Book Report (1)

Plain Dealer columnist Sam Fulwood III's "Full of It: Strong Words and Fresh Thinking for Cleveland" (Gray and Co., $24.95) is a collection of columns (about one in every four) Fulwood has penned since arriving here in 2000. A former Los Angeles Times reporter who contributed to the paper's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots, Fulwood takes heat from some PD readers still trying to figure out how this out-of-towner can accurately weigh in on the city's people and politics. Fulwood's angle is that he is the guy to do it because he sees the city with a fresh set of eyes. Whether he's recounting the tale of a hotel clerk who asked him, "So, why are you coming here?" during his first day in town, shedding light on a community wounded by a child's murder or boiling down the city's low self-esteem to a case of "geographic penis envy," Fulwood writes the Cleveland he sees and already loves, for better or worse.