BOOKS

DUDE, WHERE'S MY COUNTRY?
By Michael Moore
(New York Times)

In his latest book, Michael Moore reveals the identity of his favorite political candidate: someone who bracingly advocates ''a free country, a safe country, a peaceful country that genuinely shares its riches with the less fortunate around the world, a country that believes in everyone getting a fair shake, and where fear is seen as the only thing we need to fear.'' Oh, wait a minute -- he's talking about himself. When ''we, the people'' enters the vocabulary of someone who likes to give marching orders, watch out. Our self-appointed spokesman may have an agenda of his own. At the end of ''Bowling for Columbine,'' Mr. Moore almost ruined an otherwise terrific documentary by grandstanding with Charlton Heston and a photograph of a dead child. As someone with a penchant for demagoguery, someone who thinks that the present political structure needs ''to be brought down and removed and replaced with a whole new system that we control,'' Mr. Moore plays to the camera even when he's doing it on the page.

Mr. Moore's previous book, ''Stupid White Men,'' was such a hit that it was last year's best-selling nonfiction book. It was in its 52nd printing when he completed the very timely ''Dude, Where's My Country?,'' a book eager to mention its author's accomplishments. Mr. Moore's antiwar outcry at last year's Academy Awards presentation is also immortalized, supposedly mentioned to him by a great-granddaughter named Anne Coulter Moore: ''Mom said you were once famous for a few minutes for yelling about something during one of the oil wars. Now all we have is this old photo of you with your mouth open and pointing at something.'' That sounds about right. ''Dude, Where's My Country?'' includes one chapter in which Mr. Moore adopts the voice of God -- only playfully, of course. In another chapter he invites you, the reader, to join what he calls Mike's Militia. And then he gives out instructions, ''as your commander in chief.'' The smart, subversive sense of humor that brings one million visitors a day (another number trumpeted here) to Mr. Moore's Web site (where they can relive his speeches and take more of his instructions) is seriously strained by the burden of so much self-promotion.

When ''Stupid White Men'' appeared, its brand of name-calling was more of a novelty on the best-seller list. Now it is luxuriantly in flower. Mr. Moore will no doubt share a readership with Al Franken's ''Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them'' (which is funnier), Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose's ''Bushwhacked'' (which is better informed) and Joe Conason's ''Big Lies'' (also better informed), if not with Bill O'Reilly's ''Who's Looking Out for You?'' (politically opposite, but no less self-serving). But Mr. Moore, through real conviction along with showboating personality, does make himself the most galvanizing and accessible of the lot. With any such book, you -- or ''the American people,'' as Mr. Moore repeatedly speechifies it -- can expect a certain amount of over-the-top invective. As he draws on earlier books, notably Robert Baer's ''Sleeping With the Devil,'' to identify connections between the Bush family and Saudi Arabian royalty, Mr. Moore exhorts: ''George, is this good for our national security, our homeland security? Who is it good for? You? Pops?''

But at the same time Mr. Moore is rounding off sums of Saudi money to the nearest trillion, he is being more precise in other areas. For instance, he identifies such members of the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq as Palau, a group of North Pacific islands, with a population smaller than the audience at many rock concerts. Palau has ''yummy tapioca and succulent coconut but, unfortunately, no troops.'' This isn't new information, but it is deployed effectively here. So is a demonstration of how unreadable the text of the U.S.A. Patriot Act is, and the fact that the Internal Revenue Service has a specific form for tax refunds of $1 million or more. (It is reprinted here.) And so is Mr. Moore's digging into underpublicized news events like a Taliban visit to Texas, for oil-related reasons, in 1997. He wonders why 20-year-old video images of Donald Rumsfeld embracing Saddam Hussein have been broadcast only by Oprah Winfrey. She, incidentally, is his draft pick for president in 2004 -- though he also sees Wesley Clark ''or any one of the Dixie Chicks'' as possibilities.

''Dude, Where's My Country?'' is much sharper about election strategy than it is about uncovering the Bush administration's transgressions. One chapter here, entitled ''Bush Removal and Other Spring Cleaning Chores,'' presents ways for Mike's Militia to get out the vote. (''We've got the people on our side.'') However outnumbered the left may feel (''go crawl into that phone booth with the Noam Chomsky fan club, you miserable loser!''), Mr. Moore devotes a chapter to arguing that American voters are more liberal than they know. In ''How to Talk to Your Conservative Brother-in-Law,'' Mr. Moore has some specific hints. He recommends agreeing that men and women are different, that animals don't have rights, that granola is fattening and that a little sunlight is actually good for your health. ''We have a namby-pamby way of saying things,'' he writes, along with ''a hoity-toity view of religion.'' He asks readers to recognize that ''this arrogance is a big reason the lower classes will always side with the Republicans.'' Mr. Moore has marshaled all of his impassioned, populist bluster to effecting that change. That makes ''Dude, Where's My Country?'' a bumper sticker that doubles as a book.

MONEYBALL: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
By Michael Lewis

At the end of ''Moneyball,'' Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, is said to fear that no one will ever really know what revolutionary things his team has accomplished, or how this ingenious strategy was devised. Not to worry. Mr. Beane has caught the sharp, inquisitive eye of Michael Lewis, who has now immortalized him. And Mr. Lewis, like the A's under Mr. Beane's aegis, is playing at the top of his game.
As he has often demonstrated, most dazzlingly in ''Liars' Poker'' and ''The New New Thing,'' Mr. Lewis is a terrifically entertaining explicator. Like Tom Wolfe (whose enthusiasm for ''Moneyball'' is cited in its jacket copy), he can be trusted to make anything interesting, and to cast even the familiar in a bright new light. You need know absolutely nothing about baseball to appreciate the wit, snap, economy and incisiveness of his thoughts about it. ''The mood is exactly what it would be if every person in the room was handed his own personal vial of nitroglycerine,'' he writes, describing the day of the team's 2002 amateur player draft.
Mr. Lewis has turned the story of one underfinanced baseball team into a showcase for his wide-ranging talents. Here he finds colorful characters, cutting-edge analytical data, the excitement of innovation and the thrill of the game, all bound together by the vigor of his prose. And in the person of Mr. Beane -- who, one of his former teammates said, ''could talk a dog off a meat wagon'' -- he has an irresistible underdog for a hero. ''At its center,'' Mr. Lewis writes of this story, ''is a man whose life was turned upside down by professional baseball, and who, miraculously, found a way to return the favor.''
In order to underscore the ingenuity of Mr. Beane's tactics, Mr. Lewis must summon some traditional approaches to baseball playing, recruiting and writing. In the view of old-fashioned scouts, he says, ''you found a big league ballplayer by driving 60,000 miles, staying in a hundred'' execrable ''motels, and eating God knows how many meals at Denny's all so you could watch 200 high school and college baseball games inside of four months, 199 of which were completely meaningless to you.''

And as for the kind of high seriousness that the game can inspire in writers: ''Baseball offered a comfortable seat to the polysyllabic wonders who quoted dead authors and blathered on about the poetry of motion. These people dignified the game, like a bow tie. They were harmless. What was threatening was cold, hard intelligence.'' The kind, in other words, that Mr. Beane and Mr. Lewis are ready to provide.
Once a player so promising that he was chased by scouts (''It got so that Billy would run from practice straight to some friend's house to avoid their incessant phone calls to his home''), Mr. Beane made the worst decision of his life for financial reasons. He chose sports over college, became a New York Met, and failed. Mr. Lewis describes how Mr. Beane eventually turned to coaching, and how his iconoclasm was born. ''The old scouts are like a Greek chorus; it is their job to underscore the eternal themes of baseball,'' Mr. Lewis writes. ''The eternal themes are precisely what Billy Beane wants to exploit for profit -- by ignoring them.''

Because the A's cannot afford superstars -- and because when they develop one, like Jason Giambi, he is liable to morph into a highly paid New York Yankee -- they need to think differently. And Mr. Beane does: he understands that a player's most expensive attributes, at least according to conventional wisdom, are not necessarily his most valuable. Relying on close statistical analysis, and on the innovative baseball handicapping of Bill James (who began with stapled, photocopied books that drew a ''cocktail party-sized readership,'' he develops a new set of hiring tactics. That way, a player like Mr. Giambi can be regarded as an amalgam of several different talents, and can effectively be replaced by several lesser players. ''He could find the pieces of Giambi he could least afford to be without,'' Mr. Lewis explains, ''and buy them for a tiny fraction of the cost of Giambi himself.''

''Moneyball'' follows the careful reassessment of how players are rated once computers and sophisticated statisticians begin dissecting the game. Traditional scoring of errors may mean nothing when it comes to a team's long-term record; on the other hand, the ability to get on base even if it means walking is a valuable asset. The recent emphasis on measuring each player's on-base percentage is one of the incremental changes that have revolutionized baseball strategy, at least in Oakland. ''Baseball is a soap opera that lends itself to probabilistic thinking,'' one of the game's new breed of analysts has said. That neatly encapsulates this book's lessons.
While Mr. Lewis carefully explains and illustrates these developments, he also stays closely attuned to the spirit of the game. ''Somewhere in the night sky is a ball,'' he writes, watching one player. ''Where, apparently, he is unsure.''

''Moneyball'' moves nimbly between sheer exuberance and strategic wiles. Some sections of the book concentrate on particular players and games, capturing them with lively immediacy. Others show Mr. Beane in action as he horse-trades players and outfoxes the competition. ''Billy uses his poverty to camouflage another fact, that he wants these oddballs more than the studs he cannot afford,'' Mr. Lewis writes. And he must do this with fake ingenuousness, because ''it is the nature of being the general manager of a baseball team that you have to remain on familiar terms with people you are continually trying'' to cheat.
The bottom line: in the American League West last year, the teams finished in inverse order to their payrolls. Oakland wound up ranking highest with the least money, demonstrating a principle that can be appreciated far beyond the realm of baseball. And Mr. Lewis has hit another one out of the park.