suring her, "If you can't remember it. it never really happened, anyway.

" She and Smashed: Story of a her peers often went to class wearing Drunken Girlhood pajamas, too hungover to get dressed. By Koren Zailckas "During a particularly silent FridayViking, 368 pp., $21.95 morning class, a teacher will say, to the ike most women, I remember my first rows of students drooping over the kiddrink in tender minutiae," Koren ney-shaped surfaces of their school desks, Zailckas writes. "The exact date is 'It looks like you all started the weekend June 17,1994.1 am fourteen, which early.'" And we wonder why so many prois the norm these days, when the mean fessors would rather take sabbaticals and age of the first drink for girls is less than write for obscure journals than teach thirteen." Zailckas describes her subse- undergraduates. After commencement, quent decade of drinkZailckas expects to "find ing in her perceptive new paradise in the 'real memoir, Smashed. ' world,' where there are After sneaking drinks men seeking meaningful and getting her stomach relationships, jobs in pumped in high school, media, and cheap and Zailckas enrolled at smashed spacious lofts in major Syracuse University cities." This self-deprewhere alcohol was a cating narration raises respite from a wintry, desolate environment: her book above typical Just Say No lecturing. It's "Drinking, which was once an accomplished first book a novelty, will become the and unflinching examiusual. ... Drinking will nation of a genuine socigive college a circular conological problem. And if figuration, like a holding parents of high schoolers pattern I can navigate start bringing copies of while I await clearance Smashed to guided tours in the real world." Housed in an impersonal high-rise dorm, of the Syracuse campus, school officials she joined a sorority where bar hopping will quickly learn if there really is no such was expected. During one drinking black- thing as bad publicity. Andrew Milner out she either did or did not lose her vir(a_milner@citypaper. net) ginity to a frat brother, a girlfriend reasBOOKQUICK

Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt

By Gary Indiana New Press, 140pp., $19.95

A world-renowned movie star whose films are steeped in apocalyptic violence, a star in bodybuilding (a sport with overtones of homoeroticism and steroid addiction), a Kennedy in-law and son of a Nazi party member, a celebrity accused repeatedly of sexual harassment and even racial slurs, stood before last summer's 2004 Republican convention. And the governor of California called his opponents "girlie men" to the at swoons of delegates and pundits alike. g< How exactly did Arnold Schwarzenegger sc Arnold Schwarzenegger become the ol leader of the world's sixth-largest econp' omy? The felicitously named Gary Indiana in tries to deconstruct the Govinator. Of m Schwarzenegger's rise to Hollywood stardom and political celebrity, Indiana implies m that there's no longer much difference a between the two: "The total experience tl of having a relationship with Arnold ft Schwarzenegger that many people believed ir they had, and its transference from the 6! world of make-believe into the arena of "c government, spoke to the possibility that S( the democratic experiment was rapidly sl mutating into a ceremonial fantasy." se The book offers a good summary of the gl statewide recall of Gray Davis in 2003 ye and the truncated, Gilbert & Sullivan- tr esque campaign season that put Arnold Y in the governor's mansion. And Indiana m offers trenchant analysis of such hi Schwarzenegger films as The Running hi Man and End of Days: "The notion that w the 'right' kind of'strong leader' is all the w government a dazed and confused rabble ti needs to awaken itself to more enlight- li< ened 'values' is a standard premise in tl many of Schwarzenegger's films." But the ii book's tone is so polemical that it will e appeal only to those who already agree o with its anti-Arnold premise. Author Matt t Miller recently lamented in The New York i Times that "best-selling books reinforce 1 what folks thought when they bought i them," and railed, "Is persuasion dead? I And if so, does it matter?" Schwarzenegger I Syndrome will provide ammo for the governor's group of enemies, but I'm afraid it won't sway most of his (shrinking number of) supporters.
Andrew Milner