Thirteen Steps Lead Down

When I was living in Massachusetts, I would spend Saturday mornings listening to NPR and writing (or, perhaps more likely, avoiding writing). WBUR in Boston had a terrific Saturday morning line-up of Scott Simon's Weekend Edition, followed by Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! with Peter Sagal, then Car Talk and This American Life. Some days I would listen straight through to Prairie Home Companion, which WBUR seems not to carry any longer, and a homegrown show featuring puns and language play from host Richard Lederer.

But that was the east coast around the millennium, and now it's a decade or so later and Saturday mornings consist of Max & Ruby cartoons, toy trains, and music classes for 3-year olds. I can't reliably luxuriate in Saturday morning radio anymore, and even if I could the station that carries Wait Wait... in Milwaukee doesn't come in so well. I've been trying, though, to keep up with the show through its podcast. I've always enjoyed Peter Sagal -- he speaks clearly and quickly, always sounds upbeat, and he's wickedly funny.

Sagal's Book of Vice purports on its cover to concern "very naughty things (and how to do them)," but the things he covers aren't exceedingly naughty and little information about how one goes about doing them. In his introduction, Sagal puts forward the book as a kind of rejoinder to William Bennett's Book of Virtues, but it isn't exactly that, either. Still, it's a worthwhile read.

Sagal relates his forays into the world of vice, reporting on swingers clubs, strip joints, gambling dens, porn starlets, conspicuous consumption, and -- why not? -- molecular gastronomy. In each instance, Sagal represents a pleasant way of standing on his "staid, Midwestern" morals without being at all judgemental. He's curious about these things, but not particularly salacious or scandalized by them.

Sagal's wit, so evident in the radio show, doesn't always translate that well to the page, though it's a light and fun read. He's bored at the Saturday night swinger's party, he's mystified by contemporary pornography, he astutely demonstrates that the appeal of gambling is not in the winning. Ultimately, as his final anecdote demonstrates, it's the wondering about all this stuff, not the stuff itself, that he finds satisfying. So although Sagal claims in his introduction that "Somewhere, somebody is having more fun than you," he demonstrates conclusively that this isn't actually the case.