Ask anyone who has done much volunteering and you are bound to hear—along with heartwarming stories of teaching a kid to read or saving a church slated for demolition—tales of abuse. A friend recalls the Saturday she sacrificed to help build a playground at a New Orleans community center. She arrived to find the well-heeled volunteers who had donated the space standing around complaining into their cell phones about the heat; she was handed a shovel. Six palm-blistering hours later, she “accidentally” tossed mulch on a slacker and left. “I just thought if we’re all in this together, let’s be in this together,” she said.

But it is our very self-reliance (and a distrust of government), sociologists Marc A. Musick and John Wilson write in 

, that spurs Americans to donate their time. Bootstraps firmly in hand, we have the highest volunteer rate in the world—one study estimates that nearly two-thirds of Americans volunteer. Because such labor is motivated by ideals rather than cash, tapping this resource can be a delicate challenge. In a giant compendium—of other social scientists’ studies as well as analyses of survey data collected over two decades—Musick and Wilson set out to paint an exhaustive portrait of modern volunteers, and “help practitioners better recruit, train, motivate, and retain volunteers.”

The book examines volunteers’ motivations and ­backgrounds—­including race, gender, and socioeconomic ­resources—­and addresses subjects such as recruitment and types of service various groups favor. But the authors’ sweeping approach encounters a ­not-­uncommon prob­lem: Many of the studies mentioned contradict one another. So we are left with ­forehead ­slap­pers such as “In the opinion of many scholars, organ­i­za­tions will recruit volunteers only if they appeal to their values and beliefs” and “There is quite convincing evidence that volunteers are more em­pathic people than ­non-­volunteers.” You don’t ­say.

Many recruiters won’t be surprised to learn that their best volunteer prospects are affluent, white, churchgoing women. (While women do not contribute more hours than men, they volunteer at a higher rate.) To be fair, people in each of these categories are the most likely to be asked—41 percent of white Americans, for instance, have been asked to volunteer, compared with 33 percent of blacks, and nearly two-thirds of Amer­icans with household incomes over $75,000 are asked compared with one-third of those earning less than $25,000. Being asked is a strong predictor of who ­volunteers.

From amid the obvious conclusions and the sociological jargon, however, an engaging narrative begins to emerge, of Americans’—especially American ­women’s—­relationship to labor. “In capitalist societies,” the authors write, “volunteers are often admired as people, but their work is devalued. We tend to assume that if a job is really worth doing, it will be paid for.” Often, the volunteer work that women do is “society’s ‘dirty work,’” similar to household ­duties—­caring for children and the elderly, preparing meals, bookkeeping. Men tend to have “more desirable” leadership roles in the public domain: coach, firefighter, board member. This imbalance led many in the feminist movement of the 1970s to resist volunteering. Activist Doris Gold put it bluntly: “Voluntarism is clearly ­exploitative—­in its implication that social justice for all classes can be achieved through the moral ‘service’ of some who are expendable, albeit out of choice.” From this perspective, our nation of ­do-­it-­yourselfers is a place where we are emphatically not all in this ­together.

, I wondered what would happen if Americans stopped being quite so ­gung-­ho about signing up to help out. What if women took a break from the “dirty work,” and instead people were paid to do it? The warm-fuzzies sector might shrink, but the resulting jobs would allow those who couldn’t afford to volunteer to have a bigger role in helping others, even ­as—­per the American ­way—­they helped ­themselves.

, a writer living in New Orleans, has spent thousands of hours volunteering in education programs in the United States and India.

 by Marc A. Musick and John Wilson, Indiana University Press, 663 pp, 2007.

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What makes people volunteer to help others? Reviewer Darcy Courteau tries to find some answers in a study by two sociologists.

Labors of Love

On the entire spectrum of vice, compulsive hoarding registers toward the innocuous end. Who doesn’t have a drawer full of faded T-shirts or old rubber bands? Still, in its most extreme forms the phenomenon is repulsive enough that it’s a natural for reality TV. Last year A&E premiered 

, which features homes pregnant with debris and agitated occupants who have been given the ultimatum—by landlords or health inspectors—to clean up or move out. A woman stalls a cleanup crew for hours, demanding that they recover a treasured piece of broken floor tile they’ve misplaced. Amusing. But then come the long-suffering spouses who pick their way, Daniel Boone–like, through “goat paths” on the way to bed. When the camera films a woman asking Mom if a broken vacuum cleaner and its dander-filled companions are more important than family, the problem ticks, on our vice spectrum, a shade closer to perdition. Buried as we are in a glut of cheap goods, clutter is the rule, but we draw the line at ankle deep. More than that, and you’ve got problems.

Well, yes and no. Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) specialists Randy Frost and Gail Steketee take a philosophical approach in their engaging and surprisingly cheerful study 

. Frost, a psychologist, narrates several representative cases. (Steketee, a social worker, contributed to the “conceptual work,” but most of the fieldwork is Frost’s.) The collections that brought the woman they call Irene to financial ruin and broke up her family are ho-hum in comparison to Ralph’s house, in which the bathtub is so full of scavenged detritus that he showers at a pool at the local college. These folks require interventions such as the “experiment,” in which hoarders throw out an inconsequential item, then track their diminishing emotional pain until—in the best cases—each subsequent purge becomes easier. The clinician’s tone remains imperturbable, though the authors do allow themselves a dusting of deadpan humor: Irene, encouraged to experiment with tossing a newspaper, first shakes from its pages an envelope containing $100. “This wasn’t exactly the outcome I’d expected,” Frost writes.

Hoarders' connection to objects is so real that some have committed suicide after forced cleanups.

Between six and 15 million Americans obsessively collect, and, contrary to popular notion, they are not always elderly. Frost and Steketee report an “average age of just over 50” among their subjects, many of whom described hoarding symptoms from early in life; other hoarders are in elementary school. Hoarders’ pathologies, often exacerbated by past trauma, are many, and can include OCD (which drives the collecting), attention deficits that prevent organization (an item out of sight is out of mind), paralyzing perfectionism (organizational standards, set impossibly high, end up abandoned altogether), and a childlike avoidance of the discomfort associated with discarding things.

Yet, the authors argue, there is more to the picture. Hoarders’ style of consumption is different from that of status seekers: “Objects become part of who the hoarder is, not the façade he or she displays to the world.” The connection to objects is so real that several hoarders have committed suicide after forced cleanups. Items are cherished for the utility and possibilities they represent; Ralph will not part with a leaking bucket as long as he can imagine alternate uses for it. An “inordinate number of hoarders describe themselves as artists,” the authors observe, adding, “Maybe hoarding is creativity run amok.”

The modern world tends toward abstraction. Files are stored not in cabinets but in information “clouds.” People who once earned a living making things now look for work. Against this backdrop, there is a heroic element to the “de facto archivists of objects others have left behind, inverted versions of materialists who crave the new.” Indeed, it is the collector of leaking buckets who knows what succor the right piece of trash could bring to a person in need—of a needle, a knife blade, or the unrotted portion of a potato.

Her fiction and essays have appeared, most recently, in

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things

 by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 290 pp, 2011.

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Up to Here

On November 18, 1978, more than 900 Americans living in a socialist collective in Guyana were murdered or took their own lives. Many poisoned themselves with Flavor Aid laced with cyanide. Their bodies were found scattered around Jonestown, the plantation they’d carved out of the jungle four years earlier at the behest of their leader, Jim Jones. He had promised his followers an egalitarian utopia, but Jonestown defectors had returned to the United States calling the place a prison. Leo Ryan, a Democratic congressman from California, led a small entourage to Guyana to investigate. When Jonestown gunmen killed Ryan and several others, Jones ordered aides to roll out stockpiles of poison; he and his followers would find peace in death before the authorities arrived.

Americans have been darkly fascinated with the event ever since—it’s the subject of numerous books and documentary films. Today, we mock blind followers of any stripe by saying they have “drunk the Kool-Aid.” In 

, journalist Julia Scheeres attempts to correct that unsympathetic characterization of the Jonestown faithful. She knows evangelism’s destructive side intimately—in her 2005 memoir, 

, she described how her zealot parents packed her and an adopted brother off to a brutal Christian reeducation camp in the Dominican Republic.

Scheeres brings her special understanding to bear on the lives of five Jonestown residents, most of whom survived the mass suicide: a man trying to keep his troubled family together, his rebellious son, an elderly black woman searching for a desegregated house of worship, an idealistic schoolteacher, and a kid from the Oakland ghetto determined to stay out of jail. Scheeres is a gifted storyteller, and her characters’ reconstructed conversations and thoughts are a testament to extensive interviews and research that relied, in part, on the hundreds of audiotapes and 50,000 pages of diaries and personal notes the FBI recovered from the site.

When Jones founded his Peoples Temple in the mid-1950s in Indianapolis, desegregation was a cornerstone of the church—a majority of his followers were black. (Jones himself was a white man born in rural Indiana.) A decade later he moved the congregation to California, where he performed phony healings even as he trashed the Bible and claimed personal divinity.

The Temple’s live-and-let-live ethos soured. Jones slept with congregants, demanded their paychecks, and meted out spankings with a belt. Eventually, a journalistic exposé spurred his retreat to Jonestown, whose remote jungle location allowed for even greater abuses. People worked soil too poor to feed them while Jones feasted on barbiturates, chicken dinners, and Diet Pepsi. Naughty children were fed hot peppers or dangled upside down in a well. And Jones staged a series of “White Nights,” during which he pretended that Jonestown was under attack, and conducted suicide drills with fake poison.

Jones’s actions were horrific, but some of the book’s most anguished accounts are of the cruelty his followers heaped on each other, ratting out family members or offering to kill a captured runaway. Ultimately, however, Scheeres concludes that the people of Jonestown were “noble idealists” and innocent victims betrayed by a single man.

The reality seems more complicated than that. It is true that not everyone who died at Jonestown freely chose to cash it in. An iconic photograph of Jonestown corpses shows a pair of tiny legs lying in a stack of jeans-clad rumps. Among the dead were 304 children; dozens of adults were forcibly injected with poison. Certainly, many of the faithful ended up being exploited instead of finding the equality they sought: Blacks slaved in the plantation’s fields, and women became Jones’s concubines. But it is also true that camp guards carrying weapons they could have used for self-defense forced their comrades to die and finally killed themselves. The man who terrified and seduced wasn't all-powerful.

Indeed, Jones was so messed up on downers by the time he summoned the cyanide that he slurred his words as he recorded what now circulates on the Internet as the “Death Tape”: Residents, each carrying a private mix of reasons they’d sought to live in Jonestown—fears, loyalties, ideals, the need to be close to a father or to absorb just a bit of Jones’s power—have crowded around. For several minutes, Christine Miller, a black woman, argues with Jones. There are alternatives, and it isn't right to kill the children. “We all have a right to our own destiny as individuals,” she tells Jones, who listens patiently, paternally—before allowing the others to shout her down.

, has written for publications including 

: "A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jamestown" by Julia Scheeres, Free Press, 2011.

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Today, we mock blind followers by saying they have “drunk the Kool-Aid.” Perhaps we should correct that unsympathetic characterization of the Jonestown faithful.

The True Believers of Jonestown

In the Kuwaiti desert in March 2003, before 800 soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment, British army colonel Tim Collins made a dazzling eve-of-battle speech. With Shakespearean flourishes and the moral fine-tuning of Jehovah, he instructed the troops to “tread lightly” in “the birthplace of Abraham,” though some would kill, others would be killed, and there would be “no time for sorrow.” Iraq’s children would one day acknowledge that the “the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you.” Reporters and their audiences, including President George W. Bush, were electrified. Months later, however, Sam Leith, a writer and former literary editor of 

, spoke to a high-ranking officer who suspected the speech had sunk like a stone before the immediate audience, youngsters more worried about staying alive in the desert than in history books.

, his brief, rambunctious handbook of rhetoric, to illustrate a larger point. If you want folks on your side, you’ve got to speak their language. Collins would have done better to borrow a page from General George S. Patton, who roused his soldiers with a profane promise to get them home — the fastest route being through Berlin, where he’d personally shoot the so-and-so Hitler, “just like I’d shoot a snake!”

To help his readers both to hone their own rhetorical skills and to train their noses to detect baloney when the scent wafts their way, Leith breaks down the basics of rhetoric, the art of persuasion systematized by Aristotle. He often provides practical advice: When confronted with your past failures, talk about building a better future. But “if you’re arguing against someone about what to do in the future, find something in the past with which to discredit him.”

Pistols is not all pop how-to. A self-confessed rhetoric nerd, Leith will not disappoint his fellows. He sprinkles his study with terminology, from “atticism” (“crisp, unornamented, aphoristic style”) to “zeugma”—go look that one up, there’s a glossary in the back—as well as metrical line readings that poets might appreciate. He observes that Antony’s supplication to “friends, Romans, countrymen” in 

 rouses its listeners because it sounds like the opening bars of AC/DC’s heavy metal song “Back in Black”: “DUM! DUH-dum! DUH-dum-dum!” And the three consecutive stressed syllables “Yes we can” gave that hopeful 2008 refrain enough heft to lob its speaker into the White House.

Rhetoric is, in fact, everywhere that elections are, and that’s for the better, Leith maintains, since the art is most robust in societies where citizens are allowed a say. “People in Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Libya, by pushing for democracy, are arguing, in effect, for the right to argue,” he writes of the Arab Spring. This is true, but many a fine voice has incited not compassion but cruelty, not virtue but vice. Indeed, the rhetoric masters the book profiles include not only Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. but also Adolf Hitler, and even Satan, who speaks with a silver tongue in Genesis and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Perhaps for that reason, not everyone has been as excited about rhetoric as Aristotle was. His mentor, Plato, may have been dismayed that his pragmatic pupil thought rhetoric on a par with the search for objective truth. The Western tradition of persuasion is confrontational to the core, “better at dealing with either/or propositions than and/also possibilities or neither/nors,” Leith notes. I wouldn’t have minded hearing more about that analysis, or about this one: The very point when women became educated and enfranchised strangely coincided with the “point at which our long history of understanding and consciously thinking about rhetoric sank beneath the waters of Lethe.” Leith doesn’t speculate why, but I wish he had.

To be fair, that discussion might have been beyond the scope of this book, whose larger aim, Leith writes, is to pass along love, for “to understand rhetoric is in large part to understand your fellow human beings.” That sounds like a suspiciously benign motivation to study the art of argument, but in these funny, friendly pages, it rings entirely true.

 is an assistant editor of The Wilson Quarterly.

Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric From Aristotle to Obama

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Reviewing "Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama."