A good history of science unreels like the practice of science itself. It wends through a world of experiments until a new reality arises. But the more layered story of that journey is that science is not just a process but is the men and women performing it. In his radiant new book, "The Age of Wonder," Holmes treats us to the amazing lives of the pioneering sailors and balloonists, astronomers and chemists of the Romantic era. Making good on the book's subtitle, he takes us on a dazzling tour of their chaotic British observatories and fatal explorations in African jungles, showing us "how the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science."

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Author Timothy Egan told a funny story in the New York Times last year about having lunch in Vernazza, in the Italian Cinque Terre, "watching waves of people pour into the tiny village to look for their serendipitous Stevesian encounter while clutching his guidebook. A sudden outburst came from my 7-year-old son: 'Rick Steves has got to be stopped!'"

Steves laughed out loud when he read that line, he told me. But see, that's the problem. He's so good-natured and devoted in his PBS travel specials to showing places that Fodor's would never send tourists to in their floral shirts that he's created a monstrous new travel industry. He's the apotheosis of the anti-Carnival Cruise crowd.

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"The Book of the Unknown" is a collection of pre-modern tales -- picture "The Princess Bride" without the gloss -- that do an imaginative number on Judaism. They read as if a mischievous and slightly mad young scholar took up a secret residence in an ancient library and composed his own samizdat version of sacred Jewish texts. In fact, says Keats, "I wrote a number of them at the MacDowell Colony, where I had my own wood-burning oven. Every evening I would smoke myself out and in my delirium the tales would come. I mean, who doesn't like hallucination?"

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Its simple images -- "Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire" -- were as pungent as Jacob Lawrence's paintings of the black Diaspora from the South, and every bit as moving. Yes, she carried the big theme of black America's struggle, but carried it lightly. With a black president about to call the White House home, she conjured the "dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce."

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"Convinced the relationship had become romantic," the Gray Lady reported, "some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself -- instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity."

The article unleashed the watchdogs of journalism in nearly every trade journal and university in the country, spurring debates on editing and anonymous sources, sex and politics, and what constitutes news that's fit to print. On Monday, Iseman added her own criticism -- a defamation lawsuit, seeking $27 million from the Times for its "act of negligence and actual malice."

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"The 71-year-old Burris -- who often refers to himself in the third person -- has never been shy about broadcasting his ambitions and loudly celebrating his achievements," writes Andrew Herrmann of the Chicago Sun-Times. When Burris ran for governor in 2002, his third unsuccessful try at the job, he told the paper's Kate Grossman: "Roland Burris, who started way down here, in the segregation of a southern Illinois community, was able to set goals, plan and strategize and make it."

Appparently Roland Burris' confidence had long been in place. In a 1994 interview with the Sun-Times, Herrmann informs us, "Burris said his past success -- he had been elected comptroller and attorney general -- was 'divine providence' that began at age 15 when he decided to become a lawyer and officeholder."

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Are you a Cleveland Cavaliers fan living in Miami? A Los Angeles Lakers fan shipped to the Lakers' old home in Minneapolis? A Boston Celtics fan on assignment in Omaha, Neb.? With NBA League Pass Broadband ($100), you can watch LeBron, Kobe, K.G. and the stars from all 30 teams (over 900 games) on your laptop, wherever you happen to be stationed.

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Kids love big things. And that goes for you kids in your 30s and 40s who haven't outgrown the thrill of seeing Redskins running back Clinton Portis emblazoned on your bedroom wall. Well, better make that your garage wall: Consider Fathead ($149). What is it? Let's go to the P.R. copy: "Fathead is a life-size, hi-def, precision-cut wall graphic made of hyper-durable vinyl." In other words, a really big poster of sports stars. Jeff Gordon, anyone?

The sport of kings is now the sport of mooks like you and me. Yes, we can own a thoroughbred racehorse ($499 down and an average monthly stipend of $29). Karakorum Racing Team offers ownership stakes as small as one-half of a percent in a stable of more than 30 horses in New York and mid-Atlantic tracks. You and your 100-or-so co-owners pay for the hay and the shots and the horseshoes, and when your horse wins, you get to stand in the winner's circle (in 2008, about 12.4 percent of the time).

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Give the baseball junkie in your life a subscription to Bill James' Web site ($3 a month). Written with nonpareil authority, the site contains a treasure trove of stats and nuggets about your favorite players, past and present. Perfect for punching up while you're watching a game or when you're counting down the months until pitchers and catchers report.

Is your sports fan also a political junkie? If so, may we suggest this "Throwback" Barack Obama high school basketball T-shirt ($20)? Launch three-pointers like "the O'Bomber" did when he led his team to the 1979 Hawaiian state finals. Toss it in the wash, throw it back on, then try to solve the global energy crisis, navigate a recession and extricate the country from two wars.

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"You guys have heard some of the examples of where those dollars go," the fun Alaska governor said to the guys in the audience, acknowledging their media savvy about Congress members, who sometimes acquire public money for frivolous projects. "You've heard about the bridges. And some of these pet projects. They really don't make a whole lot of sense."

A troubled look crossed her face. "And sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good, things like ..." she grinned, shaking her head side to side, her voice rising to a facetious pitch "... fruit fly research in Paris, France." Feeling in tune with the guys in her audience, she added, "I kid you not."

From the point of view of the confident governor, who reportedly once remarked that "dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time," contradicting 200 years of paleontology, you can see how spending public money to study fruit flies seems so dumb.

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Right now we're in his 2001 Volvo on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, merging onto the Belt Parkway, and I'm giving him a little bit of a hard time for driving as if he's caught somewhere between the bumper sticker and the New Hampshire state motto. As we approach the intersection, he lowers his speed, checks his side mirror, looks over his shoulder and tentatively accelerates onto the parkway.

"You have to be careful here," he says. "People come blazing out of the Battery Tunnel with an E-Z Pass and don't stop for you."

"I notice you didn't signal," I say.

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Gould loved to tell interviewers he sang because no piano could match the sound of music he heard in his head. His humming was an unconscious corrective to a piano's physical shortcomings. In truth, Gould picked up the singing habit from his mother when he was first learning to play the piano as a kid in Toronto, and never could shake it.

But that mundane fact doesn't undercut Gould's legendary drive and vision. If he could have, the intellectually electric pianist, who died from a stroke at age 50 in 1982, would have beamed his beloved Bach and Schönberg to listeners without an instrument at all. Performing a piece exactly as he heard it in the concert hall of his imagination was the ideal that forever inspired him. He knew it was impossible to achieve, but that didn't stop him from trying.

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Destroyer has just released "Trouble in Dreams," its ninth album in 12 years. As with many indie bands, it is loved by a small group of fans who follow rock closely, but remains off the radar of most listeners. I discovered Destroyer six years ago by reading a brief review of its 2002 album, "This Night," in the New York Times. Since then I have been convinced the band could find a wider audience. I don't mean it should be more popular -- that's a critical cliché that never comes true for cult bands anyway -- but that casual rock fans who remain on the lookout for something new are likely to be wowed.

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According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, the bacteria, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, affects men who had "frequent contact" and "often did not shower before using communal whirlpools." These men also consumed "10 times the number of antimicrobial prescriptions dispensed to the general public."

The venerable journal warned that continued use of virus-fighting drugs by these men, "combined with other factors such as compromised skin, close skin-to-skin contact, [and] contaminated environment," was brewing "the right conditions for efficient transmission" of the bacteria.

This, indeed, is cause for concern. MRSA has led to staph infections that have killed patients in hospitals nationwide. Further, this particular variant of MRSA, known as USA300 -- which can eat skin and tissue -- is notoriously difficult to treat; many drugs wither in its path.

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The day of respite was cooked up by musician and conceptual artist Bill Drummond, best known as the mad genius at the controls of the KLF, British progenitors of ambient house music. As Drummond testified in the Guardian last year, his love of music had been rattled out of him by its ubiquity. "I decided I needed a day I could set aside to listen to no music whatsoever," he wrote. "Instead, I would be thinking about what I wanted and what I didn't want from music. Not to blindly -- or should that be deafly -- consume what was on offer. A day where I could develop ideas."

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All right, so much for the clever opening. Ross, as you may or may not know, is the classical music critic of the New Yorker. But in the past decade, employing the spry rhythms of pop journalism, and displaying an unabashed affinity for Pavement and Radiohead, Ross has managed to spring classical music from its encrusted shell and make it feel contemporary. That's a mighty admirable feat and now it reaches something close to magnificence in his first book, "The Rest Is Noise."

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With his characteristic empathy and keen eye for details, Sacks, a neurologist whose literary tales of his patients began appearing in the '80s in the New York Review of Books, and later in the New Yorker, wonders how Wearing managed to "retain his remarkable knowledge of music, his ability to sight-read, to play the piano and organ, sing, conduct a choir, in the masterly way he did before he became ill?" His answers delve into the brain anatomy where our trivial and emotional memories reside, and reveal the transformative power of music. Playing the piano or conducting reanimates Wearing, Sacks writes, and "engages him as a creative person." His performing self is "seemingly untouched by his amnesia, even though his autobiographical self" is virtually lost.

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