Books discussed in this essay:

Brothel: Mustang Ranch and its Women
by Alexa Albert
Ballantine Publishing Group, 258 pp, $14.95

Word Freak
by Stefan Fatsis
Penguin Books, 372 pp, $14.00

Baby ER: The Heroic Doctors and Nurses who Perform Medicine's Tiniest Miracles
by Edward Humes
Simon and Schuster, 320 pp, $25.00

Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe
Bantam Books, 416 pp, $14.95

I like a few good stimulants: a cup of coffee, a hunk of chocolate and a book that lets me watch a writer venture into a community I wouldn't dare approach. I like to see how far the author gets. Reading about subcultures, sinking into the shared rituals and philosophy, the language and history of a group, I become a voyeur, a person who "takes exaggerated or unseemly enjoyment from being an observer."  From the vantage point of my couch, neither expert researcher nor participant observer, I may react in both exaggerated and unseemly fashions.

When the Merry Pranksters, the band of psychedelic adventurers led by Ken Kesey and immortalized by Tom Wolfe, gambol about in the sun in front of a mystified policeman, I may chortle. When a professional Scrabble contestant gives off a foul smell while author Stefan Fatsis watches him play, I may blanch. I don't have to calculate what expression to assume while I watch a prostitute strap on a dildo and screw a man, or how to react when a parent of a sick, premature baby wonders how many times he can repeat the worst day of his life.  Thank goodness authors Alexa Albert, who inserted herself in the world of prostitutes, and Edward Humes, who observed a neonatal intensive care unit for a year, watched and listened in my stead. Writers like Wolfe, Albert, Fatsis and Humes are the voyageurs whose work allows me to be a voyeur.

I choose the term voyageurs, as opposed to voyagers, deliberately. A voyageur is not only someone who journeys, but "an expert guide in remote regions." The term was used for French Canadian trackers, who worked for fur companies in the colonial era. Like these woodsmen, authors who write about subcultures are not only people who enter uncharted terrain and survive to tell the tales. They are skilled guides who make sense of the journey for others with bits of history, moments of reflection, and a broad understanding of how their precise location fits into a large-scale map. When they find something of interest and are asked, "Can I get closer? Can I get closer now?" an expert guide knows when to ease forward and when to hold out an arm and say, "You're close enough."

The term voyeur derives from the French voir, to see. In the United States, books that draw readers into subcultures where they can watch from within often derive from the genre's pioneers, George Plimpton, Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, his classic book about 1960s psychedelic subculture, Wolfe pulls the readers into the tactile and sensual experiences of the Merry Pranksters, even as his language mimics their drug-induced feelings of oneness and paranoia. Repeating key colors, words and sounds – Day Glo paint, grokking and grooving, the iridescent red, white and blue Yin Yang on Kesey's jacket or the hawonkawonkawonkawonkawonka of his harmonica – Wolfe creates the sense that the Pranksters are at once real and surreal. They synch and are out front, and blurt Yeah! Yeah! Right! Right! Right! at opportune moments. In these details, Wolfe makes readers feel part of a community through their shared vocabulary. Never trust a Prankster is the motto of the subculture Wolfe explores. It's true, Wolfe's writing seems to say. Never trust a Prankster, but trust me. I'll bring you there, and, bad trips or no, I'll get you out alive.

Alexa Albert's telling of Brothel, her study of Nevada's famous Mustang Ranch and the women who worked in it, takes the reader along with the writer as she moves from outside to the center of a community. Unlike Wolfe, Albert does not speak in the language of the members. She participates, but then steps back to observe and reflect – a writer and also an academic, calling on fields of study to make sense of the action. At the beginning she's an outsider wanting in, a scientist with a mission to perform public health research. She gains access, sleeping in the brothel as she studies it, concluding that prostitutes use condoms as directed, and deciding that legalized prostitution reduces the transmission rates of STD's. But she wants more.