by Kay Redfield Jamison

(Knopf) $26I've been listening to the Bach cantata no. 170 with the great and glorious Janet Baker doing the solo. The music sounds inspiring and life-affirming, and when you hear it you feel like you want to stand up and do something. But then you look at the words and you see it begins, "O pleasant rest, beloved soul's delight," and it ends "Life is distasteful to me, Jesus take me away...." This cantata is a love song for death, a suicide note.

Getting away from it all is only one of the reasons for suicide that Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, examines in her new book. Night Falls Fast begins by describing the pact Jamison made with a mentally ill friend; that each would call the other the next time either of them was seriously thinking about committing suicide. The pact didn't work and Jamison's friend offed himself. The personal part of this book is about coming to grips with the death of a loved one. The scientific part looks at the demographics, methods, locations, and language of suicide. While Jamison argues that some suicides are the predictable outcomes of specific mental illnesses, she also finds social and historical circumstances very important. For example, until 1933, Mount Mihara was a relatively unknown active volcano in Japan. Then two pretty young female students threw themselves into it, and the following year there were 160 copycat suicides and 1,200 attempts. Extreme social conditions like widespread economic collapse (jumping out of windows after the stock market crash), rampant sexism (females in a particularly misogynist province of China offing themselves by the hundreds), and religious conviction (Heaven's Gate, Jonestown, the Bach cantata) can make suicide seem almost normal. But you still feel, the way Jamison does when she remembers her dead friend, that there's something not quite right about it. REBECCA BROWN

DISGRACE

by J. M. Coetzee

(Viking) $23.95I read Disgrace right before reading José Saramago's Blindness, and the combination of these two gorgeously dark books almost made me believe in the apocalypse. Like Saramago, South African writer J. M. Coetzee excels at giving voice to the very darkest instincts of the human heart, in a context which reveals them as logical responses to often harrowing surroundings.

The main character of Disgrace, Professor David Lurie, is an unlikeable man. At midlife, he holds only to the iffy morality of being honest about his base desires, a process which leads him to sleep with a confused young student and thereupon gets him fired. Hounded by the press, he retreats to live with his eco-lesbian daughter at a very isolated farm; the retreat, however, turns to terror when the farm is robbed and Lurie's daughter is brutally raped.

The remarkable thing about Disgrace is that when Lurie hits this stark and nearly hopeless bottom, he experiences no "epiphany," no humbling. Instead, he seems to become even more broadly himself -- a self that is stripped of expectancy, a self that is more sober, but a self that is nevertheless just as strong-willed as it was at the beginning. Coetzee's rendering of this flattening-out of a disgraced person is brilliant and disturbing, and at the end you feel like you know and understand Lurie -- so much so that his final decision, which might seem reprehensible, instead makes perfect, and poignant, sense. TRACI VOGEL

MENTAL HYGIENE: CLASSROOM FILMS, 1945-1970

by Ken Smith

(Blast Books) $24.95We blew it after WWI -- we gave birth to the shell-shocked "Lost Generation." Determined not to repeat the error after WWII (even more shocking in its demonstration of inhumanity), large-scale efforts were made to guide the profoundly-but-invisibly affected American consciousness into behavioral and moral rectitude. America had launched a strategic campaign to manufacture its culture by directing our desires and habits. The most bizarre manifestation of this programmatic effort was in classroom films on dating, driver safety, and generally "fitting in."

Ken Smith's strongest insight into the thousands of 10-20-minute lifestyle instructions made between 1945 and 1970 is that they were not made to brainwash their viewers (our enemies the Nazis did that), but to act as guidance. In righteous naïveté, the producers didn't realize that "brainwashing" and "guidance" were two sides of the same coin, and the films acquired their gleam of indoctrination as it became clear that youth culture was slipping into Dean-and-Dylan despondence.

Smith's only fault is ambition. Half of the book is an alphabetical index complete with synopses; the chapters gloss over some of his most interesting points; and the pages are thoroughly ornamented with film stills, captions, lists, and factoids. Smith tries to write filmmakers' biographies, cultural import analyses, reviews of the films themselves, and genre history superimposed onto political and cultural history, and can only do it all superficially. He could have benefited from teaming up with an academic to help him expand his ideas and beef up the essays, and fill out the other points of intrigue such as how the super-gory car-accident filmmakers at Safety Enterprises were making pornos on the side (?!).

But this criticism comes only because I want more. Ultimately, Smith nails the issue's crux: American adolescents were given muscle cars, gushing hormones, opportunities to work, and plenty of resources for leisure, and they were entirely discouraged from harnessing that power. Classroom films are vestiges of a superstructure flailing in a losing battle. BRIAN GOEDDE

LOST AND FOUND

MARX ON SUICIDE

by Karl Marx, translated and edited by K. Anderson et al.

(Northwestern, 1999) $14.95In the silent film Paris Asleep (1924), a mad scientist puts the entire population of Paris into suspended animation. As the camera roams through the newly industrialized Paris of the 1920s, an urban typology unfolds: Flower-sellers, bourgeoises, and dandies stand as motionless as fossils at Pompeii. The camera lingers on a would-be suicide, frozen just before hurling himself into the Seine. The note in his hand reads: "The pace of modern life has become too fast."

This scene is emblematic of Marx on Suicide, which tells the stories of three Parisian women who commit suicide. Like the film, Marx presents suicide as socially produced, not as an individual aberration. For Marx, however, the person who commits suicide is not merely one urban type among others, but the extreme case, the case that reveals "the contradictions and unnatural state of modern life." Marx calls for "a total reform of the organization of our current society" -- not so much focusing on the political economy, but the tyrannical structure of the family. At issue is not class warfare but gender warfare.

About this book as commodity fetish: It's a new work by Marx! On a topic that has ironic resonance for Marx's own life! (Two of his three daughters committed suicide.) Now how much would you pay? Before you answer: The book is "by" Marx only in a postmodern sense. It contains an essay written by a French police administrator named Peuchet; Marx excerpted and translated the essay for publication in a German newspaper. Marx made additions to the original (the words quoted in this review are Marx's, not Peuchet's), but there is so little by Marx here that the publishers have had to pad out the volume by including the original French and German texts. All in all, $14.95 is pretty steep for a 26-page essay. Steal this book. DIANA GEORGE