Like a true mathematician, he revels in abstraction, including proofs and mathematical notation where another writer would cop out and use metaphors. Only very occasionally does he make actual errors or simplify so much that the math looks wrong.

But readers familiar with Wallace may not be surprised to learn that he fetishizes technical terms to the point of becoming irritating and inconsiderate. (Pretentious? Lui?) For example, do you know what w/r/t stands for? Well, I’ll tell you, since Wallace doesn’t: “with respect to,” a phrase that comes up quite a bit in math classes, and that Wallace sticks into ordinary sentences from time to time in its abbreviated form. You might be able to guess its meaning from the context if you didn’t already know; but then again you might not, and Wallace has already tired your brain with so many necessary abbreviations that adding gratuitous extras seems rude.

Then there’s his choice to structure the book as a history of infinity, rather than a less chronological treatment. Wallace begins with paradoxes that troubled the ancient Greeks, such as Zeno’s brain twisters, including the one about how you can’t cross the street because you first have to go halfway across, then halfway across the remaining distance, then halfway across the remainder of that, and so on forever. (You may have encountered the version in which a hare loses a race to a slower tortoise who had a head start.) Centuries of mathematicians found infinitely large and infinitely small quantities tempting but problematical because of these and similar problems. If you know the math but not the history, it’s fascinating to watch whole branches of math (analysis, set theory) grow out of attempts to avoid or justify using these dubious infinities and infinitesimals in calculations. But the chronological structure seems to make it hard for Wallace to leave out any of the background. He’s like a hungry man in a grocery store, piling more and more and more into his 319-page book (or “booklet,” as he wishfully calls it). His appetite is inspiring, but I could have done with a lot less of the partial differential equations — sticky formulas from second-year calculus, sort of like algebra equations that use further, harder equations instead of the familiar x’s and y’s — and a lot more of the actual theory of infinite numbers that begins with Cantor’s cardinals and ordinals.

Oddly, Wallace stops with Cantor in the early 20th century. The next exciting advances in set theory come a few decades later with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. They don’t have much to do with infinity per se, and the novelist Rebecca Goldstein will cover them in another book in the same series anyway (I can’t wait — she’s terrific), so I can see why Wallace skimmed lightly over them. But infinity didn’t stop with Cantor. In the 1960s, John Horton Conway, a mathematician at Princeton, invented (or as he would say, discovered) a new number system, the “surreal numbers,” which takes the study of the infinite far beyond Cantor’s cardinals and ordinals. You can use Cantor’s numbers to measure things and, more or less, to count — but that’s about it. But with Conway’s surreals, calculations involving infinitely large and small quantities make precise sense for the first time. You can add, subtract, multiply, divide and even differentiate (an operation of calculus) with the surreals — you can use them in algebra and come up with meaningful answers. And the beauty of it is, they’re relatively easy to understand and explain. Wallace does mention a precursor of the surreals, the hyperreals, but I was disappointed not to find the surreals themselves in Wallace’s book.

On the whole, though, Wallace does an admirable job unwinding what he calls “the Story of Infinity’s overall dynamic, whereby certain paradoxes give rise to conceptual advances that can handle those original paradoxes but in turn give rise to new paradoxes, which then generate further conceptual advances, and so on.” Who needs boy-meets-girl when you can have mind-meets-mind-meets-truth?

Jagger, God love him (because somebody has to), comes off as an almighty pest, and Wood and Watts are perfectly charming and occasionally incisive. But after cruising through some 100 of the book’s 360 pages — or is it 3,600? — I found myself bypassing just about everyone else and heading straight for Keith.

Who else is going to come right out and say, “After all, the only thing Bill [Wyman] did was to leave the band and have three babies and one fish-and-chip shop!” (And on the next page, when he says, “I love Bill dearly,” you absolutely believe it.) When the others speak of poor Brian Jones, they make tiptoeing pronouncements about his insecurity, his low self-esteem, his confusion about his own direction and how it meshed (or, more accurately, didn’t) with that of the band. Keith — who had, of course, hooked up with Jones’ girlfriend, the glamorous, long-leggedy-beasty Anita Pallenberg — says, “He was a pain in the arse, quite honestly.”

For those who want to know more (and who doesn’t?), in another passage he lays everything out in more detail: “With Brian it was all self-consuming pride. If we’d been living in another century I’d have been having a duel with the motherfucker every single day. He would stand on his little hind legs about some piece of bullshit and turn it into a big deal — ‘You didn’t smile at me today’ — and then he started to get so stoned, he became something you just sat in the corner.”

Poor, dead Brian. And yet there’s something bracingly sympathetic about the way Richards talks about him — as if he realizes that making mealy-mouthed pronouncements about the dead does them no favors.

Even more than that, Richards, with his plain talk and his dedication to showmanship even when he’s being interviewed for a book and not performing, is exactly the kind of voice the Stones need right now. The Stones, it seems, want to be both a legend and a working band. How does any band pull that off, after sticking together (more or less) for 40 years? Even though rock ‘n’ roll seems to have been around forever, the Stones are only 10 years younger than the form itself; in that context, records like “12 x 5″ and “Aftermath” are rough parallels to the cave drawings at Lascaux.

In theory, I wholeheartedly believe that you’re never too old to rock ‘n’ roll. But in practice — well, I haven’t been interested in a new Stones record in years. Yet I can’t help being fascinated by the Stones themselves, partly because so much of their work has given me such great pleasure over the years, and partly because I’m awed that they’re still kicking around. I respect them for that, and in a way, I feel sorry for them: When the Beatles broke up, the fracture seemed premature, a crack in the universe the world wasn’t ready for (even if the band members themselves had more than had it by then).

But the Stones never granted themselves the luxury of leaving their audience wanting more: Instead, they’ve gone on playing past the point where many of their fans might have preferred less. And now they’ve stepped over yet another line, edging even closer to Steve and Eydie-dom: They’ve put out a coffee-table book about themselves. How un-rock ‘n’ roll is that?

“According to the Rolling Stones” is one of those leaden Christmasy books, the kind of thing desperate wives, girlfriends, moms and daughters buy for the men in their lives when they have no idea what else to get. In the book and elsewhere, the Stones are very cagey about their unspoken competition with the Beatles. Supposedly, of course, there was no real competition between the two outfits — and the cover of “Their Satanic Majesties Request” looks nothing like that of a swinging little record that the Liverpool four just happened to have put out some five months earlier.

In yet another feat of bold non-imitation, “According to the Rolling Stones” has the same glassy-eyed stiffness as “The Beatles Anthology,” released a few years back. It’s amusing enough to dip into, but there’s something dispiriting about trying to read the damn thing — you begin to feel like one of those obsessive completists who ostensibly loves music so much he can’t bear to actually listen to it anymore, preferring to marshal facts and anecdotes and recording-date thingamabobs, which are much more manageable than the slippery moods and feelings that music teases out of us.

All that said, “According to the Rolling Stones” does have some nice pictures. Covering the band’s nascence in the early ’60s (in their trimly cut mismatched clothes, they looked much more “street” than the Beatles, and cooler in a rufty-tufty way) right up through the release of the 2002 retrospective “Forty Licks,” the book is reasonably useful as a visual record of who the Stones were and who they have become.

There’s a photo of the elfin Wood curled up uncomfortably in a guitar case, like a cat who has adamantly decided to have a nap in a box that’s way too small for it. We get numerous pictures of the dapper Watts, who has aged the most beautifully of all the Stones — young or old, he manages to come off both dapper and utterly, likably regular at the same time. And, of course, there are many, many pictures of Jagger looking self-important, both with and without makeup. Let no one accuse me of being unfair to poor Mick, though: I pick on him only because he invites deflating like no other rock star, not least because his place in the rock universe is so firmly assured. And there are photographs here — including one very famous one, taken by David Bailey, of Jagger in a fur-trimmed hood, a blasé hipster Eskimo who’s just dropped in from the land of cool — that cement his position in the pantheon of the most beautiful creatures of the ’60s.

And yet, again, it’s Richards you can’t look away from. The Richards of the late ’60s and early ’70s had more innate, scruffy elegance than any other rock star of his (and perhaps any) era: Swathed in scarves and decked out in chunky silver jewelry, he’s both dashing prince and exotic princess, sly seducer and debauched maiden, a man so completely in control of his masculinity that he can’t resist wrapping himself in its feminine complement. But he never came off as fey or affected: His look wasn’t about bending genders, and it wasn’t an art-school statement. Striped pants, ruffled blouses, white leather boots with lizard-skin cap toes: It appears that he simply wore (and to this day, continues to wear) what he likes, not as an affront to conventional notions of how men should look, but as an outright reinvention of them — a way of saying that all men have something of womankind within them, and vice versa, so why not take advantage of all the available options?

And despite his infamous excess, Richards seems to remember more colorful details than anyone else in his band. At one point, Charlie Watts tries to downplay an episode during the ’80s — a period during which, he admits, he was drinking heavily — when he went for Jagger: The group was spending some time in Amsterdam and Jagger decided he wanted to speak to Watts. Jagger got on the phone, asking, with obvious insolence, “Where’s my drummer?”

“He annoyed me,” Watts explains, “so I went storming upstairs and told him not to say things like that.”

Keith picks up the story and runs with it: “There’s a knock at the door and there’s Charlie Watts, dressed in a Savile Row suit, tie, hair done, shaved, cologne. He walks across to Mick, grabs him and says, ‘Never call me your drummer again’ — bang. On this table is a great silver platter of smoked salmon …”

For the rest of the story, you’ll have to read the book. Or at least just the Keith sections. At one point, Richards fumes about being hounded by law enforcement goons on both sides of the Atlantic, simply because they wanted to make an example of him as a symbol of excess: “At the end of the day you don’t mess with me. There’s no point in doing it. I’m only a guitar player, I write a few songs. I’m a troubadour, a minstrel — it’s a long-established profession. That’s all I do. I don’t have any big aspirations. I’m not Mozart.”

Maybe that sounds a little too self-effacing, coming from one of the most revered guitarists in rock history. But it also sounds astonishingly sensible. Maybe next year’s hot Christmas item should be one of those little books that grace bookstore checkout counters everywhere — “The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards.” It could even come with a companion volume: “Keith Richards’ What Not to Wear,” including tips for making a staid daytime outfit suitable for all-night rockin’ just by adding a few key accessories, like a skull ring or a Moroccan scarf. Keith Richards is a man who knows how to live, and there’s plenty we can learn from him. Chicken soup for the soul, bloody ‘ell.

Passing was a much-hyped subject during the Harlem Renaissance, which produced a plethora of rich fiction about it: Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Jessie Fauset’s “Plum Bun,” Walter White’s “Flight.” The subject had its Hollywood heyday; melodramatic passing flicks from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s include “Pinky,” “Lost Boundaries” and two big-screen versions of “Imitation of Life” (the latter version, directed by Douglas Sirk, probably still delights the Kleenex industry).

But along came the ’60s. And with it, Black Power and other ideologies that made the saga of passing — and the act of passing itself — soppy, weak-kneed and thus unhip. Passing was passé, critics said, because racial pride was where it’s at. Whether prophecy or prescription, their words proved accurate, for a while, at least: The subject never vanished from public or private sectors, but it did step aside for a hot minute or two.

That hot minute is over. Passing, these days, is anything but passé. This week Anthony Hopkins, neither a black man nor a Jew, saunters onto the big screen to play a black man passing as a Jew in the long-awaited screen version of Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain.” Last month, journalist Brooke Kroeger’s collection of case studies, “Passing: When People Can’t Be Who They Are,” earned solid reviews and prompted a National Public Radio program on passing. Brent Staples recently penned a series of New York Times editorials on the subject.

All this is the crescendo of a passing wave that’s been approaching for several years now: In the late ’90s, two highly touted novels — Danzy Senna’s “Caucasia” and Colson Whitehead’s “The Intuitionist” — featured passing plots, and as race-based memoirs became practically the only memoirs worth publishing, real-life passing narratives (like poet Clarence Major’s “Come by Here: My Mother’s Life”) resurfaced on shelves.

This passing renaissance — no pun intended — represented something rare: A trend that germinated in the ivory tower was trickling down to the masses (not, as is usually the case, vice versa). It began in the mid-’90s, with cultural-studies academics who gave renewed attention to passing narratives, got them reissued in snazzy Penguin editions, and wrote occasionally readable, theoretical books about them. The best of these was a 1996 Duke University Press anthology, “Passing and the Fictions of Identity,” which Kroeger — who’s clearly done her academic homework — cites.

Kroeger cites it because this anthology, like her book and “The Human Stain,” embodies racial passing, new-millennium style: Among other things, it isn’t limited to black-as-white. “Passing puts us in touch with the wondrous ability each person has to create and recreate the self,” Kroeger writes. Her book includes blacks passing as white, yes, but also a gay man passing as straight, a white woman passing as black, and a Jewish Latina (her richest subject, because it encompasses the theoretical trinity of race, class and gender).

There’s passing that Kroeger aptly deems “good-guy adventuring,” which is really just disguise: Frank Abagnale in “Catch Me If You Can,” or Joshua Clover, a poet whose writing persona was Jane Dark — Village Voice music critic, feminist and high-lowbrow aficionado. Kroeger offers a sketch of passing’s progressive arc: “from inadvertent passing to passing for fun to passing part time or full time to passing all the way or breaking the cycle at any point.”

Kroeger’s broad definition of passing is really too broad, however, so broad as to render the term almost meaningless. Refusing to allow for historical differences between forms of passing, her definition also isn’t precise enough: Though Jane Dark’s public “outing” may have ruffled few feathers, the public fuss over the young “Latino” writer Danny Santiago’s 1983 memoir “Famous All Over Town” (Santiago was really a white man named Dan James), or Binjamin Wilkomirski’s 1994 Holocaust memoir “Fragments” (Wilkomirski was neither a Jew nor a survivor), proves that even in the literary world, not all passing is equal. We have long guarded the gates into some identities more closely than others.

But even without its necessary distinctions — between passing that’s based on physical traits (black-white) and passing that isn’t (gay-straight), between the slippery categories called “ethnicity,” “race” and “nationality” — Kroeger’s definition gestures toward an America that’s finally giving due attention to racial binaries other than black/white. It’s in line with the sort of passing narratives making rounds nowadays: gender passing in “Boys Don’t Cry” and “The Crying Game,” Jewish-Gentile passing in the 1990 film “Europa, Europa” and books like Stephen Dubner’s “Turbulent Souls,” Susan Jacoby’s “Half Jew” or the 2000 anthology “Suddenly Jewish.” Name the category — Latina? Italian? Senior citizen? — and odds are someone’s written about passing for it.

So what to make of this passing fad? Here’s the simplest explanation: It goes hand-in-hand with new-and-improved notions about race and identity. Passing “upends all our tidy little methods of recognizing and categorizing human beings,” writes Kroeger, and “makes us wonder what exactly makes an identity authentic, or if and how authenticity matters.”

Bingo: In the context of race, “authenticity” and “identity” have truly begun to unravel. This began when biologists, finding more variations than commonalities among so-called races, debunked race altogether. First for the highbrow and then for the masses — increasingly informed that multiracialism is our destiny, glimpsing the “new face of America” on the cover of Time — race became the emperor’s new clothes. The public imagination slowly began coming to grips with an idea voiced half a century ago by Walter White, the blond-haired, blue-eyed “black” man who once ran the NAACP: “We do not see color. We think it.”

Nothing embodies this notion — race is an idea, not a physical truth — like passing. If color is thought and not reality, why, after all, can’t a blue-blooded Welshman named Hopkins play Coleman Silk, American black-cum-Jew? And why can’t Wentworth Miller, an actor of mixed heritage, play the young Silk? More broadly, why should someone whose father is black and mother is Jewish, who looks “white as snow” (as Coleman’s mother describes him), be bound to any single race?

He shouldn’t. And that — insist Kroeger’s book, Benton’s film and most other contemporary passing narratives — is precisely what separates new-school passing stories from old-school ones. Back in the Jim Crow days, Nella Larsen or Douglas Sirk delivered punishment — usually death — to passers, whom we were meant to believe had overstepped “natural” boundaries. Sure, passers offered a revolutionary moment or two, a scene in which they radically questioned rigid racial lines. But in the end, melodramas like “Showboat” and “Pinky” upheld such categories. Passers were deemed to be essentially black, via the slavery-era “one-drop rule,” and the scene in which they owned up to this one drop was their moment of undoing and the narrative’s climax.

According to Kroeger, the contemporary passer’s unmasking doesn’t produce this sort of tear-jerking drama. “It usually provokes some surprise, no doubt some gossip,” she writes, “but then what ordinarily follows is a big ‘So what?’” Savvy postmodern minds — critical of race as a category and thus too sophisticated for its unyielding distinctions — empathize with and often champion passers, Kroeger argues. We don’t chastise them for committing the great sin of denying some true, essential self; what’s a “true self,” anyway?

Kroeger’s point — her “so what?” — is at the heart of “The Human Stain,” which — like Roth’s novel, first conceived during the ’50s but set in the ’40s and the ’90s — is really two stories sewn together. One is a traditional passing narrative of the American 1940s, when a young Coleman Silk breaks his mother’s heart by electing to pass for white and date Steena Paulson, the very embodiment of white womanhood (Danish and Icelandic — do they come any whiter?). Upon discovering that she’s fallen in love with a “black” man who only looks white, a shocked Steena tearfully exits the film and Coleman’s life.

The unraveling of this love story is set in deliberate contrast to that of the other film embedded in “The Human Stain.” Set in the contemporary moment and thus pervaded by our modern-day dysfunctions (race-, class- and gender-related), this film is a May-December romance between Coleman and Faunia Farley, played by a Nicole Kidman who looks more emaciated than ever (representing her frailty, perhaps? Her un-bootylicious whiteness?). Though viewers never witness Faunia’s reaction to Coleman’s confession about his past and his race, the film’s opening scene — Faunia resting peacefully on Coleman’s shoulder — establishes her reaction as indeed somewhere along the lines of “so what?” The point is obvious, but Coleman’s sister spells it out for us: “Nowadays it’s hard to imagine that anyone would do what Coleman felt he had to do.”

Via different mediums and different tones — “Passing” has moments of uplift while “The Human Stain” is all tragedy — Kroeger and director Benton are really making the same point: Passing is passé not as a topic, but as an activity. At a time when we’ve supposedly reconsidered race and outgrown Jim Crow-era racism, there’s no reason to pass anymore. The impetus for producing movies and books about passing is thus to insist on a paradox: We ought to talk about passing again in order to assert that it’s a dead issue. Passing, the thinking goes, isn’t passé as a subject — precisely because it is passé as a course of action.

But there’s the rub. Can we really suggest that passing has passed, a casualty of older-and-wiser theories about race?

Tell that to the woman who, empathizing with one of Staples’ New York Times editorials, described growing up in “a ‘passing’ family” and had her letter published under the heading “Black, White and in Pain.” Tell it to some of my blunt college students, who deem the benefits of passing alluring as ever (“Hell, I would if I could,” one of them sighed after class, speaking with more than a measure of envy about a passing co-worker). To say that passing is passé is to say that racism, which produces passing, is passé. And that’s one of the Great American Fantasies.

As long as there’s white privilege, as long as there’s racism of the “but would you let your daughter marry one?” variety, passing will exist and “so what?” won’t be the most frequent reaction to it. Offensive racial ideologies are like roaches: Just when you think you’ve eradicated them, they crop up again and your apartment looks just the way it did a week ago. Until we come up with a magical race-equalizing version of Raid, black-to-white passing won’t, practically speaking, have its last stand.

Neither will it vanish, theoretically speaking. Here’s where things get slippery: Though it seems to undermine essential racial categories — when someone who looks white isn’t white, then who is? — passing ultimately reinforces them, because talking about passing from one race to another assumes that there are distinct races to pass in and out of. Despite her well-meaning claims about the elusive qualities of identity, Kroeger serves up a title as essentialist as they come: “When People Can’t Be Who They Are” insinuates that there’s indeed a true self, a certain racial “are” whom passers can’t “be.” Most of her subjects, usually in the process of finding a racially appropriate mate, ultimately locate this “are” and thus settle into a “true” self, much as old-school passing figures did.

Kroeger, hip to passing paradoxes, tries to find an out by tinkering with the definition of “passing,” which produces another mess: If passing is race-based, and race, as progressive minds know, doesn’t actually exist, then no one can be a passer; if passing is about identity-shifting more generally, then everyone is a passer. So Kroeger distinguishes passing from everyday identity-shifting by claiming that only a passer doesn’t “recognize the persona she assumes as her own.” But this isn’t fully convincing, and neither is the lip service she pays to the artificiality of race.

Any truly anti-essentialist framework must embrace a technical truth: Despite the legacy of the “one-drop rule,” someone who’s both black and white is passing for black as much as he’s passing for white. “The Human Stain” sidesteps this issue because Coleman’s parents are both defined as black, but Coleman’s white ancestry is written all over his face — so why can’t he claim it?

“The Human Stain,” like “Passing,” ultimately can’t buck the essentialist conventions of the passing story. Not only does it begin with tragic death for the passer — his punishment? — but the film is described by Benton as modern-day Greek tragedy. And what is Greek tragedy if not didactic, eager to render retribution to those who hubristically overstep natural boundaries? The film employs almost every stock element in the classic passing-narrative book, most notably a long-suffering black mother who — standing in for the African-American race — endures the sting of her son’s rejection.

So essentialism wins out in the end. It does in my classroom, too: With their proclivity for statements about being “essentially” black or “really” white, my students — wise and insightful in so many respects — remind me that claims about how racially progressive we’ve become are overstated and optimistic. So does another recent letter to the Times, which asserts — in terms to make racial theorists cringe — that “being black is not something you can teach or mimic … it’s simply who you are.”

We like our solid selves. How, after all, does one actually live in a racial free-for-all, a world in which all identity is (to quote Samira Kawash’s study of passing) “not what we are but what we are passing for”? Even Harvard race guru Randall Kennedy, whose “Interracial Intimacies” argues for a choose-your-own-race approach (he calls it “free and easy entry into and exit from racial categories”), admits that such a world could produce “some racial fraud, or even a considerable amount of it.” Such a world also runs contrary to our passion for security, for the type of identity comfort zone that even Kroeger’s shifting subjects stake out in the end.

More than anything else, today’s passing fad is about the gulf between theory and practice. Yes, race is dead and passing passed with it — but no, they’re not. Academic jive about race as a “disproved” concept is, well, jive; good old Race, rigid and old-hat, lives on in our hearts and minds. Slay something — blackness, whiteness, Latino-ness — in concept and you haven’t slain it in the flesh.

So where does the solution lie? For “The Human Stain,” in language. The film is structured on the struggle of blocked writer Nathan Zuckerman (Roth’s alter ego, played with understated pathos by Gary Sinise). Nathan finds his story in Coleman; he finds it, then, in passing. To clean the human stain of racism — to out that damned spot — is to make narrative about it. Talking is the cure.

Thing is, that produces yet another paradox: The more we talk about the end of race (or of passing), the more it thrives in our discourse and thus in our consciousness. The article you’re reading, which objects to our fixation on race, ironically perpetuates this same fixation. Does this mean we — I — ought to shut up? That’s a tall order, considering that the subject is as eternally hot (if not quite as steamy) as Ben and J.Lo.

It’s also a tall order because we hold dearly to at least one Freudian tenet: In knowledge lies healing, and analysis extricates us from quagmires, racial and otherwise. It’s hard to dispute that — but as contemporary chatter about race and passing makes clear, it’s also easy to overstate it. The wisest move is the most obvious one: Take talk with more than a few grains of salt. Keep theorizing about the passing of passing — as Kroeger, Roth and others do — and hope that time will make theory and practice, the real and the ideal, better bedfellows.

Yet there was something about the siege that makes it just as relevant now as it was the day it was finally resolved. It was a microcosm for years of struggle that unfolded in real time as we watched on television or followed it in the newspapers. Very rarely does such a brief moment seem to embody so completely the overwhelming scope of the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even rarer is the book that, by helping us to understand the minute dynamics of an event like the siege, actually expands our understanding of the forces that drive the conflict as a whole.

At its best points, this is exactly what Joshua Hammer’s new book, “A Season in Bethlehem,” accomplishes. Taking us behind the church’s protective walls and well beyond what we saw on TV or read in the press, Hammer’s account of the siege thrusts us into the heart of the action — the clashing egos, the tense negotiations, the dwindling supplies of food, patience and sanity — and into the heart of what makes Israeli-Palestinian relations so frustrating and so hopeless.

By using a slice of history to illustrate the conflict as a whole, “A Season in Bethlehem” follows in the tradition of another impressive piece of reportage, Tom Segev’s “1949, The First Israelis,” which examined a single watershed year — immediately following the birth of Israel — to illuminate the significance of many years of war and struggle. While Hammer’s book may lack the impressive historical research and narrative sophistication of “1949,” it makes up for these limitations by doing what it does best: focusing on the intricate drama of the siege itself, painting a picture of the action so complete it seems at times as if Hammer — who is Newsweek’s Middle East correspondent — must have been locked in the church himself.

To move the narrative along, Hammer keeps track of a few principal characters inside and outside the Church of the Nativity. Inside, there’s Ibrahim Abayat, the leader of the Bethlehem wing of the Palestinian militant group the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade; Chris Bandak, his Christian friend and underling; Mohammed al-Madani, the governor of Bethlehem; Omar Habib, a young resident of the city who was unlucky enough to get trapped in the compound; and Father Parthenius, a Greek Orthodox priest. Outside, there’s Mike Aviad, an Israeli army reservist, and Leor Littan, the chief Israeli negotiator. The gaggle of characters can get confusing — in fact, I spared you the names of several people who also played a significant role. But the crowded cast is necessary, because each individual represents a different element of the Palestinian and Israeli societies stuck in their seemingly eternal tango.

Abayat, the militant, forces his way with his men into the church to hide from an Israeli military onslaught launched in response to the increasingly violent Palestinian uprising, then nearly two years old. At first, Abayat is arrogant and defiant, sparked by the same anger that drove his attacks on Israeli soldiers and settlers. He refuses to accept any compromise, anything less than total freedom. As the days pass, though, food supplies dwindle to nothing, and the church walls start to feel more and more like those of a cage, not those of a sanctuary. His resolve weakens. Once resigned to the fate of a martyr — death at the hands of the Israeli enemy — he finally accepts banishment from his home in the West Bank, the ultimate humiliation for a Palestinian.

It’s easy to take Abayat’s case and extrapolate, to use him as a metaphor for all Palestinian militants and perhaps to conclude that the only way for Israel to stop them is to defeat them utterly — starve them, break their spirits, remove them from the land. But Hammer reveals that the situation of the siege, and likewise of the conflict as a whole, is far more complex, and its solution far from simple.

As he remains trapped with the militants, Father Parthenius — who once loathed the extremists who made life for the average people of Bethlehem so difficult — starts to empathize with them. Parthenius is not himself Palestinian, but by the end of the siege he identifies with men whom Israel has labeled terrorists, and with their cause. Then there’s the boy, Omar Habib, who goes to a good school, his future full of potential. By the time he wins his release from the church, though, he is fed up both with the militants, who don’t want him to leave, and with the Israeli military, which has tried its best to starve him. In the aftermath of the siege, his resentment threatens to push him in the direction of the militant groups, following some of his brothers who made the same decision.

There is no easy answer for ending the siege, just as there is no easy answer to ending the years of animosity between Palestinians and Israelis. Hammer uses the characters to brilliantly depict the divisions and strains — the plurality — of Palestinian society that are so often overlooked by outside observers.

Each person, in the transformation he undergoes during the siege, becomes a living symbol for a different facet of society. The structure of the church embodies the experience of life in the West Bank or Gaza, territories whose borders are controlled entirely by a foreign power: feelings of being stuck, trapped in cramped quarters with limited resources at your disposal, finding yourself forced to form alliances with people you would normally hate, even as you fight your best friend over a last scrap of bread. Wanting to escape just as much as you wish you could hold on.

Of course, the potential problem with treating individuals as universals, as metaphors, is that it becomes easy to lose track of their unique identities, what makes them three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood people. Hammer’s characterizations do encounter this problem — particularly when he deals with subjects with whom he has a hard time empathizing.

By far the most “real” character in the book is one who plays no role in the siege itself. This is Samir Zedan, a Bethlehem Christian who serves as Hammer’s translator — and who also becomes Hammer’s good friend. Zedan is portrayed as being warm, funny and industrious, if at times bigoted against Muslims and Christians from different sects. He has his fair share of good qualities and bad. In other words, he’s human.

On the other hand, Ibrahim Abayat, who’s held up as the quintessential militant, comes off as being less than human. Hammer does provide us with the extensive history of the Abayat clan, and it’s a violent history indeed. But this mess of names and dates doesn’t help us understand Abayat any better as a person. Granted, Hammer had more access to Zedan, his friend, than to the extremist, which undoubtedly made painting a picture of Zedan easier. But part of the problem seems to come from Hammer’s own attitude about Palestinian militancy in general.

At the end of the book, Hammer visits Abayat in exile in Spain. Abayat is lonely, stripped of his bravado, perhaps even pitiable. Yet Hammer cannot get past Abayat’s complicity in attacks on Israeli settlers. “In my mind, Ibrahim Abayat was a sociopath whom the intifada had elevated into a freedom fighter,” he writes.

Maybe. But it’s impossible to ignore that Abayat’s story is not an aberration. As Hammer himself notes, the vast majority of Palestinian society at the time supported the violent measures used by people like Abayat. Surely they’re not all sociopaths. By automatically writing off Abayat’s behavior to mental defect, Hammer squanders any chance at an honest evaluation of what lies at the roots of not only Abayat’s militancy, but that of much of Palestinian society. What results is a flat characterization that makes for both weak journalism and weak storytelling.

What is even stranger, perhaps, is that the second-most underdeveloped character is Hammer himself. The book jacket emphasizes that this is a story of Bethlehem’s disintegration “as witnessed by a reporter who was there from the beginning.” In fact, we only really get to hear Hammer’s perspective at the very end of the book. For some readers, Hammer’s decision largely to exclude himself will be welcome — after all, the book is about Bethlehem, right? Yet while I was reading this I couldn’t help wondering what kind of impact — emotionally, mentally, spiritually — all these events were having on an American who had just arrived in the Holy Land. Perhaps a window into Hammer’s soul would have added some valuable internal landscape to the narrative.

Likewise, readers looking for a nuanced portrait of Israeli society — or the Israeli position in the siege — may also be disappointed. While Hammer’s book goes a long way in exploring the complexities of Palestinian life during the most recent intifada, only a few significant Israeli characters populate his book.

The principal Israeli character, reservist Mike Aviad, is a former peacenik who just can’t understand why the Palestinians reverted to using violence against the Israelis after the failure of Oslo. Aviad is a very sympathetic character, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But by focusing solely on Aviad, Hammer robs us of the kind of complex portrayal of Israeli society that he so masterfully provides of the Palestinian side. Even Israel has its fair share of militants — and they arguably have just as large an impact on their nation as Palestinian extremists have on life in the West Bank and Gaza. You would never know that from reading Hammer’s book.

On the other hand, some readers may also lament the fact that Hammer doesn’t spend more time profiling Jewish victims of Palestinian violence, to better represent Israel’s reasons for reoccupying Bethlehem in the first place.

Of course, in a book on the Middle East, it’s impossible to make everybody happy. Personally, I think the condition of the Palestinians stuck in the church during the siege is just as much an allegory for life in Israel proper as for life in the territories. Israelis also tend to feel trapped in their own homes, surrounded on all sides by a relentless enemy. What’s remarkable is just how similar the two experiences are, how interchangeable the feelings of Palestinians and Israelis really can be — both in this book and elsewhere.

Far too often, Americans who follow events in the Middle East oversimplify life there. Israelis and Palestinians become mere symbols of monolithic entities, figments of our own imagination and our need to see the world in terms of black and white, good and evil. Palestinians are either terrorists or victims; Israelis are imperialists or innocent civilians. Though not perfect, “A Season in Bethlehem,” with its in-depth depiction of a single panel of the broad and bloody tapestry of the conflict, brings us much closer to the complex reality of life in the Holy Land.