Who Are You People? by Shari Caudron

In Who Are You People?, subtitled A Personal Journey into the Heart of Fanatical Passion in America, Shari Caudron sets out to understand her own lack of a "singular, all-consuming interest" by learning about people who are fanatical about something. Over the course of a three-year period of reporting, Caudron hung out with Barbie collectors, ice fishermen, pigeon racers, players of testosterone-infused board games, The Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club, Grobanites (fans of singer Josh Groban), sci-fi aficionados, furries, collectors of pop culture artifacts, and storm chasers. In every case, she found something to admire about the passionate fans.

Reading about Caudron's adventures with the various groups is sometimes touching, occasionally enlightening, and nearly always hilarious; since she makes as much fun of herself as she does the people she encounters, the humor is generally good-spirited. While she also consulted social scientists, pollsters, genetics research and the founder of Meetup.com in an effort to learn more about passion and where and how it originates, the encounters with the various forms of fanatics are the most interesting pieces of the book.

Caudron identifies the types of subcultures she studied as "one of the few places in American society where people are allowed to be comfortably different." While she did not discover a personal passion during her journey, she did reconnect with her ten-year-old self, the "age when we're allowed to be fully absorbed in something totally meaningless. . . . it's the age before the twin social pressures of restraint and conformity take over and squeeze the silliness out of us."

As a person who, when advised to "follow your bliss," has always wondered "what bliss?" I thoroughly enjoyed Caudron's examination of people following their bliss in directions I couldn't have imagined without her help.

Favorite passage (not so much a favorite as an exemplar of what kept me chuckling):

If seven ferret lovers were able to find each other in a metropolitan area with more than three million people, who else might be joining together in pursuit of shared interests. I checked Meetup's lists of topics and learned there were more than twenty-three hundred specific interests posted. There were scheduled meetings for people who loved aviation, beekeeping, cake-decorating, dumpster-diving, Elvis, flashlights, graffiti, juggling, magic, poi, pugs, robotics, roller coasters, scrapbooks, skyscrapers, yo-yos, Ukrainian eggs, and hundreds of other interests. If the list was accurate, not only was community alive and well in America, but so was passion, albeit in some pretty obscure ways. Try though I might, I failed to come up with a single illuminating reason why anyone would want to spend an evening chatting about flashlights.