DISCOVERIES

NOT BY ACCIDENT

Reconstructing a Careless Life

By Samantha Dunn

Henry Holt: 256 pp., $24

Why are some people accident-prone? What does it mean to be accident-prone? These are the questions that surface most often in Samantha Dunn’s Vicodin-soaked brain after a terrifying, life-threatening accident that occurred while she was riding her horse, Harley, in the Malibu hills a little more than a year ago. Dunn dismounted to cross a stream; Harley reared and landed on her, his hoofs slicing her leg below the shin. The first person to come to Dunn’s rescue is actor Edward Albert Jr. Looking up at the vaguely familiar face is the beginning of a surreal journey for Dunn. “Your life will change because of this,” he tells her while they wait for the paramedics. His prediction resounds throughout “Not by Accident,” a memoir of Dunn’s recovery. Until now, Dunn had been a twentysomething freelance writer on sports and fitness, a rider of horses all her life, a somewhat cynical fast-moving, fast-talking and, yes, accident-prone woman. Married to a musician, she lived through his drug addiction and rehab; the marriage, not good before the accident, unravels during the recovery.

As she gets better, her editors begin to call and send her on assignments to yoga studios and fitness gurus. She now has the space in her life to listen to their messages. You are careless with your life, a Navy SEAL tells her; people with stressful childhoods are often accident-prone, psychologists tell her. Dunn is an honest, charming, though not always graceful writer. She forgives her horse, her mother and, in many ways, her husband. The main attraction of this memoir is self-recognition, mixed with hope for a better, more fully conscious life.

*

THE ZYGOTE CHRONICLES

By Suzanne Finnamore

Grove Press: 126 pp., $22

Too often, women use humor to apologize for themselves. Whatever might seem goofy or messy or out of place in such male orbits as the advertising world, where Suzanne Finnamore’s vaguely disguised autobiographical novel is set, is more digestible with a coating of rapid irony. “The Zygote Chronicles” is another book about having a baby. Because this process changes at least superficially every 10 years, it’s a good subject for fiction or nonfiction, but it is not useful information one gleans from these books. It is a riff, a persona to try on when you are stripped of your identity in order to make babies. The skinny advertising executive, so terminally focused on the hip and superficial, takes a dive into less-than-coolness: the world of extra weight, amniocentesis, obstetrics and, yes, true love. Selfless love. Animal love. Very hard to make this subject hip. And so, “The Zygote Chronicles,” which has some beautiful phrases (like “velocity of the spirit” and “advertising is the least work you can do for the most money”) is without bubbles. All the fizz goes flat as the mother-to-be begins her internal cooing. Until around the sixth month, she is still funny--unable to stand how badly her husband smells or to forgive him when he steams up a “mess of beets” for dinner--but the cord that ties her to the world is humming and stretching. When it breaks, she is lost to us, which is the trouble with most books about pregnancy. No one really wants to see the literary video of your birth.

*

THE ENVY OF THE WORLD

On Being a Black Man in America

By Ellis Cose

Washington Square Press:

164 pp., $22

Ellis Cose has written a risky and generous book. It’s risky because Cose, author of “The Rage of the Privileged Class,” an essayist and a contributing editor for Newsweek, lets us in on his definition of the problems and advantages of being black in America. It’s generous because he gives us data from polls and studies but also anecdotes and interviews and conversations. “Our challenge, as black men, as human beings, is to see beyond the assumptions that limit our existence.”

As of June 2000, 792,000 black males were in prison in this country. Black men--applauded for their style, their sexuality, their animal magnetism by everyone from Norman Mailer to Walt Disney--are discouraged as children from achieving in ways that vary from subtle to illegal. If you are a white reader, each time you read about these hurdles (here or elsewhere), you struggle to find a parallel in your own life, and you cannot. Cose spells out the different kinds of anger a black child experiences. He chides us for failing to go back beyond slavery to understand black history; he brings us into his version of the story between black men and black women. It’s not a war, he says; black women don’t feel they have much to choose from for a partner. Black men turn to lighter-skinned minorities. Our culture holds the black man like a Pieta, like Mary cradling her son Jesus in her lap, and he is exhausted.