Most ecologists do not like the idea -- still popular more than two millennia after it gained acceptance -- that nature is in balance. Mention the concept and some researchers get downright dyspeptic. A Wheaton College professor named John Kricher has even written a book, "The Balance of Nature: Ecology's Enduring Myth." "Historically, the notion of a balance of nature is part observational, part metaphysical, and not scientific in any way," he argues, leaving no chance for disagreement: "Any notion of a balance of nature is surely naïve, given the reality of present climate change and its collective effect on global ecosystems."

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The NIH was not pleased. Administrators looked upon the money with institutional jealousy. Begrudgingly they set up a special account for his nerve poison research -- and bluntly informed Venter that he was "perhaps too entrepreneurial."

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Igor Stravinsky is one of eight major artists of the 19th and 20th centuries considered in "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," Jonah Lehrer's earnest attempt to vindicate the accomplishments of art by demonstrating how great composers and novelists and chefs of the past, from Marcel Proust to George Eliot to August Escoffier, anticipated recent scientific discoveries. "I have chosen them because their art proved to be the most accurate," Lehrer writes, "because they most explicitly anticipated our science." Lehrer's thesis would be indefensible even if his examples were convincing: Accuracy is no standard for art, which can fully justify its worth without recourse to peer review. As it stands, even the rationalist lens of science cannot support Lehrer's sophomoric project.

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Exactly who Cody and Oakley were, though, becomes less clear with each attempted biography. The greater the scrutiny, the less certain their history. Every detail is questionable. With his novelist's eye and footing in the West, McMurtry is positioned to deliver as good a book on the pair as we're likely to get. He has succeeded for the most part, by telling us all that isn't known about them, that we might more fully appreciate the extraordinary story of their fame.

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Adam Nicolson describes the feat with impressive skill and frequent insight, if at greater length than necessary, in "God's Secretaries." "The age's lifeblood was the bridging of contradictory qualities," he claims. Judging from Nicolson's characterization of the 54 translators, their prickly king, and their precarious era, that may be the understatement of the century.

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If, on the surface, his dilemma bears a resemblance to that of rogue historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, in another respect the court case against him seems strongly to anticipate such tussles as the lawsuit, recently dismissed, against J.K. Rowling disputing her claim to have created Harry Potter. All of which is to say that the litigation that challenged Wells' reputation some eight decades ago vividly evokes, and may even explain, the reasons for our confusion about plagiarism to this day.

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That defining moment in the history of photography -- the discovery of a technique that would become as closely associated with Man Ray as his own shadow -- serves also as almost too perfect a metaphor for his three-year relationship with Miller in the early '30s. But if it can be read as an example of how, by keeping a muse, an artist may directly benefit -- apparently at her expense -- there is to be found a deeper layer at which it isn't so easy to calculate profit or loss, or even who's who.

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It's a formula. As former New York Times editors Patricia T. O'Conner and Stewart Kellerman note, there's no need with E-rater "to sweat over creativity, individuality and style -- the things a real reader looks for in writing." Alas, the advice they dispense in "You Send Me: Getting It Right When You Write Online" can only result in prose equally dull and mechanical.

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Few writers before or since have received such a glowing endorsement from their own mothers, let alone from the author of "Othello," "Macbeth" and "Hamlet." Hugo may be unique among writers in his unstinting esteem for Shakespeare, whom he liked to imagine not only in an all-star reading group with Dante and Cervantes, but also in the spiritual company of Isaiah and Saint Paul.

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Alas, outside a secondhand store, these days you won't find anything of the sort. On her 50th anniversary, poor, dead Amy Vanderbilt has been "entirely rewritten and updated" by a retired White House staff coordinator and a personal-investment financial reporter. In the 786 pages between the revised book's designer covers can be found the rubble of a toppled past arthritically cobbled together without the faintest idea of what it once meant. "The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette," as authored by Nancy Tuckerman and Nancy Dunnan, won't tell you how to act at an Annapolis hop, and the advice it gives on conversational skills at parties is enough to ensure that you will never again have to worry about being on anybody's guest list, but if you want to understand the demise of etiquette in America, this is the only book you need.

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As might be expected, there are almost as many variations on the theme "the first time I read 'The Catcher in the Rye'" as there are copies of the book in print. And in that respect it isn't so dissimilar from how earlier generations must have remembered their initial encounters with the "Iliad" or "Hamlet" or "The Howdy-Doody Show." The difference is that, in the case of Salinger, we seem to have the insatiable urge to share with him our experience of his work.

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There the resemblance ends. While John's revelation was reputedly divine, Stoker's inspiration came, as his son would later explain, "in a nightmarish dream after eating too much dressed crab." Following that gastrointestinally uncomfortable evening, the potboiler writer -- author of such forgettable titles as "The Shoulder of Shasta" and "The Watter's Mou'" -- would spend seven years pouring several millennia of vampire lore into arguably the most familiar fictional character of the 19th century, a figure who in the 20th would become the most frequently filmed as well.

There would never be another hit for the author after that. While Dracula is not Stoker in either appearance or character, Stoker is pretty much "Dracula" to his readers, and little else. And so the recent reemergence into public view of the original 1897 manuscript -- more than 100 years after the book was sent to the printer -- affords an unusual opportunity to meet the long-dead author. For many decades, the manuscript was presumed lost, thrown away by the publisher as you'd expect would happen with the work of a hack. (Is anybody out there actually archiving the Jackie Collins oeuvre?)

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What was once the argument of the gentleman misogynist is now the line taken by the academic feminist: The sexual body is a dangerous thing, best shrouded from sight. That's the line taken in a new book by feminist scholar Leigh Summers, "Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset," an examination of the garment's "role in female objectification" originally written as her doctoral dissertation. In her introduction, she claims that "[t]he corset remains profoundly under-theorized." She then goes on to build a theoretical construct similar to that advanced by those 19th century men who, in the name of morality, sought to suppress women's sensuality.

While her mind is perhaps slightly sounder than that of Victorian phrenologist Orson S. Fowler -- who warned that wearing a corset excited dangerous "amative desires" by pressing blood to bowels -- her reasoning is largely consistent with that found in such chauvinist classics as "From Ballroom to Hell" and "Where Satan Sows His Seed." Plus, she uses language like "hetero-patriarchal dominance."

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They do. At least that's a conclusion to be reached if the letters in "The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time" are in fact the 50 greatest love letters of all time. Selected by autograph dealer David H. Lowenherz, many were penned by notorious lovers like Ernest Hemingway and Henry VIII. On the whole, they've done their job well, whether that's meant wooing a wife, harnessing a husband or just leading a lover into a tryst.

Ad pros use the term "pull" to denote the response on a mailer, and are thrilled to garner orders from one out of every 100 recipients. Lowenherz's 50 greatest love letters did substantially better, by my own estimated average, pulling a solid 63 percent. Admittedly, these numbers don't take into account long-term satisfaction; from Michelangelo to Anne Sexton, the most alluring lovers are hardly the most stable. Still, they ought to be good enough to make companies from State Farm Insurance to Omaha Steaks reconsider how they bait new customers with their limited-time offers.

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This isn't fiction. On the contrary, it's the story the military told itself back in 1958. For decades after that, journalists heard rumors of an official government "doomsday scenario," yet it wasn't until 1998 that the document was briefly, inadvertently, declassified. Innocuously titled "The Emergency Plans Book," the elusive memorandum was turned over to the National Archives -- together with scores of other previously secret files released by the office of the Secretary of the Air Force in a routine housecleaning -- where military historian L. Douglas Keeney discovered it and had it xeroxed for future reference. When he returned to the archives a year later, he saw that the original was gone; a colonel had ordered it reclassified, and thereafter it was available only to those with top-secret clearance. Keeney found himself with the only copy in civilian hands. Naturally, he decided to publish it.

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Who could be surprised? The Mona Lisa, femme fatale, has a sexual history more sordid than Mata Hari. As a seductress, her sustained popularity rivals that of Cleopatra. French kings kept her in their bathing chamber at Fontainbleu. Napoleon shared her company, briefly, in his bedroom. Authors from Jules Michelet to Jules Verne, Stephen Mallarmé to Algernon Swinburne, have made love to her in so many words. William Gibson lent her name to a cyberpunk whore. She's at least twice endorsed contraception -- appearing on the Giaconda Liquid Latex condom in '50s Spain and, more recently, on the Mona Lisa-CU375 IUD. But even both birth control methods combined could hardly be expected to protect her from decades of Parisian striptease personification, or comparison -- in the New Yorker -- to kinky Monica Lewinsky.

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Andy Warhol also had that. He made himself a name, and vanished in our midst. That was his art. Pity anybody who undertakes his biography: Whatever one claims is questionable, and to catch him whole is less feasible, even, than dismissing him out of hand.

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She was being modest. The truth is that Scott used a great deal of Zelda's writing, credited to characters he modeled after her, in every book he completed in his abbreviated life. That Zelda was Scott's muse is hardly news, and it comes as no surprise that her frank sexuality, the wild abandon with which she flaunted her body at parties, gave color to his stories: More has been written about the Fitzgeralds, their antics and affairs, than they can possibly have known about themselves.

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Her lipstick, too, which turns her mouth into a possible, albeit improbable, kiss. And I can't help but give honorable mention to her wardrobe, which shows off more variations on fur and feathers than there are species in the Galapagos. Marguerite is a femme. A new book by femme-for-life Shar Rednour called "The Femme's Guide to the Universe" gets her type just right when it says, "There is only one moment and that moment is her."

Rednour's book is to my friend Marguerite what lighting cues are to a Broadway musical. It gives technical information she follows instinctively but would be mortified to know I'd learned. (The reason Marguerite's lipstick doesn't smudge? She applies it after her powder which, by happy coincidence, serves as an anti-skid foundation.)

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Physicians, rather like diplomats, must be on familiar terms with both human states in order to be effective partisans of either. Doctors must go places we'd ourselves like to avoid. They must keep a certain confidential manner. Tempted as we may be to view the history of medicine as a story of advancement from brute savagery to HMO-facilitated immortality, the evidence left behind over the past millennium -- textbooks, scalpels and apothecary jars -- suggests, rather, the pains physicians have invariably taken to conceal from their patients what they can't help but acknowledge among themselves: the morbid neutrality of their trade.

Then along comes the Duke University Medical Center with what looks to be a scholarly exhibition, but in fact is an act of high treason. The curators have innocuously titled it "The Physician's Art," and published on the occasion a book-length catalog handsome enough to mingle on a coffee table with the likes of Vanity Fair.

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