Making a circuitous search for selfhood
A Left-Hand Turn Around the World: Chasing the Mystery and Meaning of All Things Southpaw
By David Wolman
Da Capo, 256 pp., $23.95
The Underdog: How I Survived the World's Most Outlandish Competitions
By Joshua Davis
Villard, 198 pp., $21.95
Humans are notorious for their existential crises. What or who put me here? What significance can life possibly have? How can I set myself apart from the 6 billion others marooned on planet earth?
In America, a country founded on personal liberty, this search for purpose is practically rammed down our collective throats. But being a meaningful individual amid the media-cultural complex's background buzz is like finding one's voice by shouting into the interstate's 24/7 traffic hum -- Sisyphean, at best.
Still, two new authors take a crack at it: David Wolman, who penned ''A Left-Hand Turn Around the World," and Joshua Davis, writer of ''The Underdog." These debut, first-person accounts are the road maps of their efforts.
As it turns out, Wolman (originally from Newton) and Davis know each other. Both are journalists for Wired and other magazines, and mutual thanks are given in their acknowledgments pages. So the comparable structures of both books come as no surprise: article-length chapters, each based on a different globe-trotting quest to discover how the author is, or could be, different.
To say Wolman is obsessed with his lefty identity is an understatement. Whether eating dinner or using a fountain pen, he finds occasions to bond with his fellow southpaws. He feels their pain. After all, his kin were always stigmatized: to be left-handed was to be cursed, if not in cahoots with the devil. With a right-hand-oriented world damning lefties as different, Wolman can't help but wonder (as other lefties do) if his 10 percent minority group might be superior to the 90 percent righty majority. Or at least, special: ''As an upper-middle-class white kid in an uppity Boston suburb," Wolman writes, ''being left-handed helped, in its own minuscule way, fend off the ominous prospects of mediocrity."
While both journalists inject their books with personal experience, ''A Left-Hand Turn" is made from substantial ingredients. Wolman's initial investigation -- is handedness a choice or determined in the womb? -- is largely research-driven. To answer the ''nature vs. nuture" debate, he interviews an array of authorities, from a British neuropsychologist to a palm reader, a primatologist studying handedness in chimpanzees, and an Illinois man who, after an accident, had his left hand grafted onto his right arm.
Wolman is aware he only has 256 pages to cover plenty of territory, so he's smart enough to sense when the reader might be overwhelmed with scientific jargon. Bolstered by historical, psychological and neurological material put in layman's terms, this engrossing book gives readers a fine introduction to the handedness debates.
Less comprehensive, ''Underdog" is Davis's trial-and-error hunt for ''whatever it was that made me unique." Supposedly pressured by his wife to support her American dream of an apartment with a bathtub and direct light, Davis, rather than apply for a real job, decides to enter a slew of dangerous contests. He travels to Spain to try bullfighting, then to Italy to enter a backward running race, all the while pleading to his wife, ''I could be great and just never knew it." He encounters others, like fellow sumo- and arm-wrestlers, who play supporting roles in his journey toward self-fulfillment. It's all an unlikely premise, but the reader goes along for the ride.
Focusing only on his travelogue isn't necessary a misstep. But this strategy puts all the eggs in Davis's storytelling basket. Unfortunately, in this case he's not quite up to the task. Too often, the narrative (essentially strung-together, stand-alone chapters) is stuck at the level of a vacationer recounting the ''time I fought a bull in Spain" anecdote: outlandish enough to sustain interest, but not as funny as it ought to be.
When Davis aims for introspection, the effort is hit or miss. Mulling over a session with a therapist, he cleverly remarks, ''From the outside it might look like I was doing crazy things, but that was only because I'd crossed all the noncrazy things off my list." But after his sumo match failures, when a boy asks him for his autograph, Davis produces a homily about a higher purpose: ''It slowly dawned on me that maybe this wasn't a complete defeat. I had unwittingly inspired these people and that made me feel better."
Finding pseudo-philosophical lessons in what is essentially ''Jackass" or ''Fear Factor"-style behavior only reveals the book's shaky premise. By the end of ''Underdog," when Davis has convinced his family to enter the Sauna World Championships in Finland, the ''life purpose" element has worn suspiciously thin.
Wolman can be as guilty as Davis. His weaker moments are the self-indulgent, author-centric ones: an account of traveling to a Scottish castle to find a staircase custom-made for southpaw sword fighters, for instance. Likewise, his more-cynical-than-thou debunking of a fraudulent palmistry school is entertaining, but it's tangential to his overall goals. In both books, the meatier, on-target chapters are more satisfying, like ''Underdog" 's best section, a humane and extended visit with an Indian everyman who becomes Davis's backward-running guru.
For both authors, being ''addicted to questions" is an admirable trait. Even if, in the case of ''A Left-Hand Turn," the central inquiry remains unsolved. Whether lefty brains are wired differently, or one's true purpose can ever be plumbed, no one can say. Yet the meandering routes toward these answers are still worth taking.
Ethan Gilsdorf is a poet and freelance writer living in Somerville. He can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com 
