To bee or not to bee

In the available photos, Buchmann appears as a cheerful, beardlessly professorial man with thick glasses. One imagines him running with the bees in khaki shorts and a short-sleeved dress shirt, all knees and elbows. It's impossible not to admire a man like that, knowledgeable yet childlike in his enthusiasm.

Holley Bishop's "Robbing the Bees" is another ball of wax altogether. It represents a venerable New York dilettante tradition, in which a privileged or well-connected New Yorker will become a casual expert on a subject, reading through the literature and taking a few field trips, then reporting his or her findings in book form.

Some of these dilettante books are very good: The estimable John McPhee, one of America's all-time research fiends and prose stylists, began as one of these writers, as did Michael Pollan (of "Botany of Desire"). The less-estimable ones tend to be hedged as personal memoirs, in the "my journey through the fascinating world of..." category, and err strangely toward the obvious (or even the no-duh), such that you can imagine the authors going through life protected by giant, Plexiglas New York Bubbles like the balls that hamsters walk around in.

Bishop, a graduate of Brown University and the Columbia School of Journalism who works in book publishing, bought a house in rural Connecticut and got a couple of beehives. Someone must have said, perhaps at one of those same parties where the Discovery Channel guy hangs out, that she should write a book about being a person who has a couple of beehives, so, as Bishop says, she studied the literature on bees and took some trips to visit Donald Smiley, a professional beekeeper in Florida, and produced just such a book. The difference between her book and Buchmann's is striking. Both have loads of great information and detail, covering much of the same territory. And good, or simply honest, writing can make almost any topic interesting. But "Robbing the Bees" is written in a familiar, semi-precious style that's full of facts from other sources, pat descriptions and stock phrases, and where the entire solar system seems to orbit the author. For instance, to describe my evening: My taste buds enjoyed a Jolly Rancher with gusto, and I perused a dusty old tome while guzzling a glass of the finest beer. I am now excitedly walking toward my fish tank, where I will get my recommended daily allowance of magic and wonder.

If anyone's dying out there, I'm sorry -- it's really that bad when Bishop shifts from expository, fact-based prose, which is merely stuck together at slightly odd angles, into a more expressive, personal style. Here's one place where you can see such a shift:

"[Honeybees] live for only several weeks and heroically die after delivering their dreaded, venomous sting. Bees shape the very landscape in which we all live by cross-pollinating and changing the plants that nourish them. After decades of living in honeyless ignorance I added these divine insects and their delicious produce to my recommended daily allowance of magic and wonder."

This bandage on my head is from when I set the book on fire and beat myself silly with it (it's a thick book), thinking that some people can write like that with relaxed certainty, like a bowling ball rolling downhill, whereas I could barely finish anything for years, classically blocked and in mortal dread of publishing an imperfect sentence (as you can see, I've largely gotten over any silly concerns with quality. And yet, there are things like a puzzling chapter of Bishop's in which she's hanging around her New York apartment naked during the '03 blackout, that make "relaxed certainty" seem a more perilous mindframe than ever).

We're on a bit of a tangent here, and we'll be back to the bees (and Bishop's book) in just a paragraph or two, but perhaps the best example of the contemporary dilettante book is Daniel Pinchbeck's "Trust-fund Shaman: My Psychedelic Journey Through the Fascinating World of a Bunch of Old Carlos Castaneda Paperbacks" (published under the title "Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism"). According to Pinchbeck, a good-natured and well-meaning son of a wealthy literary family, he remembered that psychedelic drugs are widely said to have religious significance, and went around reading books about drugs while also taking a lot of them, often in far-flung locales. Achoo!, he sneezed, and a book deal was in the Kleenex. It's an interesting topic, to be sure, although in classic low-dilettante style, Pinchbeck describes things in over-limpid, imprecise terms, as though (this is a crucial characteristic, and also the thing about "Robbing the Bees" that best explains Bishop's writing style) a book were like a paper to be turned in for a grade: As if someone who comes from the right place socially need only demonstrate that he did the relevant reading, and write correct prose with no serious logical or factual errors, to be able to expect comments like "Great work!" or "A revealing treatment of the subject matter!" and be rewarded with an authorial career. To imitate Pinchbeck's signature 50 yards of narrative distance (and this is a made-up passage, tuned for concision, that's actually quite close to how the book reads): The drug, Yage, can radically dissolve consciousness. The experience can be highly individual, but I found myself experiencing beatific visions that transcended time and space.

Next Page: What Tom Petty has in common with bees

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