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"Blonde Like Me" is almost purely descriptive, dividing blonds into types -- Innocent, Moon and Sun are Ilyin's major divisions -- and offering glimpses of the author's past through the lens of the blonds she has known and been. There is nothing wrong with organizing things this way, but the book is disappointingly bland as narrative and disappointingly shallow as analysis.

Blonde Like Me: The Roots of the Blonde Myth in Our Culture By Natalia Ilyin Touchstone, 188 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com I'm Wild Again: Snippets From My Life and a Few Brazen Thoughts By Helen Gurley Brown St. Martin's Press, 288 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Is a woman's "deepest desire for herself" really revealed by her choice of hair color? Ilyin's assumptions about women and the world are both narrow and conventional:

The Innocent Blonde inside every woman wants to kick over the traces every now and again. There are moments when we all get the urge to abandon the four-by-four by the side of the road, dump the kids off at the sitter's for fifteen years, pay off the mortgage with a flick of the pen, and make tracks for Aruba. But we can't, so we buy a box of hair color.

Oh yeah? There's an "innocent" blond inside all of us, including Asians, Africans and we brunets who have never had the slightest interest in being blond? And many of us never pick up the "traces," or we do kick them over, and not with a box of hair color. Who is teaching father culture here?

On the last page of her book, Ilyin writes that women choose to be blonds because "they want to live heroic lives," which may be so. A book examining the distance between actually heroic lives and lives centered on hair color choices would be a useful thing. But a book that assumes that there is something heroic about having a particular hair color is another matter. Don't women, at least, know that questions of appearance have their place, but scarcely represent the deepest truths of our lives?

But what moves the book from the realm of the flawed to that of the truly annoying is the cloying tone Ilyin uses to tell her life story. Throughout "Blonde Like Me," her dumbed-down stance, the effort to pretend that she's really a regular gal, not an intellectual, grates. Why should a highly intelligent university professor feel obliged to coo on the first page of her book, "Tired of working, I decided to go to a very ritzy grad school to learn about signs and symbols and what they meant"? Or, later, mock her own work in progress on advertising imagery? Why does she feel the need to convince us that she's insecure about her looks and weight, just like the presumed chummy (female) reader? (And what does the male reader make of all that?) It's sad indeed if she thinks "we" won't like her if she's smart, and it's foolish of her, as a writer, to cut her coat accordingly. Does she want her obit to mention that she was blond or that she was a semiotician?

Ilyin is a polished and graceful stylist, and she provides enough historical anecdotes and pop-culture tidbits to show that she could undoubtedly have written a good and enduring book on the symbolic status of the blond. But she hasn't. There is no more in the way of argument or interpretation than you might find in Vogue. Only stray aphorisms and asides suggest the blonds book we might have had: "Real people are not whole" ... "The words of the goddess that want to come out of your mouth often get tangled in your hair."

Inside "Blonde Like Me" are at least two more interesting books struggling to emerge. One is about being a very tall female: Ilyin claims that the male attention she gets comes from her being blond, but it's likely that being a 6-foot-2 woman attracts even more notice than her hair color does. The other is about growing up in a diplomatic household with a White Russian father. The scenes of her family life are quietly delightful, although they are drawn with little depth. Family members get their one- or two-line descriptions, and you have to wonder about someone who would dismiss her sister thus: "Nadia works at a computer company, sees friends, has beaus, and kicks over the traces every once in a while by having pizza at her favorite dive. Add to this a lovely Victorian apartment and convenient storage unit, and you pretty much have Nadia."

Several chapters of "Blonde Like Me" are memoir material only tangentially related to the book's premise ("The Semi-Dior Pivot‚" about how her mother sent her to modeling school to give her confidence once she hit 6-2 at 13, and "I, Defiler," in which she describes a bizarre incident at an Orthodox church service). They suggest the contours of one of the hidden books in this one, but add nothing to its content as a book about blonds. It's as though Ilyin wanted to write a memoir, but got a contract for a book on blonds, and tried to make the best of it.

Next page | If Helen Gurley Brown had a graduate degree, she wouldn't go around ashamed of it