It seems he has company. As Alex Kuczynski tells it in Beauty Junkies, she’d barely installed herself poolside, in a bikini and under a blazing sun, when a shadow fell over her legs. “Did you have fat cut off your butt?” demanded the small child at her elbow. Testily, he explained: “You have the dots, and my mommy has some, and her friends have some, and she told me that when ladies have those dots that means they had fat cut off their butts.” With an emphatic “no,” Ms. Kuczynski put him in his place and stalked off, a towel around her waist. She was indignant. She was also lying.

Her loss is our gain. If you’re going muckraking, you want someone who has tasted the goods. Ms. Kuczynski’s portrait of the exploding cosmetic-surgery business—and of our corresponding addiction—is leavened by her own adventures in the skin trade. She took her first dip in the rivers of Botox at 28 and opted for liposuction and to have fat removed from her eyelids by her mid-30’s. “I was a junkie,” she confesses, and as a reader I wouldn’t want it any other way. Would you believe Eric Schlosser or Morgan Spurlock if they were vegetarians? For that matter, would you trust a short, squat brunette with this job?

It’s not only because she had 16 ounces suctioned off her bottom (at a cost of $6,000) that you want to read Ms. Kuczynski, a former New York Observer reporter who now writes for The Times. Not many people can begin a sentence with Serbian terrorists and end it with Pamela Anderson. Doubtless Borat can, but he wouldn’t be explaining plastic surgery’s origins in World War I. “Enhancement technologies” actually took off when mortars and grenades—rather than time—ravaged our faces. Ms. Kuczynski offers a little tour of reconstructive miracles, from 16th-century noses that could be sneezed right off your face to Fanny Brice, who—as Dorothy Parker had it—“cut off her nose to spite her race.” We get the first, almost inadvertent breast enhancement and the botched face of the beautiful Vanderbilt heiress. Who but Ms. Kuczynski would have noticed that Hemingway proleptically described what we recognize today as a bad face-lift? He was talking about war veterans, whom he granted more respect than my little friend Paul-Armand did their tight-faced heirs.

Where once a cosmetic surgeon compared her 1960’s practice to an abortion clinic, her field today is the toast of the town—and a $15 billion industry. Dentists have lobbied for the right to perform face-lifts and breast implants; the American Society for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery classifies small breasts as a deformity. (Dress sizes have ballooned accordingly. And while we’re less preposterous on this coast than on the other, women everywhere seem to prefer cartoonish missiles to what Ms. Kuczynski wistfully terms “the Diane Keaton of breast implants.”)

Ms. Kuczynski turns out to have been a latecomer to the party; she talks to 23-year-olds who are getting Botox, and reports that breasts are the new high-school graduation present. In part we are beholden to “age management,” in part we are correcting God’s mistakes. On both counts, we have crossed a critical Rubicon. Ms. Kuczynski compares post-surgery notes with her housekeeper, who has had a successful eye-lift. Elitism has sailed out the window; you no longer have to be genetically lucky, just surgically inclined. You also have to wonder how much Ms. Kuczynski is paying the cleaning lady.

How exactly have inner virtues lost out to surgical virtuosity? Ms. Kuczynski rounds up the usual suspects: Lara Croft, the simplistic male mind, Sports Illustrated, online porn. She also collars psychiatry (the inferiority complex is cosmetic surgery’s best friend) and the insurance companies, which have not only made the practice of medicine financially unattractive but which now market cosmetic surgeries to boost the bottom line. Managed care has chased packs of doctors into cosmetic surgery, and the result is physicians who specialize in marketing rather than medicine.

The makeover of the Hippocratic oath is unsightly, but so are a lot of other things. This is a book that will give you ideas, all of them expensive. You’d have to move to California to develop a taste for “tits on sticks” (if you’re a woman, I mean), but here at home there’s plenty to do. Where have I been that I’d never heard of permanent lipstick? There are things in these pages I thought you wore on the ski lift but that you evidently inject into your face. After Beauty Junkies, you’ll never eat lunch in this town the same way again. You’re going to catch yourself doing what I did yesterday: thinking everyone back into his or her real face. And then some. If Ms. Kuczynski’s statistics are correct, then someone in that room had indulged in an eyebrow-hair transplant, toe liposuction or a scrotum reduction—or was, by the time coffee was served, considering labiaplasty. My guess is that no one had opted for the bootleg Botox, but then again, there were two last-minute cancellations.

Ms. Kuczynski points up the hazards of the enterprise—on a day when she should have been at a friend’s memorial service, she was hideous and housebound, the victim of a Restylane injection gone awry—but her warnings will only whet your appetite. Who wouldn’t love to be carded at 36? As fantasies go, it’s up there with going back to high school knowing what you know now. Hers is arguably the best advertisement for the industry since A Chorus Line and “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three” first directed us to Park and 73rd.

Beauty Junkies supplies guidelines and hotlines, addresses and prices. The advice comes with a classic Kuczynski twist: “Distrust doctors who use the same procedure over and over again and produce patients who all look the same; distrust doctors who are too tan, or who have bad hair implants, or who look as if they were Michael Jackson’s twin brother.” Those kind of salted peanuts abound on every page. There should be a cocktail named for this woman.

Ms. Kuczynski glides past a good deal as well, though I realize that’s part of the exercise: You’re not in the market for profundity if you’re so much as reading this review. All the same, some questions lie messy and untweaked on the page. Once there was a dividing line between those who bought into this business and those who argued before the Supreme Court (or wrote for The Times). What happened? Briefly, Ms. Kuczynski pauses at a fascinating intersection: “Looks are the new feminism,” she declares. If a woman is powerful, she has to be beautiful too, she notes, without wondering if that serves to enhance or excuse the effect.

She touches lightly on the arms race (“If she gets to play Gidget forever, why shouldn’t I?”) but generally doesn’t get too caught up with issues of masochism, control or identity, or with our yawning, aching hunger. In the last pages she thrashes about, attempting to sum things up without seeming either too flip or too profound, tucking a miscarriage and King Lear in somewhere on her way to a unified theory of our collective addiction: We actually believe what we see in the mirror. Well, maybe, but isn’t eternal adolescence a kind of pathology? Aging may feel like one, but it isn’t, strictly speaking, an ailment. Whence the collective rush to vote our pasts off the island? Is the reality on our TV’s any different from the fiction in our mirrors or in our memoirs?

Let me be clear about this: You’ll want what she’s having. And if you’re going to go there, you’ll want Alex Kuczynski as your Virgil. For that matter, if you’re going anywhere, you probably do. I would trust her with anything—except a dot-connecting 8-year-old.

Stacy Schiff’s most recent book is A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Owl).

It seems he has company. As Alex Kuczynski tells it in Beauty Junkies, she’d barely installed herself poolside, in a bikini and under a blazing sun, when a shadow fell over her legs. “Did you have fat cut off your butt?” demanded the small child at her elbow. Testily, he explained: “You have the dots, and my mommy has some, and her friends have some, and she told me that when ladies have those dots that means they had fat cut off their butts.” With an emphatic “no,” Ms. Kuczynski put him in his place and stalked off, a towel around her waist. She was indignant. She was also lying.

Her loss is our gain. If you’re going muckraking, you want someone who has tasted the goods. Ms. Kuczynski’s portrait of the exploding cosmetic-surgery business—and of our corresponding addiction—is leavened by her own adventures in the skin trade. She took her first dip in the rivers of Botox at 28 and opted for liposuction and to have fat removed from her eyelids by her mid-30’s. “I was a junkie,” she confesses, and as a reader I wouldn’t want it any other way. Would you believe Eric Schlosser or Morgan Spurlock if they were vegetarians? For that matter, would you trust a short, squat brunette with this job?

It’s not only because she had 16 ounces suctioned off her bottom (at a cost of $6,000) that you want to read Ms. Kuczynski, a former New York Observer reporter who now writes for The Times. Not many people can begin a sentence with Serbian terrorists and end it with Pamela Anderson. Doubtless Borat can, but he wouldn’t be explaining plastic surgery’s origins in World War I. “Enhancement technologies” actually took off when mortars and grenades—rather than time—ravaged our faces. Ms. Kuczynski offers a little tour of reconstructive miracles, from 16th-century noses that could be sneezed right off your face to Fanny Brice, who—as Dorothy Parker had it—“cut off her nose to spite her race.” We get the first, almost inadvertent breast enhancement and the botched face of the beautiful Vanderbilt heiress. Who but Ms. Kuczynski would have noticed that Hemingway proleptically described what we recognize today as a bad face-lift? He was talking about war veterans, whom he granted more respect than my little friend Paul-Armand did their tight-faced heirs.

Where once a cosmetic surgeon compared her 1960’s practice to an abortion clinic, her field today is the toast of the town—and a $15 billion industry. Dentists have lobbied for the right to perform face-lifts and breast implants; the American Society for Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery classifies small breasts as a deformity. (Dress sizes have ballooned accordingly. And while we’re less preposterous on this coast than on the other, women everywhere seem to prefer cartoonish missiles to what Ms. Kuczynski wistfully terms “the Diane Keaton of breast implants.”)

Ms. Kuczynski turns out to have been a latecomer to the party; she talks to 23-year-olds who are getting Botox, and reports that breasts are the new high-school graduation present. In part we are beholden to “age management,” in part we are correcting God’s mistakes. On both counts, we have crossed a critical Rubicon. Ms. Kuczynski compares post-surgery notes with her housekeeper, who has had a successful eye-lift. Elitism has sailed out the window; you no longer have to be genetically lucky, just surgically inclined. You also have to wonder how much Ms. Kuczynski is paying the cleaning lady.

How exactly have inner virtues lost out to surgical virtuosity? Ms. Kuczynski rounds up the usual suspects: Lara Croft, the simplistic male mind, Sports Illustrated, online porn. She also collars psychiatry (the inferiority complex is cosmetic surgery’s best friend) and the insurance companies, which have not only made the practice of medicine financially unattractive but which now market cosmetic surgeries to boost the bottom line. Managed care has chased packs of doctors into cosmetic surgery, and the result is physicians who specialize in marketing rather than medicine.

The makeover of the Hippocratic oath is unsightly, but so are a lot of other things. This is a book that will give you ideas, all of them expensive. You’d have to move to California to develop a taste for “tits on sticks” (if you’re a woman, I mean), but here at home there’s plenty to do. Where have I been that I’d never heard of permanent lipstick? There are things in these pages I thought you wore on the ski lift but that you evidently inject into your face. After Beauty Junkies, you’ll never eat lunch in this town the same way again. You’re going to catch yourself doing what I did yesterday: thinking everyone back into his or her real face. And then some. If Ms. Kuczynski’s statistics are correct, then someone in that room had indulged in an eyebrow-hair transplant, toe liposuction or a scrotum reduction—or was, by the time coffee was served, considering labiaplasty. My guess is that no one had opted for the bootleg Botox, but then again, there were two last-minute cancellations.

Ms. Kuczynski points up the hazards of the enterprise—on a day when she should have been at a friend’s memorial service, she was hideous and housebound, the victim of a Restylane injection gone awry—but her warnings will only whet your appetite. Who wouldn’t love to be carded at 36? As fantasies go, it’s up there with going back to high school knowing what you know now. Hers is arguably the best advertisement for the industry since A Chorus Line and “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three” first directed us to Park and 73rd.

Beauty Junkies supplies guidelines and hotlines, addresses and prices. The advice comes with a classic Kuczynski twist: “Distrust doctors who use the same procedure over and over again and produce patients who all look the same; distrust doctors who are too tan, or who have bad hair implants, or who look as if they were Michael Jackson’s twin brother.” Those kind of salted peanuts abound on every page. There should be a cocktail named for this woman.

Ms. Kuczynski glides past a good deal as well, though I realize that’s part of the exercise: You’re not in the market for profundity if you’re so much as reading this review. All the same, some questions lie messy and untweaked on the page. Once there was a dividing line between those who bought into this business and those who argued before the Supreme Court (or wrote for The Times). What happened? Briefly, Ms. Kuczynski pauses at a fascinating intersection: “Looks are the new feminism,” she declares. If a woman is powerful, she has to be beautiful too, she notes, without wondering if that serves to enhance or excuse the effect.

She touches lightly on the arms race (“If she gets to play Gidget forever, why shouldn’t I?”) but generally doesn’t get too caught up with issues of masochism, control or identity, or with our yawning, aching hunger. In the last pages she thrashes about, attempting to sum things up without seeming either too flip or too profound, tucking a miscarriage and King Lear in somewhere on her way to a unified theory of our collective addiction: We actually believe what we see in the mirror. Well, maybe, but isn’t eternal adolescence a kind of pathology? Aging may feel like one, but it isn’t, strictly speaking, an ailment. Whence the collective rush to vote our pasts off the island? Is the reality on our TV’s any different from the fiction in our mirrors or in our memoirs?

Let me be clear about this: You’ll want what she’s having. And if you’re going to go there, you’ll want Alex Kuczynski as your Virgil. For that matter, if you’re going anywhere, you probably do. I would trust her with anything—except a dot-connecting 8-year-old.

Stacy Schiff’s most recent book is A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Owl).

A former litigator and retired professor of philosophy, Ms. Hirshman has for some time now stood on the barricades launching brilliantly titled bombshells (“Is Your Husband a Worse Problem Than Larry Summers?”). It is her belief that nothing is more hazardous to a woman’s life than her traditional redoubt, the home. You have to wonder how many dust bunnies Ms. Hirshman has tripped over to get this sore; she puts the desperate back in housewife, if ever it went missing. “Certainly it is not using your reason to do repetitive, physical tasks, whether it’s cleaning or driving the car pool,” she seethes.

Quite rightly, she points out that both ends of the political spectrum have united to deliver an entirely reactionary message: From the left comes the news that the office is overrated; from the right comes the news that family is underrated. Either way, it adds up to barefoot in the kitchen. Ms. Hirshman’s solution is “the love that dares not speak its name: love of work.”

We’ve blamed pretty much everyone else for the failure of feminism: Linda Hirshman’s singular contribution to the debate is to blame the stay-at-home mother. She will emerge from these 101 pages as a battered wife. Sidestepping the booby-trapped issue of who can afford to opt out of the workforce and who can’t, Ms. Hirshman zeroes in on a narrow demographic: a crop of high-achieving women whose marriage announcements appeared in The New York Times. If nothing else, after this one you’ll never read the society pages the same way again. They turn out to be not a beginning but an end, the place where feminists lay down their arms. (“I’ve always known that,” yawns my husband.)

Ms. Hirshman is all bared teeth and dripping disdain. Women had no choices. Now they do. What are they doing, staying at home with their Harvard degrees and playing with crayons?

The statistics are indeed sobering. On average, only about half of highly educated women with small children are working full-time. Forty percent of law- and business-school classes are female, while about 16 percent of major law-firm partners and Wall Street corporate officers are female. The implications—for society, for our pocketbooks, for our daughters—are not good. How you square this with the news that girls are seriously outperforming boys in the collegiate classroom is up to you; I shudder to think we might wind up with the most maniacally motivated generation of dishwasher-emptiers in history.

But is the educated woman who steps out of the work force hurting anyone? Is she even hurting herself? Ms. Hirshman believes that she has acted not only harmfully but immorally. It drives her nuts that the very women who could have dominated markets and formulated policy—feminism’s brightest hopes—are today pushing strollers around the Upper West Side. Occasionally it drives me nuts too, though for different reasons. I’m happy to blame the opter-outers for making me look bad; as a working mother in stay-at-home clothes, I’m inadequate on two counts. But my suspicion is that if I’m tempted to assign blame, it’s because I worry that they’re better mothers than I am. They’re probably better wives too. I’m not ready to blame them for the failure of feminism, however.

By contrast, Ms. Hirshman’s indignation bounds ahead. Not only does it drive her nuts that the Times brides aren’t working (and that the ones who are tend to do more than their share of family life), it rankles that young women gravitate away from power and promotions, that they embrace the socially meaningful before the financially lucrative. To counter those self-immolating tendencies, Ms. Hirshman has formulated a strategic plan: Bag the liberal-arts education. Go for the money. Never quit one job until you’ve lined up another. Bargain relentlessly over equal household labor. Resort to reproductive blackmail. (“Have a baby,” concedes Ms. Hirshman, “Just don’t have two.”) Marry either a younger man or a much older one. “Intellectual freedom depends on material things,” noted Virginia Woolf in 1928, but a room of one’s own and £500 a year have never looked so lame.

Having failed all of the above courses—except for household negotiation, at which I earn a divorce-defying A—I am in no position to be impartial here. But Ms. Hirshman does strike me as a little shortsighted in the human-nature department. Indeed, women are not natural domestics. Yet, since time immemorial, for better or worse and not exactly reluctantly, we’ve been natural mothers. It’s one thing to implore women to forsake idealism; it’s quite another to uphold corporate America as our salvation. Ms. Hirshman scoffs at the ambitionless, convinced that we go to our graves regretting the time we failed to put in at our desks. (Here she speaks for a population she presumably did not interview, including Jane Austen and Sojourner Truth.) To which I can only rejoin: How many women today regret having had too many children?

And what about the economy, stupid? These women are opting out because they can: If anything, their taste in husbands was too good. Affluence has never been feminism’s best friend. There’s a curious disconnect between Ms. Hirshman’s frustration and her argument. Several times she invokes the current tax structure, which penalizes married working women. It is indeed an abomination. But it’s not what’s sending the dropout generation home. I promise. Every one of the overeducated, nonworking mothers whose path I crossed today can tell you more about prices at Tod’s than about the tax code.

Scratch a working mother and you’ll find a puddle of guilt. Scratch a nonworking mother—O.K., scratch her a little harder, to make Linda Hirshman happy—and you’ll find the same. Are women happier at home or at work? Doesn’t it say something that we haven’t figured this out yet?

Choice is to Ms. Hirshman a dirty word, a craven, immoral excuse for shooting ourselves in the foot. To her mind, feminism went wrong precisely in not telling us how to live our lives: Smart women, no choices is her mantra.

She commands us to base our professional decisions on what’s best for womankind, a message eerily reminiscent of those zealots who would like to command us to base our reproductive decisions on what’s good for mankind. This isn’t a political or economic program; it’s a life, dismally unscientific in its own right. And where Ms. Hirshman is focused on the tax code, every working mother out there is obsessed with something else: It all goes by so quickly.

The real culprit seems to me to be the maternal instinct. Until we can equalize it, following the money into the heart of corporate America isn’t likely to look so attractive. Don’t expect to love your work, counsels Ms. Hirshman. (Yes, I know, she contradicts herself here. When it comes to your desk, you’re evidently meant to close your eyes and think of feminism.) It’s odd, and in some cases utterly inexplicable, but for the most part, you can expect to love your kids.

Normally, I don’t go in for anecdotal evidence, but if Linda Hirshman can work from the society page, then last night’s dinner counts too. To my left was a federal judge, the mother of three. Across the table was a 49-year-old who has just begun practicing corporate law; she sat for her LSAT’s when her youngest was 9. Our hostess—perhaps not incidentally—was a nonworking mother, a pillar of the arts community. (For the record, three of the husbands were dishwasher-emptiers.) At one point, the conversation turned to a young whippersnapper who gave birth to her second child while in law school. The inconsiderate overachiever! We hate her. “Women are hard on women,” observed Woolf in 1928. She had no idea.

Stacy Schiff’s most recent book is A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Owl).

A former litigator and retired professor of philosophy, Ms. Hirshman has for some time now stood on the barricades launching brilliantly titled bombshells (“Is Your Husband a Worse Problem Than Larry Summers?”). It is her belief that nothing is more hazardous to a woman’s life than her traditional redoubt, the home. You have to wonder how many dust bunnies Ms. Hirshman has tripped over to get this sore; she puts the desperate back in housewife, if ever it went missing. “Certainly it is not using your reason to do repetitive, physical tasks, whether it’s cleaning or driving the car pool,” she seethes.

Quite rightly, she points out that both ends of the political spectrum have united to deliver an entirely reactionary message: From the left comes the news that the office is overrated; from the right comes the news that family is underrated. Either way, it adds up to barefoot in the kitchen. Ms. Hirshman’s solution is “the love that dares not speak its name: love of work.”

We’ve blamed pretty much everyone else for the failure of feminism: Linda Hirshman’s singular contribution to the debate is to blame the stay-at-home mother. She will emerge from these 101 pages as a battered wife. Sidestepping the booby-trapped issue of who can afford to opt out of the workforce and who can’t, Ms. Hirshman zeroes in on a narrow demographic: a crop of high-achieving women whose marriage announcements appeared in The New York Times. If nothing else, after this one you’ll never read the society pages the same way again. They turn out to be not a beginning but an end, the place where feminists lay down their arms. (“I’ve always known that,” yawns my husband.)

Ms. Hirshman is all bared teeth and dripping disdain. Women had no choices. Now they do. What are they doing, staying at home with their Harvard degrees and playing with crayons?

The statistics are indeed sobering. On average, only about half of highly educated women with small children are working full-time. Forty percent of law- and business-school classes are female, while about 16 percent of major law-firm partners and Wall Street corporate officers are female. The implications—for society, for our pocketbooks, for our daughters—are not good. How you square this with the news that girls are seriously outperforming boys in the collegiate classroom is up to you; I shudder to think we might wind up with the most maniacally motivated generation of dishwasher-emptiers in history.

But is the educated woman who steps out of the work force hurting anyone? Is she even hurting herself? Ms. Hirshman believes that she has acted not only harmfully but immorally. It drives her nuts that the very women who could have dominated markets and formulated policy—feminism’s brightest hopes—are today pushing strollers around the Upper West Side. Occasionally it drives me nuts too, though for different reasons. I’m happy to blame the opter-outers for making me look bad; as a working mother in stay-at-home clothes, I’m inadequate on two counts. But my suspicion is that if I’m tempted to assign blame, it’s because I worry that they’re better mothers than I am. They’re probably better wives too. I’m not ready to blame them for the failure of feminism, however.

By contrast, Ms. Hirshman’s indignation bounds ahead. Not only does it drive her nuts that the Times brides aren’t working (and that the ones who are tend to do more than their share of family life), it rankles that young women gravitate away from power and promotions, that they embrace the socially meaningful before the financially lucrative. To counter those self-immolating tendencies, Ms. Hirshman has formulated a strategic plan: Bag the liberal-arts education. Go for the money. Never quit one job until you’ve lined up another. Bargain relentlessly over equal household labor. Resort to reproductive blackmail. (“Have a baby,” concedes Ms. Hirshman, “ Just don’t have two.”) Marry either a younger man or a much older one. “Intellectual freedom depends on material things,” noted Virginia Woolf in 1928, but a room of one’s own and £500 a year have never looked so lame.

Having failed all of the above courses—except for household negotiation, at which I earn a divorce-defying A—I am in no position to be impartial here. But Ms. Hirshman does strike me as a little shortsighted in the human-nature department. Indeed, women are not natural domestics. Yet, since time immemorial, for better or worse and not exactly reluctantly, we’ve been natural mothers. It’s one thing to implore women to forsake idealism; it’s quite another to uphold corporate America as our salvation. Ms. Hirshman scoffs at the ambitionless, convinced that we go to our graves regretting the time we failed to put in at our desks. (Here she speaks for a population she presumably did not interview, including Jane Austen and Sojourner Truth.) To which I can only rejoin: How many women today regret having had too many children?

And what about the economy, stupid? These women are opting out because they can: If anything, their taste in husbands was too good. Affluence has never been feminism’s best friend. There’s a curious disconnect between Ms. Hirshman’s frustration and her argument. Several times she invokes the current tax structure, which penalizes married working women. It is indeed an abomination. But it’s not what’s sending the dropout generation home. I promise. Every one of the overeducated, nonworking mothers whose path I crossed today can tell you more about prices at Tod’s than about the tax code.

Scratch a working mother and you’ll find a puddle of guilt. Scratch a nonworking mother—O.K., scratch her a little harder, to make Linda Hirshman happy—and you’ll find the same. Are women happier at home or at work? Doesn’t it say something that we haven’t figured this out yet?

Choice is to Ms. Hirshman a dirty word, a craven, immoral excuse for shooting ourselves in the foot. To her mind, feminism went wrong precisely in not telling us how to live our lives: Smart women, no choices is her mantra.

She commands us to base our professional decisions on what’s best for womankind, a message eerily reminiscent of those zealots who would like to command us to base our reproductive decisions on what’s good for mankind. This isn’t a political or economic program; it’s a life, dismally unscientific in its own right. And where Ms. Hirshman is focused on the tax code, every working mother out there is obsessed with something else: It all goes by so quickly.

The real culprit seems to me to be the maternal instinct. Until we can equalize it, following the money into the heart of corporate America isn’t likely to look so attractive. Don’t expect to love your work, counsels Ms. Hirshman. (Yes, I know, she contradicts herself here. When it comes to your desk, you’re evidently meant to close your eyes and think of feminism.) It’s odd, and in some cases utterly inexplicable, but for the most part, you can expect to love your kids.

Normally, I don’t go in for anecdotal evidence, but if Linda Hirshman can work from the society page, then last night’s dinner counts too. To my left was a federal judge, the mother of three. Across the table was a 49-year-old who has just begun practicing corporate law; she sat for her LSAT’s when her youngest was 9. Our hostess—perhaps not incidentally—was a nonworking mother, a pillar of the arts community. (For the record, three of the husbands were dishwasher-emptiers.) At one point, the conversation turned to a young whippersnapper who gave birth to her second child while in law school. The inconsiderate overachiever! We hate her. “Women are hard on women,” observed Woolf in 1928. She had no idea.

Stacy Schiff’s most recent book is A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Owl).

John Adams: Party of One, by James Grant. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 544 pages, $30.

Any biography of John Adams that works anxiety, insecurity, worry and dread into its first paragraph is off on the right track. A host of superlatives attach themselves to our first ambassador to Great Britain and second President, who qualifies as well as the thinnest-skinned of the Founding Fathers. Either Adams had a degree of self-consciousness unparalleled in 18th-century America, or he had an overdeveloped habit of reaching for a pen-in his hand, a weapon of mass destruction-to fend off doubts and demons. At no time did he play well with others; even his fiancée described him as severe and unsociable. Erratic in his own century, he's neurotic in ours.

In biography as in life, where you start makes all the difference. The financial writer James Grant opens John Adams: Party of One in 1785, as Adams prepares to represent his newborn nation at the Court of St. James. It's a far cry from David McCullough's indelible image of the cloaked rebel, forging his way to Philadelphia on horseback, pink-faced and pontificating, against a backdrop of silent New England snow. In Passionate Sage, Joseph J. Ellis ushers Adams in at the end of his Presidential term, amid moving crates in an unfinished White House. Catherine Drinker Bowen started at the opposite end, with the 10-year-old Adams following the French fleet's progress toward Boston, a sight he would later claim made of him a politician. Mr. Grant's is a most appropriate point of entry: The fretful Adams of his first paragraph bows before the man whose tyranny he has decried for two decades, an external state perfectly consistent with Adams' internal, congenitally cross-eyed one. From the start, he was a man ill at ease in his own skin. And from the start, he was a man who yearned for a continental stage, which Mr. Grant proffers up front.

That stage was by no means preordained. It was very nearly willed into being by Massachusetts' most prominent trial lawyer, obsessed from his early years by the sobering thought that he might "live and die an ignorant, obscure fellow." From his 20's, he remained alert to the "animating Occasion" that might summon him to greatness. History would oblige, or so Adams would assert; to his mind, "the child Independence was born" not with the Stamp Act, but in a 1761 courtroom hearing at which Adams argued against the writs of assistance. He admired a colleague, James Otis Jr., for speaking that day in what would later become the Adams tradition: "With the promptitude of Classical Allusions, a depth of Research, a rapid Summary of Historical Events and dates, a profusion of legal Authorities, a prophetic glare of his eyes into futurity, and a rapid Torrent of impetuous Eloquence …. "

Nothing of the events that followed would divorce Adams' vaulting ambition from his bottomless insecurity. He was equally capable of fretting that he was unworthy of a position as he was of fretting that a position was unworthy of him. Even when it was ample, his lot was never enough. And to this tortured soul fell the most thankless fate in American history. In March 1797, Adams succeeded George Washington as President of the United States. The new chief executive was miserable. It seemed to him that more tears were shed that afternoon than at any tragedy he had ever attended-and Adams had been to a great deal of theater in his life. Were his countrymen weeping with joy or grief, over the serene transfer of power or over the exchange of a beloved leader for "an unbeloved one"? (There were plenty of tears at Washington's inauguration too, but, typically, Adams neglected to mention as much.)

With the Presidency, Adams inherited an undeclared war on France, a crisis he nimbly averted. That was arguably the most diplomatic act of his life; it was, to his mind, his crowning achievement. (In the midst of that scrape, he also signed the Alien and Sedition Acts, to be considered the greatest stain on his honor.) The Adams Presidency and its attendant dramas claim less of Mr. Grant's attention, however, than does Adams' European career, by which he is both more intrigued and more impressed. Adams has been called a lot of names, but Mr. Grant is surely the first to hail him as America's pre-eminent junk-bond salesman. He bills Adams' European loan-raising among his greatest works, as indeed it was: On that foundation stood our credit abroad. If those loans have not often counted among Adams' greatest triumphs, it's because the details are abstruse; Mr. Grant lucidly unravels them. He is equally sure-footed on the subject of Adams and religion, on which he expands at length.

Along the way he makes some fine points. He pays tribute to the role ignorance played in the American Revolution; the half-year silences between America and Europe worked in the fledgling republic's favor, depriving the continent of news that would have obliterated all hope of financial assistance. (The reverse was equally true: Congress was expert at spending funds that Adams-and Franklin in Paris-had yet to obtain.)

Mr. Grant also brings into focus the prosaic home life of a country lawyer, perennially short on funds, preoccupied by the demands of his estate. In early September 1774, Adams held forth at the Continental Congress. In early September 1783, he signed the peace that recognized America's existence, in Paris. For early September 1796, Mr. Grant offers us Adams' diary entry: "Carted 6 loads of slimy Mud from the Brook to the heap of Compost."

Mr. Grant is not without his quirks. He lets drop so many remarks about the cost of an 18th-century education that one begins to wonder where he sends his kids to school. (And if Harvard is to waive tuition for the cash-strapped Adamses on page 307, why are we worrying about the cost of three Harvard tuitions on page 311?) Though he is quick to provide his subject with his continental stage, he is not always equally gracious. His Adams can't sit still, can't focus, suffers from a wandering mind; Mr. Grant essentially diagnoses A.D.D.

There is no question that Adams suffered from something we would medicate today, but even the most fun-loving of psychopharms might hesitate before dispensing Ritalin to someone who tore through Molière's Amphitryon, whose idea of a good time was drafting the Massachusetts State Constitution. (Which Adams did, nearly single-handedly, in six weeks that would count among the happiest of his life.) Adams suffered at least one and probably two nervous breakdowns recently suggested to have been related to an overactive thyroid. The protuberant eyes, the irritable disposition, the paranoia buttress a case for Graves' disease. Mr. Grant introduces that hypothesis early on, to cite it as fact 165 pages later. This is how financial panics get started.

With Adams' character, he is spot-on and sparkling. So uneasy was Adams with himself that he was a misfit wherever he went. After a decade abroad, he returns from Europe to find himself turned into a monarchist; his discomfort in the official halls of power-even his own official halls-made of him an absentee President. Hinged or unhinged, he craved validation, vindication-odd hungers for a man so wed to his immovable principles. He had no tolerance for peccadilloes, and a vanity born of his own blamelessness. Who else would take a moment in his autobiography to assure his children that they had no illegitimate brothers and sisters? (Even by 18th-century standards, that was a losing recipe for memoir.) Adams was true to his principles but not his party; his duty to his country overrode all. His hatreds were, as Mr. Grant puts it, "throbbing, intricately constructed, and obsessive." He may qualify as the worst team player in the history of our country.

It requires a peculiar constitution to vaunt one's unpopularity, an Adams specialty, generally accomplished in what Mr. Grant terms "epic flights of self-pity and suspicion." Our second President stands in no danger of fading into obscurity, only in falling victim to the inner sulks and outward storms. A party of one indeed, he was his own worst enemy. The eloquent James Grant rescues him from himself, to our good fortune.

Stacy Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America will be published next month by Henry Holt.

Malcolm Gladwell is a David Macaulay of ideas. He won't tell you how a zipper or a gearshift works, but he is illuminating on the subject of ideological behavior. Which is to say, ideas in their American incarnation; we're not talking about how humiliation, fear and dire economic news might combust into national socialism, or why existentialism emerged from a mushroom cloud of Gauloise smoke. We're talking about those great cultural tripwires that, when activated, send us reeling off in search of Pet Rocks, or DVD's or a table at Pastis. In the Gladwellian universe there is a sound explanation for our lemminglike behavior, one that draws from history, sociology and psychology and that takes its name–the "tipping point"–from epidemiology. His modest volume proposes to answer one very immodest question: Where does radical change come from?

Mr. Gladwell postulates that ideas–rumors, behaviors, addictions, footwear fads–spread like viruses. And that three factors account for the contagion. Every good social epidemic deserves a spokesman; in Mr. Gladwell's glossary these are "Connectors," "Mavens" and "Salesmen," the highly social, or the highly articulate, or the highly placed, the ones who get the ball rolling, who knit the social fabric together. This time around, the medium is the messenger. Blessedly, Mr. Gladwell makes his point without reference to Oprah, that Great Connector in the Sky. Instead, he does a splendid job describing mere mortals such as Texas economist (and "Maven") Mark Alpert: avid reader of Consumer Reports , electronics wizard, evangelist and all-around know-it-all, a paragon of the "pathologically helpful." You know the type: hell at dinner parties; heaven when you're shopping for a car, or need emergency Yankees tickets. Walking data banks like Mr. Alpert–along with the Connectors, and the Salesmen–are crucial to the spread of social epidemic. Together they explain why the New York family in need of orthodontia will end up, sooner or later, in the office of Marc Lemchen, D.M.D., P.C., Park Avenue at 62nd Street (570-2333). This is Mr. Gladwell at his sprightly best, as he was in his memorable New Yorker piece, "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg," some of it recapitulated in the book.

Mr. Gladwell's second law will drive the perfectionist to distraction. The tinkering matters. Immensely. With enough finessing, any message can be made more memorable, more "sticky." Sometimes all it takes is a lowly breach of grammar. None of us is in any danger of forgetting that "Winston tastes good … like a cigarette should." With enough fine-tuning, we could all be walking around like the jingle-jangled Alan Strang of Equus . Contagion and stickiness are not to be confused; the first is a property of the messenger, the second of the message. And the sultans of stickiness are by definition the professionals; there are no Mark Alperts here. Which may explain why this section of the book sports less of Mr. Gladwell's lucid connection-making and feels more like a sermon to the advertising man. It doesn't help that Mr. Gladwell takes as his example Sesame Street , a show that–"out of a desperate desire to be sticky"–was test-marketed to within an inch of its life. Detailed descriptions of various Sesame Street episodes follow, which have about them as much charm as the all-text edition of the collections of the Louvre.

Mr. Gladwell undermines his own argument. As the producers of Blue's Clues discovered, three decades after the debut of Big Bird, children's television could be more compelling still. Sesame Street was too long. It moved too briskly. There was too much talk, not enough narrative, too much wordplay. There were too many clever concessions to that mythical beast, the adult viewer. Soon enough, Blue's Clues was trouncing Sesame Street , a show it furiously out-stickied. For all its resounding success, Sesame Street turned out not to have been sticky after all. Of course, the improvements devised by the producers of Blue's Clues did not make their show more educational. They made it more addictive. In any event, what Mr. Gladwell winds up with is a repetitive section about the value of repetition for young children.

Mr. Gladwell turns to crime to illustrate "The Power of Context," his third epidemiological law. Disease requires a breeding ground, a propitious time and place. "Paul Revere's afternoon ride" just wouldn't have done the trick, maintains Mr. Gladwell; correlatively, a well-kept subway will foster fewer transgressions. It's a stretch, but Mr. Gladwell is nothing if not nimble. He has combed the literature, and he has engaged in experiments of his own. Best of all, he is blessed with a supremely limpid prose style. Citing the studies, he argues that the population does not divide neatly into the honest and the dishonest, the sadistic and the compassionate. There are some dispiriting lessons for the modern world here, among them the fact that the good Samaritan, when pressed for time, is no longer any kind of Samaritan at all.

His three agents of infection in hand, Mr. Gladwell analyzes a number of seemingly unrelated epidemics, from the rise and fall of Airwalk footwear to a rash of suicides in Micronesia to teenage smoking. With the last he puts his Tipping Point theories to work on how to reverse a brushfire; having come to understand what makes an epidemic possible, we should be able to beat one back. How to devise a less sticky form of smoking? Abandon the absolutist approach. Let the kids smoke, but reduce the level of nicotine below the addiction threshold. Treat the serious addict with Zyban. Of course, to do all of this is to fly in the face of the most determined Salesmen and the most effective Connectors out there. Never mind.

The arguments don't always add up; there's some loopy logic there. Sometimes a felicity is just a felicity, as should be clear from Mr. Gladwell's discussion of the rebirth of Hush Puppies, a happy accident on which a company capitalized. There is no advertising equivalent to focusing a nation on a Ford Bronco or an Ermenegildo Zegna tie. And a tipping point by any other name remains equally effective. Critical mass remains critical mass. As every Beanie Babies-turned-Pokémon-turned-Crazy Bones collector knows, exponential growth is exponential growth. You could argue that anyone who had the freedom and luxury of testing his product three times before introducing it–as do the Blue's Clues producers with each episode–could succeed brilliantly. That isn't stickiness; it's practice makes perfect. The Connectors are the cool kids in high school, that land of perpetual epidemic. The stickiness "discovered" by the Blue's Clues team was the old chestnut of telling them what you're going to tell them, telling them and then telling them again.

The Tipping Point buttresses a Costco-sized aisle of flash-frozen truths. Nothing succeeds like success; nothing sells like word-of-mouth. God is in the details. He who does the most market research wins. We live in an infectious age, of memes, modems and malls. But what Mr. Gladwell has done–in a tone only slightly dumbed-down from the New Yorker pieces from which his book derives–is to penetrate this seemingly unporous bedrock. He has isolated these familiar notions, and he has analyzed them, and he has demonstrated how they amalgamate, in planned or unplanned but highly predictable patterns, and in geometric progression, to the point where suddenly, overnight, in a mass exercise of free will, we are all guzzling Fresh Samanthas.

Now if only someone would explain where the Pet Rocks disappeared to.