Days from now, when we attend kindergarten orientation, my husband and I will finally get the results of that mysterious exam our son took months ago: Is our child “normal,” “potentially gifted” or “at risk” of educational failure?

Most assessment experts agree that so-called readiness tests have error rates approaching 50 percent, making them the educational equivalent of a coin toss — which would certainly be a faster, cheaper and more entertaining way to determine the futures of very young children. Even the more benign developmental-screening tests, originally designed only to refer kids who might need further evaluation, are now being used to come up with quickie, often quacky, diagnoses.

Everyone from the American Academy of Pediatrics to the National Association of Educators of Young Children has protested the tests’ misuse, but most schools not only continue to give them, but also continue to behave as though the results were divinely inspired. “There are real problems with screening young children,” says Gilbert Gredler, professor of psychology at the University of South Carolina. “There’s quite a bit of error there, yet a lot of people assume there’s no error at all.”

In many ways, my family is lucky. Our suburban New York district doesn’t use the test results to place children in “slow” or “developmental” classes, as many districts still do. Yet the test will invariably label our child in ways large and small, as will the information we were asked to provide on our registration form: Was the pregnancy “normal”? When did our child begin to walk? To talk? And so forth.

Questions like these — some of which attempt to reach back into the womb to determine school aptitude — are quite common. Like the screening tests, they are based on the well-meaning, but deeply perverse, notion that predicting school failure is the only way to prevent it.

Rather than wait for difficulties to emerge, a phalanx of early-intervention specialists — speech therapists, occupational therapists, therapist therapists and special-ed specialists — is ready to predict learning disabilities long before they actually arise. Of course, the flip side of this notion sounds like a Zen koan for the grade school set: If we didn’t forecast failure, and then hit a child with the one-two punch of low expectations and less challenging instruction, would it have happened at all?

Kindergarten screenings have always been with us. But much of the current fuss about kindergarten readiness can be traced back to 1990, when a simple declarative sentence became Goal No. 1 of the Bush administration’s much-ballyhooed Goals 2000: “All children will enter school ready to learn.”

That sounded good. But alas, it turned out that no one really knew what “readiness” meant. Did it require a radical redistribution of wealth whereby all poor children would be entitled to the privileges and perks of a middle-class upbringing? Um, not exactly. With the best of intentions, the readiness mandate simply created an extra burden — one that was conveniently shifted onto the child’s skinny shoulders.

In many districts, the Gesell School Readiness Test gained new importance, becoming a kind of pre-K SAT, a gatekeeper exam for, of all things, public-school kindergarten.

Based on the work of Arnold Gesell — a maturational psychologist who believed that development was a process that progressed in tiny, orderly and measurable steps — the test was designed to rate a child across a variety of domains and then spit out a developmental age (D.A.) that could be compared with the child’s chronological age (C.A.).

Gesell failed to consider environmental influences on children, and he created his test to be deliberately subjective, based largely on the perceptions of examiners trained by — you guessed it — the Gesell Institute. But this didn’t faze its adherents one bit. Neither did what one researcher dubbed the test’s “reverse Lake Wobegon effect”: its darkly pessimistic view of children’s abilities. In one upstate New York district, for example, 61 percent of kindergartners were sent to so-called developmental classes as a result of the Gesell exam — until parents won a lawsuit to stop the practice.

And thus it became possible for children to do what was once unthinkable: flunk kindergarten before they ever got a tiny foot in the door.

Even when schools didn’t rely on the Gesell exam per se, their misuse of other readiness exams, along with the growing pressure to raise standardized-test scores, gave rise to the idea that kindergarten children had to be not just 5 years old but |ber-5-year-olds, or what used to be known as “6-year-olds.”

This led to the practice of “holding out” or “redshirting,” in which middle- and upper-class parents choose to delay kindergarten for their children, usually boys, because of perceived cognitive, physical or emotional “deficits.”

Unfortunately, when these grizzled pre-K vets, many of whom have a full three years of taking turns under their belts, finally do enter kindergarten, “they come to school and find out that the program is not sufficiently stimulating,” says Samuel Meisels, professor of education at the University of Michigan and an expert on early-childhood assessment. “Then [parents] start to militate for more academic programs — which is precisely what caused the problem in the first place.”

Unlike Gesell, whose work is several decades old, most psychologists now view children’s development as an erratic process — a series of zigs and zags, leaps and bounds. So the child who is deemed delayed in one area may very well surpass his or her peers just a few months later without any intervention at all. Researchers who have studied the long-term effects of “holding out” have found that exposure to school itself — the very thing that is being withheld — is actually a major factor in spurring children’s cognitive development.

A quick look at the Web sites for several of the more popular assessment tools — such as the Dial screens, Brigance screens and Metropolitan Readiness Tests — reveals not only that some come in stylish tote bags but also that their publishers use words like “fast,” “easy to use,” “reliable,” “appealing,” “colorful” “child-friendly” and even, gulp, “fun” to describe them.

Set aside for a moment the idea that brevity and reliability go together like, well, gross motor skills and intelligence. Exactly how much “fun” is it for a young child to be assessed? Is it a Chuck E. Cheese kind of fun? Or a “Let’s go to the doctor for a checkup and hope to God there’s a lollipop at the end” kind of fun?

A key ingredient of an assessment, nearly everyone seems to agree, is that the examiner establish immediate rapport with the child. In an age where everyone from Barney to Ernie has warned kids not to talk to strangers, this would seem to be no easy task.

On any given day, my own son’s personality can change dramatically, as can his level of comfort with people he has just met. On screening day, I was lucky. He was charming, chatty and eager to show off. But last year one of his playmates, a bright but shy little girl, apparently had what I’ll call a Bartleby day. Faced with the array of achingly child-friendly materials placed before her, she simply preferred not to play. That branded her at risk of school failure — or so her parents were told. (She’s doing just fine, thank you.)

Meisels, who believes that screening young children appropriately serves an important public health function, is nevertheless stumped by the practice of excluding parents from the sessions. “You wouldn’t take your child to a pediatrician if you couldn’t stay,” he points out. If the objective of screening is to obtain accurate information, Meisels says, parents clearly need to be involved. “The parents can say afterwards, ‘You know he really can do that — it’s just that he has a cold today, or he woke up late.’ It is very important for parents to have that role. Very few are intrusive during the screening.”

Instead, parents are sometimes the last to know about one. In a neighboring school district, a friend only learned that her son had been screened last September, when he came home and casually mentioned that “someone had taken him out into the hallway and told him to hop.”

Given these abuses, why bother to screen at all?

“The major reason is prevention,” says Meisels. “We can prevent problems that are at a low level of intensity from getting worse, and we can prevent secondary problems.” But, he adds, in middle-class communities, children with developmental problems are usually identified well before it’s time for kindergarten. “If you gave a valid screening test in a middle-class community,” he said, “very few children would be referred.”

That’s not to say that some children won’t have very real learning disabilities or experience other kinds of problems in school. But is there really something awful about letting difficulties emerge instead of betting — with questionable odds — that they might? Is it really all over by first grade? (In that case, maybe those tiny hands should just be put to work learning a useful trade.)

Or maybe, just maybe, we can strive to return that exciting, overwhelming first year at the big brick building into something like a grace period.

How’s that for a national goal?

As a work of literary archaeology or, more fittingly, anthropology, “The Tale of Murasaki” is a stunning success. The book overflows with rich descriptions of customs, scenery, rituals and nature that evoke a lost world and often rise to the level of art. Yet because she sticks so closely to her literary and historical sources, Dalby never quite manages to make the imaginative leap needed to bridge the gap between first-rate social science and compelling fiction.

As the story begins, Murasaki’s mother has just died, and, before long, Murasaki is running the household of her father, Tametoki, a poet and scholar of Chinese who has seen to it that his daughter is similarly well-educated — a trait that puts her at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to attracting suitors.

Murasaki doesn’t seem to mind this; in fact, as a young woman she is repelled by men, and seems content to embark on a series of intimate relationships with close female friends. While Murasaki resists her father’s attempts to find her a husband, she and her friend Chifuru begin making up stories about a dashing dream lover whose passion and poetry stand in sharp contrast to the dull, arranged marriages that await them. In “Night of the Hazy Moon,” Murasaki’s first tale, she writes, “Even in the crowd of elegant courtiers, Genji stood out. At 18 his boyish handsomeness was charming, his clothing impeccable, but it was his quietly confident attitude that drew people to him.”

Before long, Genji takes on a life of his own, and his adventures, originally set down in a series of letters, slowly make their way into the wider world, where they are devoured by an ever-growing audience. After her first love affair with a man ends, Murasaki dutifully acquiesces to her father’s choice of husband — a match that works out surprisingly well and results in the birth of her daughter, Katako. Ultimately, Murasaki’s literary prowess wins her a much-coveted position at court, where she is initially dazzled by but soon becomes disenchanted with the gossip, petty politics and sexual peccadilloes of the imperial circle, and discovers, sadly, that the real is far less compelling than her romantic ideal.

A great deal happens to Dalby’s characters, including rape, suicide, smallpox, death in childbirth and all manner of heartbreak. Yet, to paraphrase President Clinton, who may fancy himself a Genji for our time, we never really feel their pain. Part of the problem is that there are just too many of them. Dozens of major and minor historical figures glide stiffly through these pages — so many, in fact, that the author thoughtfully provides a handy glossary of names right upfront. Without it, the reader might well be lost.

There are pleasures to be had along the way. Dalby does a fine job of depicting odd but fascinating practices such as teeth darkening, in which fashionable ladies mixed iron filings and sake to achieve an alluring, black-as-night smile, and her descriptions of the many-layered gowns, whose color combinations have names like “Flowering Iris,” are often breathtaking. Devotees of poetry slams will probably also enjoy Dalby’s accounts of their ancient precursors; in “The Tale of Murasaki,” a character’s way with waka often helps determine his fate in love and his place at court.

For all its charms, however, reading this novel is a bit like visiting a museum where the exhibits are encased behind thick layers of glass. When the story is over, you come away having learned a great deal, but feeling little.

Waiting to meet him at the Wichita airport, with her two kids in tow, is his levelheaded yet secretly wanton sister, Emily, who moved back home after divorcing the cokehead who was sleeping with Mona, her sister, the youngest of the Mabies. (As if that weren’t enough, Emily will soon be diagnosed with a terminal illness and be enjoying after-hours sex in a swimming pool at the Y.) Mona, who lives at home as well, not only tried to kill herself after being dumped by Emily’s ex-husband but still sleeps with stuffed animals and married men, and continues to flirt, delicately, with self-annihilation. Their mother, devoted but ditzy, mired in nostalgia for her children’s childhood, is slowly, symbolically going blind; her husband, the now-retired Professor Mabie, responds by gradually becoming deaf.

Doubtless, Nelson, who has also written two well-received books of short stories, had to somehow bring three generations of this family back under the same roof, but here she has attempted to cram the material of half a dozen novels into one. “Living to Tell” would be much more powerful if very little happened at all.

Free from the distractions of a hyperactive plot, readers might simply enjoy Nelson’s startling similes (a toothpick twitches in the mouth of a young cop “as if he wished it were a needle, as if he could spit it with deadly accuracy into somebody’s eyeball”) or relish her riffs on subjects as diverse as the mind of a parrot, the distinctive rhythms of each family member’s feet coming down the front stairs and the “secret marital paradox nobody told you about, the way you could be desperately, suicidally lonely, and yet have not one shred of privacy.”

In fact, some of the most memorable parts of the book are those in which next to nothing takes place. When Professor Mabie crawls into a hospital bed with Betty Spitz, the platonic love of his life who is now dying, he simply lies there. “‘Finally,’ Betty said, gaze held upward. And he knew what she meant. At last they had arrived in bed together. For years they’d circumnavigated physical touch, both aware of its loadedness.”

Likewise, when Nelson flashes back to Winston’s accident, the scene derives its force not from his grandmother’s death, which feels contrived, but from the tale Bunny is telling at the exact moment the car hits that pole.

Spurred on by the colorful breath mints she had just seen at lunch, Bunny is remembering something that nearly happened when she visited a hotel bathroom as a young girl: Without warning, a hand reached out from under the stall next to hers, grabbed her ankle and then, just as abruptly, let her go. She emerged from the incident almost unscathed, left with just the shadowy imprint of a man’s hand on her white socks, and a memory that altered her in ways large and small. Unfortunately, what comes next is about as subtle as cooking with chef Emeril Lagasse. Bam! Before you know it, it’s bye-bye Bunny.

Despite these flaws, “Living to Tell” is an extraordinary achievement. At her best, Nelson, who begins her novel with a quote from “To the Lighthouse,” blends a lyricism reminiscent of Virginia Woolf with a biting wit all her own. As she traces the histories and mysteries of the Mabie clan, filtering events through each character’s perceptions and pitting each one’s version of reality against another’s, not only does Nelson paint a richly hued portrait of a family, she creates a world the reader is reluctant to leave.

Title titters aside, it turns out that Barnes, who died nearly a quarter-century ago, and packed at least a dozen eye-popping lives into her 70-plus years, more than holds her own as the subject of a biography. After just a few pages of her life story, it seems only fitting that the likes of Lassie, Amelia Earhart, Erich von Stroheim, Ronald Reagan and even Yeager, Mr. Right Stuff himself, are relegated to mere walk-ons. Pancho, aka Florence Lowe Barnes, was born to be a star.

In Barnes, worlds collided. Born to Gilded Age wealth and privilege, she became, among other things, a reluctant minister’s wife and a heartlessly indifferent mother, an accomplished equestrian, an aviator who once set a speed record, a stunt pilot who toured in the Pancho Barnes Flying Mystery Circus of the Air, a Hollywood jack-of-all-trades and, finally, the owner of Pancho’s Fly-Inn and the Happy Bottom Riding Club, the pilots oasis that may also have been a whorehouse.

Like a good novelist, Kessler has an eye for the quirky detail, and like a historian, she has a feel for the big picture, two talents that help her bring each of Barnes’ interlocking worlds to life. Through Barnes’ many jobs at the fringes of the movie industry (she started out renting her horses for cowboy movies, then became a stunt double and sometimes even a cameraperson and screenwriter), Kessler sketches Hollywood in its infancy, back when no-budget westerns were made on the fly and moviemaking was “still a seat of the pants operation where today’s prop boy could be tomorrow’s director.”

Similarly, since Barnes learned to fly in the days when “navigating” might mean swooping down low enough to read road signs, Kessler vividly re-creates the heyday of early aviation, when female fliers, or “petticoat pilots,” as they were sometimes called, raced each other all over the country in a series of wacky publicity stunts that made them media darlings, but often left them penniless.

Throughout her life, Barnes, who earned her nickname when she donned men’s clothing and jumped a ship to Mexico, wanted just one thing: More.

She was, Kessler reports, the ugliest woman most men had ever laid eyes on (the author seems particularly fixated on her heroine’s fleshy neck), with the foulest mouth they had ever heard. Yet for much of her life, Barnes had plenty of charm and plenty of money, a combination that won her four husbands and dozens of pretty-boy lovers whom she swapped as easily as she traded horses and airplanes.

Her opulent San Marino, Calif., mansion was an open house where guests drawn from Hollywood, the riding circuit and her pilot pals drank her liquor, traded stories till dawn and generally helped her run through several fortunes. Then, when Barnes moved out to the California desert, she enjoyed “playing Lady Bountiful among the desert rats.” She summoned one old friend out to her ranch this way: “We will ride a pony, fly a kite and light cigarettes on one-hundred-dollar bills.”

By the time she met Yeager and America’s future astronauts, Barnes had already become something of a legend, but she was also beginning a slow, sad slide into self-parody. Many of the wild young pilots she caroused with were turning into buttoned-up military men, and those primitive runways scratched into the desert would eventually become Edwards Air Force Base and swallow up all she held dear.

Barnes’ stomach-churning physical demise could give Stephen King pause. (Think hungry dogs and rotting flesh.) Yet Kessler refuses to make her heroine a victim of anything but her own excesses. Likewise, the author wisely resists the temptation to turn Barnes into a forgotten feminist icon — something that might have been a stretch, anyway, considering that Barnes once commissioned a giant loaf of bread and stuffed it with two naked women. In the end, Barnes’ epitaph might well be the quote that kicks off this engrossing, shamelessly entertaining book: “Ah, hell. We had more fun in a week than those weenies had in a lifetime.”

Though Conroy pulls off the feat of writing a book that brings torture victims’ suffering to life without being too painful to read, his answer is disappointingly familiar: Torturers torture because they can, he reports, and because they think they must. Ultimately, despite an exhaustive survey of torture’s long history and its underlying psychology, as well as a close look at three occasions on which it was used, what Conroy leaves out of his book overshadows what he squeezes in.

Torture is the perfect crime, Conroy asserts, because in most cases “only the victims pay.” The British government, for example, was forced to admit that it used the “Five Techniques,” yet, in a stunning display of linguistic abuse, denied that these actions constituted torture. None of the perpetrators was ever identified or prosecuted.

Next, Conroy turns his attention to the actions of some Israeli soldiers in 1988, when the intifada was in its infancy. Acting on orders they were reluctant to carry out but nevertheless obeyed, the soldiers rounded up a group of unarmed Palestinians, transported them to a field and beat them bloody. Only one of the soldiers was “punished.” (Stripped of his rank, this colonel left the army, started his own security firm and is now a very wealthy man.)

Finally, in his own city of Chicago, Conroy follows the long and winding court case filed by Andrew Wilson, a man who killed two policemen in 1982 and was then beaten and tortured with electric shocks by enraged detectives. Again, the torturers received only the mildest of reprimands, and there was little public outcry. “I found I did not have to journey far to learn that torture is something we abhor only when it is done to someone we like, preferably in another country,” Conroy concludes.

How true — and yet in the cases of both the British and the Israelis, Conroy himself commits sins of omission by examining the cruelties of just one side of a protracted struggle. The fact that “the enemy” was also engaging in torture doesn’t excuse the horrors depicted here. But by ignoring the cruelties of the Irish Republican Army and the Palestinians, and thereby making the British and Israelis villains by default, the author becomes guilty of the selective blindness he decries in others.

After all, the IRA has always been very good at killing and maiming the innocent. It was Irish terrorists who perfected the art of “kneecapping,” shooting victims in the knees so that they would never walk again. The Palestinians, too, have a long history of relying on terrorism and other morally indefensible measures to further their cause. What were the people who carried out these orders thinking? Their crimes are mentioned only in passing. Though Conroy takes pains to depict the Israeli soldiers sympathetically, he also uses them to prop up his not terribly original thesis that torture is often the handiwork of “people like us.”

Recent history is also a casualty. Though torture continues unabated, in this book, time grinds to a halt somewhere in the early ’90s — the date of Conroy’s most current interviews. Of course, a book cannot aspire to the immediacy of daily journalism. But one story in particular cries out for at least some analysis. The case of Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant tortured and sodomized by Brooklyn detectives in 1997, shocked New York and aroused a storm of protest that led one police officer to turn in fellow cops — exactly the opposite result of the Chicago case recounted here.

Throughout “Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People,” morality is at war with psychology, and the result is a stalemate. On one hand, Conroy eloquently condemns torture and society’s general willingness to look the other way. On the other, he summarizes a host of studies, most of them familiar to anyone who has ever glanced at a psychology textbook, to explain why torture persists and why it is so easy to ignore. Simply put, when faced with the gentlest of pressures from an authority figure, most people tend to follow orders first and ask moral questions later.

Forty years ago, Hannah Arendt (whose name, oddly enough, is barely mentioned here) attended the trial of Karl Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and recognized the banality of evil. Sadly, not much has changed. But Conroy, who is surprised to learn that men who have done terrible things do not usually appear to be terrible men, doesn’t seem to have heard the news.