Albert comes back, this time penetrating further, leading her readers through regions they dare not go without her. She talks to working girls about why they're in the life, asks regulars about the women who bring them back each time, and watches three prostitutes serve their clients. The women start to like her and compete over her attention. Now her reflections become sociological and psychological. She asks why up to half the women send their earnings to pimps masquerading as boyfriends. She wonders at the clients who believe the working girls are in love with them, and she sees women acting in many ways like professional people in other occupations. And then Albert turns anthropologist and goes even further, into the unspoken rules and coded language of brothel life, and the sisterhood among the women. Following Albert, readers start out on her side, wanting to see how far she'll get, and end up on the side of the women in the community she reveals.

Unlike Albert, who never turned a trick, Stefan Fatsis learns to play the game – the game of Scrabble, that is. In Word Freak, Fatsis asks his readers to watch not how far he reaches into a community, but how good he gets at the game that holds its members together. In his rising and falling ratings, compulsive anagramming and late night practice rounds, he gains himself, and his readers, access to the personalities of men who have made Scrabble-playing into an obsession. And so readers meet Matt, "one of Scrabble's best raw anagrammers," who takes up to one hundred pills a day in what he claims is a carefully selected combination of smart drugs; and brilliant Marlon, who "Ain't never looked at a white boy and thought that motherfucker is better than me." Like Wolfe, Fatsis begins to speak the lingo of the community, and like Albert he also acts as the group historian, detailing the birth of the game during the Great Depression and shining the spotlight on the compulsive "word freaks" who have contributed to the official Scrabble dictionaries. But in the end it is his own story, his rise from mediocre ratings to a respectable level of ability, to which Fatsis applies his expertise. This guide asks those with him to watch his exploits as they travel.

By contrast, in Baby ER, author Edward Humes makes his presence hard to detect. Humes is the silent tracker who asks that readers follow and keep quiet so they can watch something few eyes have seen before. He guides them to a vantage point from which they can watch the scenes unfold, and asks not that they admire his skill or consider his ability to gain them access. As Humes fades into the background, readers may watch nervous parents scrub their hands up to the elbows before they enter the neonatal care unit at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. Within, Dr. Padilla both handles and generates stress better than other staff members, and Dr. Perez brings optimism to each sick or premature infant on the ward. Nurses complain, but they love their four doctors. Everywhere there are tiny bodies, and doctors who have to manipulate tubes through and around organs comprised of flesh so fragile it can tear "like a wet paper towel." Humes uses clear and simple language to place readers at the right distance and let them watch with quiet fascination. His perspective is both clear-eyed and reverential.

These writers are my guides, and I trust them. Wolfe grounds my attention in visual detail and spoken language as he launches me into a psychedelic and spiritual subculture. Albert lets me watch while she enters a community humbly, a scientist asking questions, and leaves it passionately, a social anthropologist speaking for sisterhood to which she's grown attached. Fatsis asks that I observe while he learns to play a game, and introduces me to the players he meets along the way. And Humes takes me on a path that quells the snickering and eye-rolling voyeur in me. He asks me to watch a miracle quietly, and leave no trace behind.

AMY DUNCAN, a first-year student in the literary nonfiction program at the University of Oregon, teaches writing to high schoolers.