"Wounded Warriors," the title of Mike Sager's third collection of magazine stories, makes it sound like a book about soldiers, but that's only partly true. It's about warriors in a broader sense.

Basketball superstar Kobe Bryant is at war with his own limits. Charlie Van Dyke, who weighs more than 600 pounds, is at war with what people think of him. Activist Al Sharpton is at war with — well, take your pick.

They all come alive in surprising ways in Sager's hands. Good profile writers make connections that others miss, uncovering truths not just about their subjects but also about all of us. And Sager is a good one.

Here he is on Van Dyke:

"Charlie Van Dyke is a fat man in a low-fat world. Once upon a time, fat meant jolly, godly, prosperous — think Buddha, Venus, a Roman senator, a medieval friar, Rubens' women. Today, in our health-obsessed culture, fat is a symbol of shame — a sign of weakness and sloth and lack of discipline, an antisocial act."

Here he is on Bryant:

"He sees his work as his art, his calling. Like Jason Bourne and James Bond, two of his cinematic heroes, Kobe sees himself as an uber-practitioner: a modern warrior able to solve any problem, able to train his way into dominance."

Sager, who lives in San Diego, has been writing magazine pieces (Esquire, Rolling Stone, GQ) for 25 years. This book features 11 stories that he describes in the foreword as "particularly dear to me," stories "that have helped to shape me as a journalist and as a man."

Included is the first one he ever wrote, in 1983, on Vietnam vets who moved to Thailand after the war and stayed. It includes one from last December, the title story, about Marines "irretrievably broken" by the war on terror.

Both benefit from the long hours Sager spends with his subjects, watching and listening. They get comfortable with him and open up, and he comes away with insights not possible through the hit-and-run journalism so widely practiced these days, especially on television.

Some of the stories are harrowing. In "A Boy and His Dog in Hell," Sager goes to the slums of Philadelphia, where boys trade (or steal) pit bulls and make them fight, sometimes to the death. He captures the savagery in frightening detail: "She locks Diablito just behind the head. There is much growling and squealing. There is blood." But he doesn't revel in it.

What lingers is the sadness, how the boys don't seem to mind that they have no future. "This is life as they know it," he writes. "It's the only one they have."

In "Generation H," he hangs out in New York with a heroin addict, who becomes a window into the world where dope has become fashionable: "The fuel behind the music, the route to the sunken cheeks of the waifish model, the chemical prop in films and clubs, the self-administered antidote to diminished expectations and sensory overload in an era of ennui — 180 channels and nothing on, nothing new anyway, and nothing to look forward to."

The heroin piece also has a remarkable description of what it's like to be high on the drug, an integral part of understanding its lure, but something usually missing in stories, for obvious reasons.

"Heroin is who I am," the addict says at one point, and you don't doubt it for a second.

Happily, there are lighter pieces here, too. "The Smartest Man in America" is about people with super-high IQs who have a hard time fitting in. One works as a nightclub bouncer for $6,000 a year. Another is writing a philosophy book that he knows is already too long to be published — 1 million words and counting.

They're lost, and it's always somebody else's fault. Sager doesn't pass judgment on them, although it's possible to detect a smile behind the inclusion of quotes like this one, from one of the geniuses: "I'd love to clone myself, I really would. I would know how to raise me to reach my full potential."

The final story, from 1987, is about Sager's futile and funny attempt to interview Marlon Brando. He goes to Tahiti (tough assignment!) and then to L.A., and even though we never meet the actor, we learn a lot about him as well as about celebrity and our growing obsession with it.

All in all, a fine collection; however, there's one bothersome aspect. In the foreword, Sager explains that all the stories "have been renovated, refined, re-edited, and, in some cases, subjected to healthy cuts."

But he doesn't tell us why, or what was gained (or lost) in the process. We're left to wonder how true they still are to their time and place.

Harper's magazine has long believed in first-person journalism. Reporters get inside a story — sometimes working undercover — and return with dispatches that eschew traditional objectivity.

"Submersion Journalism" is a new collection of 15 such pieces, most of them riveting. Barbara Ehrenreich provides her usual dose of steely-eyed realism, this time to her own battle with breast cancer. Charles Bowden penetrates the chilling world of a longtime drug-war informant.

The articles are grouped by category — politics, violence, illness, vice, the arts, war — and together they provide a snapshot of recent history that's both entertaining and troubling.

To find out more about John Wilkens and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.