How interesting could the topic of Adam and Eve's navels be, anyway? I thought how much more amusing it would be to examine that hot old question -- much discussed at the Council of Trent -- of Adam's penis. (It was decided, given the absence of desire in the Garden of Eden, that Adam's erections were voluntary, that appendage functioning more like his arm.)

Yet it turns out, as Gardner explains in the title chapter, that there have been full-fledged political implications to the question of biblical bellybuttons. In 1944, an acrimonious congressional debate was occasioned by an armed services manual on "The Races of Mankind," which depicted Adam and Eve with those cute remnants of our umbilical cords. Gardner views with amused distaste the idea that some of our lawmakers were worried that the U.S. government might offend that portion of the electorate who take their Bibles literally and hold sacred the unborn status of our original ancestors.

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When I was summering in East Hampton back in 1980, there was still an old grocer who claimed to be proud of having refused to trade a sack of potatoes to Jackson Pollock in exchange for a painting. That was not an unusual fate for a major American artist in the '50s. But in a few short years things would be vastly different. Despite Gore Vidal's continuing assertion that America is "not yet a civilization," artists would finally be celebrated and financially rewarded in the world's richest nation. I had met Leo Castelli by then, but I was unaware of the historic role he had played in bringing about that cultural revolution.

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