Reviewed by Christina Eng

Published originally in The New Yorker during the 1990s, stories in this engaging but uneven collection center on individuals obsessed in varying degrees with something or another.  Singer, a staff writer at the magazine for more than three decades, pulls together nine of his favorite pieces on subjects big and small, on people famous and not-so-famous.

In “Secrets of the Magus” for example, he creates a portrait of magician Ricky Jay, whom he calls “the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive.”  He details several of Jay’s remarkable card tricks, taking us through the processes step by step, generating a sense of wonder and excitement along the way.

In another piece, “Mom Overboard!” Singer describes a couple of mothers thoroughly consumed with their children’s daily activities.  One woman, Sera, instructed the live-in nanny to record everything the children ate, “using a customized shorthand.  Spaghetti with meat sauce was ‘V-4, P-1, C-4’ (tomatoes, vegetable group; ground beef, protein group; noodles, carbohydrate group).  A yummy helping of spinach, kosher steer liver, and rice was ‘V-4, P-5, C-2,’ and so on.”

Further highlights include “The Man Who Forgets Nothing” a portrait of  veteran film director Martin Scorsese, and  “Chinos’ Artful Harvest” which describes second-generation Japanese-American farmers, the Chinos, in Del Mar, California.  Their vegetables – “far too special to be treated the way venders typically treat vegetables” – make it into the kitchens of venerable restaurateurs such as Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck.

Unfortunately, other pieces in the collection are less engrossing.  “Trump Solo,” for example, profiles Donald Trump, obsessed apparently with himself.  The article is informative.  Published in 1997, though, with no references to the developer’s forays into television, the article feels outdated.  “Joe Mitchell’s Secret,” “The Book Eater,” “Keepers of the Flame” and “La Cabeza de Villa” also fail to entirely captivate us, making Singer’s volume on the whole good, but not great.