Paul Hendrickson’s brilliant “The Living and the Dead” sketches out the uncontrolled life of a man obsessed with control, a man more comfortable talking percentages than talking about human lives. Hendrickson, a reporter at the Washington Post, carefully intertwines his account of McNamara’s career with the lives of five others caught in the wake of the war — an artist who attempted to drown the former warmaker in the waters off Martha’s Vineyard; a Quaker who set himself on fire outside McNamara’s office at the Pentagon; a marine still attempting to come to terms with the psychic injuries of McNamara’s war; an Army nurse who returned from Vietnam to a life of bizarre medical torments; a Saigon man who still rues the day the arrogant Americans arrived on the scene.

But “The Living and the Dead” is more than a group biography. It’s a reflection on the morality of collaboration, a brilliantly and bitingly critical account of McNamara’s own attempts to “apologize” for his role in the continuation of the war in his justly excoriated memoir “In Retrospect.” “The Living and the Dead” is an at times angry, but always thoughtful, account of our country’s (and Hendrickson’s own) attempts to come to terms with Vietnam, which Hendrickson declares America’s “great myth… supersed[ing] every other twentieth-century fable we have… a puzzle without pieces, a riddle without rhyme.”

One wonders what Pat would have thought of the Orange County, Calif., social workers who have been helping teenage girls in their charge — some of them as young as 13 — to get married to the men who have impregnated them, rather than trying to get the men arrested on charges of statutory rape.

The story has become a roiling controversy. Imagine! A government agency serving as a matchmaker for sexual predators! “Helping pregnant 13-year-olds to marry the men who have physically and sexually abused them will result not only in continued abuse of the adolescent, but there is strong evidence that it will soon result in abuse to the child,” a professor of social work complained in an angry letter to the Los Angeles Times. “And when the marriage ends with additional children and more abuse, will Orange County Social Services create a dating service for abusive men to cycle them into new relationships with troubled adolescents?”

Questions like these prompted Orange County (one of the most Republican in the country) to retreat from its matchmaker role. But the details of the cases cause one to pause a moment. Thirteen-year-old Isabel Gomez told social workers she truly loved her 20-year-old boyfriend. Isabel’s mother — herself only 29 — is convinced her daughter’s
troubled life has improved dramatically since he stepped into her life.
Since the marriage, she told the Los Angeles Times, “everything is much better.”
The
situation, admittedly, is far from ideal. But would Isabel Gomez be better
served if the father of her child was behind bars?

That’s a harder question to answer. Two-thirds of all teen
pregnancies involve adult men, and we can’t put them all in jail. In a
notably awkward editorial last Thursday, the L.A. Times declared itself
against the Agency’s matchmaking — sort of. “A tough call is required when
the choice seems to be between a potentially workable family unit or
pointing the child mother and baby toward public assistance, absent a
father. In only a few exceptions, where all parties are willing and of
sufficient age to become responsible parents, is the risk worth taking.”

Not terribly coherent, but when the subject is teen sexuality, it’s
impossible to be much clearer, even if the standard political rhetoric would have you believe otherwise.

For example, we are told that we are faced with an “epidemic” of teenage pregnancy. In fact, the real epidemic years were those of Pat Boone’s teendom. The birth rate among 15- to 19-year-olds after World War II leapt by more than 50% in just two years. By the 1950s, teenage girls were giving birth at twice the rates of previous decades. Indeed, the birth rate for 15-19 year-old girls in the late 1950s was some 60% higher
than it is today.

But most of the teen mothers of the 1950s were married — and so their behavior was considered, more or less, respectable.
If there is an “epidemic,” it is of out-of-wedlock births, which have tripled among teens since the 1950s. It should be noted, however, that two-thirds of these unwed mothers are not teenagers.

Still, we tend to regard teen sex as some sort of plague, with child
protection “experts” intervening in underage sexuality in ever more destructive ways. As a chilling Mother Jones magazine investigation revealed several months back, San Diego child protection workers have begun to label virtually all forms of
underage sexual experimentation (even consensual acts between children
who are roughly the same age) as “sexual abuse” — in some cases, branding boys as young as nine as “perpetrators.”

Such archaic, quasi-Victorian views are themselves part of the problem. Sexuality erupts into the lives of teenagers — as Pat Boone knew — with all the force and unpredictability of Hurricane Fran. And as anyone who’s ever spent any time with them knows, many urban teen girls look upon pregnancy as something glamorous and even empowering — whether the rest of us like it or not. They don’t think they can make much of a life for themselves, so they settle upon making one for another.

As Kristin Luker points out in “Dubious Conceptions: The Politics of
Teenage Motherhood,” many teens view childbirth as
“a pledge of hope, an acted-out wish that the lives of the next generation
will be better than those of the current generation, that this young mother
can give her child something she never had.” All too often, it’s a futile
hope — and that’s the part that makes teen pregnancy (in wedlock or out)
often so terribly sad.

In the halcyon ’50s, early marriage made sense to an awful lot of
teenage girls: with the thought of anything more than a temporary career
more or less ruled out for those of the female persuasion, why not hop into
matronhood right out of high school? Plenty of girls did — in 1955, the
average bride was only 20 years old.

It would be nice to think we’ve made some progress since then. But with Orange County social workers pushing for shotgun marriages and San Diego child-protectors going on perp-hunts, I’m not so sure we have. Both approaches reinforce the image of girls as largely passive victims, bystanders at their own fate.

Politicians, meanwhile, glibly explain the teen pregnancy “epidemic” in terms of a lack of “family values,” especially in urban America. But in many ways Isabel Gomez’s problem — and the problems of countless others like her — stems from an overdose of traditional “family values.” Too many young girls still seem to believe that
fathers know best — unwilling, for example, to insist that their lovers
use birth control, perhaps out of fear of losing them.

Girls who have confidence in themselves, and hope for their future, know that early pregnancy is a trap — and that early marriage is less a solution to their problems than a poignant symbol of the limitations of their lives.

Producer Lynda Obst (Flashdance, Sleepless in Seattle) wants to keep eating lunch in Hollywood, which is perhaps why her new account of life in the Hollywood trenches is such a tiresome read. “Hello, He Lied” recounts Obst’s own travels in our modern Babylon, from her beginnings as a journalist to her current position as big-time producer. It’s a story, alas, much less interesting than it sounds.

In part, this is because Obst tries so hard to avoid being “mean” that she’s left with almost nothing to say. She praises her Hollywood friends extravagantly, but when she stoops to criticize, she almost never names names. (“When you trash someone on the record,” she notes, “you will pay.”) Indeed, the only real people she has the guts to criticize are those she knows she’ll never have to lunch with — Phillips, for one, a “stoned” ex-producer who “trash[ed] her own Rolodex for cash.”

Worse yet, for all of her Hollywood experience, Obst simply hasn’t learned the basics of storytelling. Her anecdotes have neither beginning nor end; she’ll plunge into the middle of a tale without first giving us the beginning, then drop it uncompleted to plunge into another equally pointless mass of details. Obst treats us several times to the details of her “rescue” of the film “Bad Girls” from a production meltdown — without ever wondering if perhaps this was a film that deserved to die in childbirth.

Her breezy tone suggests that Obst is (at least sporadically) attempting to write in a humorous vein; in this attempt she does not succeed. At times, Obst seems to suffer from the delusion that she’s writing some sort of self-help book, interrupting her narrative (such as it is) to treat us to numbered lists of Hollywood “truths,” tired reflections on personal empowerment, dating hints and even little disquisitions advising what to wear on set. “Hello, He Lied” is as self-absorbed and sycophantic as Hollywood itself. It would make a terrible movie. It’s already made a terrible book.

Lopate’s style is an indirect one; he prefers to take his time, prodding his subject and peering at it from every available angle. Lopate deliberately seeks out difficult topics, hoping that an examination of his resistances will produce a deeper kind of self-knowledge. He takes up his problematic relationship with his father; he attempts to perform a post-mortem on a relationship with a woman that never quite “took.” He examines the subject of mentors in large part because the very notion of mentoring (with all its strange psychosexual overtones) unsettles him at some primal level. He reluctantly considers the Holocaust because he is troubled by the tendency of many of his fellow Jews to turn “remembrance” into kitsch.

To those with little taste for self-reflection, Lopate may seem exasperatingly, even willfully, self-indulgent. “In first person writing, there is a thin line between the charming and the insufferable,” Lopate coyly notes. “For a while now, I have dreamt of pushing at this line, slipping over occasionally to the other side, stretching the boundaries of acceptable first-person behavior, increasing like a dye the amount of obnoxiousness in my narrator — just for the thrill of living dangerously.”

In all but a few instances, Lopate stays on the charming side of the line. The worst I can say about any of these essays is that they are slight; the best of them, I can say with only a small fear of hyperbole, recall Montaigne — or, at least, what Montaigne might have been had he grown up in the streets and the bookstores of New York.

Fenichell’s book offers an informal history of the plastic age, from the debut of Parkesine in the 1860s (“HARD as IVORY, TRANSPARENT or OPAQUE…made of the most BRILLIANT COLORS”) to the stealthy return of polyester “microfiber” to the fashion runways today. It’s an often engaging book, chronicling the invention of everything from Bakelite to Teflon, the complex legal battles over various plastic patents and the remarkable popular enthusiasm for new plastic products that has erupted again and again over the years. During the cellophane-mania of the 1930s, one Cornell professor began experimentally feeding the material to students — a strategy that he hoped would allow “fat people desiring to reduce to ingest bulk without calories.” (Shades of olestra?) A decade later, near-riots erupted at stores carrying the then-revolutionary nylon stocking. The chemical side of the story, as Fenichell tells it, is one of fortuitous spills and less-than-fortuitous side effects: John Wesley Hyatt discovered the secrets of celluloid after one such spill in 1868 — but his plans to manufacture celluloid billiard balls were thwarted by the material’s tendency to blow up.

But if Fenichell has a good eye for anecdotes, he’s not much of an organizer: the book flops haphazardly from topic to topic, with such disregard for chronology that at times I wondered if even Fenichell knew what decade he was covering. And because he is so frustratingly vague in dealing with the environmental effects of our widespread plastic use, one hardly knows whether to take his scattered final chapter as a cautious celebration of plastic’s victory or a bittersweet elegy to a material as problematic as it is pliable. Nevertheless, this is an indispensable book for anyone seriously interested in the story of an indispensable material.