Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus together on a plane. (Photo: PaulaBroadwell.com)

Slate's Fred Kaplan reports that David Petraeus resigned as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency after he had an affair with one of his biographers, author Paula Broadwell. Ms. Broadwell co-authored a glowing portrait of Mr. Petraeus titled, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.

According to the biography of Ms. Broadwell on the website of her book, she is a "a research associate at Harvard University's Center for Public Leadership and a PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies at King's College London" who spent most of a year in Afghanistan with Mr. Petraeus working on the book. Her site, which was deleted sometime this evening, described the book as having built on her two-year doctoral dissertation, which was "a study in transformational leadership and organizational innovation influenced by U.S. Army General David Petraeus."

In addition to her studies of Mr. Petraeus, the book site describes Ms. Broadwell as having "graduated with academic and leadership honors from the United States Military Academy at West Point." It also notes her devotion to physical fitness and outdoor activities saying she, "graduated at the top of her class in physical fitness" after running on the prestigious military academy's outdoor, indoor and cross country track teams.

Paula and Scott Broadwell in Paris. (Photo: Facebook)

Ms. Broadwell's book site also identifies her as being married to Scott Broadwell, an interventional radiologist with whom she has two children.

"They love to run, ski, and surf together," the site says of the couple.

In a reading at a Washington, D.C. bookstore in February, Ms. Broadwell described how she met Mr. Petraeus while a graduate student at Harvard:

"He came to Harvard University where I was a graduate student and wanted to speak with students about the merits of [the] counter-insurgency approach to fighting the Iraq War, which we were losing at the time....I went up to him and said I'm writing my thesis on negotiating with terrorists and I think it could help your team win and you should really read it and he was kind of enough to indulge me and take the paper and give me his business card. We kept in touch via email for a couple years, and I was still a graduate student. Two years later, I reached out to him if he would speak to students at Harvard...He agreed to do a video teleconference from Baghdad. I asked him if I could use him as a case study in my doctoral dissertation, and he agreed."

At that same interview, Ms. Broadwell said that, while writing her book, "I got to know his family." Mr. Petraeus' wife, Holly, became the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's Office of Servicemember Affairs. In that capacity she works to protect members of the military and their families from predatory loans and financial scams. They have two children together, Stephen and Anne, who writes a food blog where she often discusses her family.

In a February, 2012 video interview with Arthur Kade [see below], Ms. Broadwell went into greater detail about her military background. She also described the process of writing her biography of Mr. Petraeus, which involved extensive interviews, phone conversations and emails.

"It's not a hagiography, I'm not in love with David Petraeus, but I think he does present a terrific role model for young people, for executives, for men and women. No matter what, there's a great role model there," Ms. Broadwell said in her interview with Mr. Kade.

Though Ms. Broadwell refuted the notion her book was overly flattering, it certainly presented a complimentary picture of Mr. Petraeus. Daily Show host Jon Stewart noted this fact when Ms. Broadwell appeared on his program in January.

"The most controversial thing is--I would say that the real controversy here is, is he awesome or incredibly awesome? It's very--it's a nice portrait," Mr. Stewart quipped.

"I have a detail I can share with you, he can turn water into bottled water," Ms. Broadwell responded.

In that same interview, the television host asked Ms. Broadwell if Mr. Petraeus, who had been rumors as a potential running mate for Mitt Romney, would ever consider running for president himself.

"My husband wants me to say he is, cause it will sell more books," Ms. Broadwell said. "I'm sorry honey, I couldn't do it."

The Associated Press reported Friday evening that the alleged affair between Ms. Broadwell and Mr. Petraeus came to light during an FBI investigation into her knowledge of the former general's email correspondence. The Observer has called phone numbers listed to the Broadwells and Ms. Broadwell's co-author Vernon Loeb, but, as of this writing, we have yet to receive a response.

Additional reporting by Colin Campbell 

 Updated with additional information 8:18 p.m.

"Omg!!!!!!! I just won prince of the ball!!!!!!!" he posted on his Twitter account.

The 32-year-old blogger/actor/writer hybrid took to the dance floor at Marquee with his princess Kari Ferrell for a suggestive round of tug-of-war with a purple boa. His fellow nominees for the crown included NonSociety founder Julia Allison.

"I've never read her blog, but I'm ultra-ultra controversial, so she couldn't touch what I'm doing," he said of Ms. Allison, standing near an ice sculpture in the shape of a Dentyne gum packet. "I'm the first Internet reality show that's ever been."

Ms. Allison, wearing a powder blue vintage prom dress, a tiara, and a thick layer of Ranjana Khan jewels, approached Mr. Kade. She recently returned from a several-week stay at a yoga ashram upstate.

"I really want to go back," she said. "I feel like I found my balance at the ashram, and I lost it here. Part of me wants to go all J.D. Salinger."

While we discussed the perils of the New York tech-media scene, Mr. Kade took another opportunity to update his 810 Twitter followers. He snapped a photo of himself with Allison in the background with the caption: "The new york observer interviewing me and julia allison."

Fameball nominees mingled freely with the founders and techies behind new startups (like men's outfitter V Bespoke) and established megabrands (like Groupon and Tumblr).

"We don't have the slightest idea of how Tumblr should be used," Tumblr founder David Karp said of mainstream print outlets like Newsweek and The New Yorker making forays with the blogging platform. "The value in Tumblr to them is something we never realized in building it."

The party was designed by Gawker TV editor Richard Blakeley to be a sort of prom for Internet Week while raising money for City Harvest. And, in true prom fashion, balloons covered the dance floor where groups of people in thick-rimmed glasses danced (ironically or otherwise) to house remixes of Jimmy Eat World and Lady Gaga. A couple smooched outside the bathroom.

"For one night, people put their differences aside for charity," Mr. Blakeley said. "Yeah, some people hate each other on the Internet. It's a lot harder to hate people in real life."

No company has evolved more conspicuously than this group of male dancers in and out of ballet drag. Back at the beginning, in 1974, the joke lay in watching guys clonk around in tutus and toe shoes, parodying (broadly) well-known dance works and making fun of old-time Ballets Russes mannerisms. No more. The same old gags are still in play—the pratfalls, the collisions, the sneaky acts of sabotage, the blindingly blond wigs of the danseurs nobles, the molting feathers of the Dying Swan.

It’s a new year. The Aileys and the Nutcrackers have come and gone, and so, alas, have Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo—the Trocks, to their friends. They recently spent almost three weeks at the Joyce, and it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.

No company has evolved more conspicuously than this group of male dancers in and out of ballet drag. Back at the beginning, in 1974, the joke lay in watching guys clonk around in tutus and toe shoes, parodying (broadly) well-known dance works and making fun of old-time Ballets Russes mannerisms. No more. The same old gags are still in play—the pratfalls, the collisions, the sneaky acts of sabotage, the blindingly blond wigs of the danseurs nobles, the molting feathers of the Dying Swan. But the level of dancing is now so high that we’re less and less inclined to laugh and more and more likely to ponder the ambiguities of a male dancer who can actually be convincing as Odette, Giselle, Paquita. Robert Carter (nom de ballerina: Olga Supphozova) is not only technically brilliant—Fonteyn and Makarova would have coughed up fortunes for his/her fouettés—but commands a musicality and port de bras that are deeply womanly. He makes jokes because they’re in the choreography, but in no way is he a joke.

Carter is a highly developed artist, but his colleagues are hardly slouches. He may be the central girl in Paquita, but the five guys who perform the other Petipa variations (or their variations of the variations) all have the technique, the control, the style. And no wonder—they’ve been coached in Paquita by one of our leading authorities on the Russian classical style, Elena Kunikova. The dancers obviously devour (and respect) her knowledge. They may be funny, but they’re deadly serious about what they do.

Another Russian expert, Yelena Tchernychova, has staged the Trocks’ new Giselle (Act II) very efficiently. The dancing is strong throughout, and some of the jokes come off—Albrecht (Albert here) gleefully joining Giselle in her coffin; all that business with the lilies!—but Giselle isn’t really parody material. It’s the quintessential ballet of the Romantic period, and the Romantic style doesn’t easily lend itself to spoofing. So one finds oneself less interested in the Trocks’ take on this great work and more interested in how well the dancers are handling their roles. The Trocks’ Paquita, their Esmeralda, their Don Quixote tell us something about those ballets. Their Giselle tells us more about men as Wilis.

Of all the Trockadero works, the most famous (and rightly so) is Peter Anastos’ Go for Barocco, his brilliant parody of Balanchine’s great Concerto Barocco. But is it a parody? Perhaps an homage? Even a reinterpretation? Certainly, it’s not a carbon copy. The obligatory jokes are there, all right, but so is a deep understanding and appreciation of Balanchine’s genius. Even if you’d never seen the original, you could infer its greatness from what Anastos has done with—or to?—it. What’s so remarkable is that with the passing of years, the dancing has grown so much more Balanchinian. That’s why today it seems less like a gag-filled romp and more like a real Balanchine performance gone wonderfully wrong.

Apart from the obvious charm and wit of what they do, the Trocks have two immense advantages. One is the rock-solid coaching they’re given, allowing them to be convincingly cuckoo in so many different styles. (This is why I go on hoping they’ll take on Ailey. Where is Peter Anastos now that we need him?) Second is the obvious love of dancing that the whole company displays. No disaffected corps members here, no superannuated principals. The Trocks love what they do every bit as much as we do.

AS IT HAPPENS, 1974—the year the Trocks were born—was also the year that Balanchine created his version of Coppélia, the most important lighthearted ballet of the 19th century, which tells the story of the high-spirited Swanilda and Frantz, her young suitor with a roving eye. Working with his onetime unofficial wife Alexandra Danilova, the most famous Swanilda of her time, Balanchine sharpened the action, deepened the character of the deluded Dr. Coppélius, who creates life-size mechanical dolls and falls in love with one of them, and put together an entirely new third-act wedding divertissement featuring, among other things, a troop of 24 little girls, all in pink and, by definition, all adorable.

Coppélia, with its great score by Léo Delibes, premiered in Paris in 1870, just months before the Emperor Louis-Napoléon made the fatal mistake of declaring war on Prussia. The ballet was an instant success, but the various versions we know descend less from the original by Arthur St. Léon than from Petipa’s reworking of it in 1884. You could fairly say that with Giselle, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, Coppélia is one of the four cornerstones of 19th-century ballet.

No doubt one of the reasons Balanchine chose to recreate it when he did—apart from its obvious box-office appeal—was that in Patricia McBride he had the perfect Swanilda, her piquant charm matched by her superb technique. City Ballet has been looking for satisfactory replacements ever since. (This is not the only McBride ballet of which this is true.)

This season there are three young Swanildas, two of them making debuts, and we can stop worrying: Even without Ashley Bouder, a natural for the part who’s out with an injury, the role is covered in depth, which means that the ballet is viable. I haven’t yet seen Megan Fairchild (a year or two ago she was promising but somewhat clenched and artificial; all reports of her current performance are glowing), but blond, lovely Sterling Hyltin was utterly appealing—she’s all coltish and radiant enthusiasm. She needs a little more focus, but she’s a dancer who works her way into roles.

Hyltin’s Frantz, Gonzalo Garcia, is not really the Frantz type; he’s not buoyant and carefree enough. Why don’t we have Benjamin Millepied in this role? He’s the closest thing the company has to Helgi Tomasson, Balanchine’s original. No complaints, though, about the other Frantz I saw: Andrew Veyette, in the best extended performance I’ve seen him give. It’s been clear from the start that he has the most potential of all the younger guys, but his talent has seemed somewhat blocked: His classical technique needs polish, and he’s needed to assert a stage presence. His Frantz was a total success—believable as a lovable swain whom the take-charge Swanilda can settle down with (and rein in)—and he’s dancing with a new confidence and energy, as if he’s decided that he really is going to be a star.

As for his Swanilda, Tiler Peck was ravishing. She has the deep musicality essential to the witty phrasing her solos demand. She’s delicate, assured and appealing, and she’s beginning to dance full-out, to take the stage. She could use more command in the big classical pas de deux, but what she did was enchanting. And in the second act, when she pretends to be the doll Coppélia, and taunts Dr. Coppélius with her willfulness and wildness, she was flawless—the Spanish solo and the Scottish solo revealing her dance intelligence and musical imagination. Peck is a born Swanilda. A keeper.

Robert LaFosse gave his amusing comical interpretation of  Coppélius, all fussy until he becomes pathetic. In a debut performance, Adam Hendrickson came closer to the undercurrents that Balanchine drew from Shaun O’Brien. Hendrickson’s Coppélius is deeply in love with his creation, the doll, and closer to tragic than to pathetic when he’s forced to realize the delusion he’s in the grip of: that he can steal Frantz’s soul to bring Coppélia to life. Hendrickson could go further in suggesting the implied malevolence of this fantasy, yet he’s mustn’t go too far: This is a romantic comedy, after all. Meanwhile, he’s made a remarkable start.

Finally, Sunday’s performance was superbly conducted by David LaMarche. Delibes’ wonderful music was vivified and clarified; it’s a long time since it sounded this good at City Ballet.

rgottlieb@observer.com

Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, from a screenplay by Steve Zaillian, is based on an 2000 New York magazine article titled “The Return of Superfly,” by Mark Jacobson. The title of the article was derived from one of the last and best manifestations of the short-lived black-controlled-and-directed drug-crime genres, Ron O’Neal’s Superfly (1973), a genre which had been launched only two years earlier by Gordon Park’s Shaft (1971). I say short-lived because black-power advocates of the period denounced the genre out of existence for tarnishing the image of blacks by suggesting that they were implicated in Harlem’s heroin trade. I can still recall being assailed, along with Roger Greenspun of The Times, by black power activist LeRoi Jones for finding delicious humor and hearty drama in black drug dealers. There seems to be no comparable degree of agitation in the 21st century over the screen image of African-Americans. This may be because so many African-American actors, like the stellar Oscar winner Denzel Washington, play both sides of the law for an ever-increasing African-American share of the ever-shrinking number of moviegoers. Besides, the never-ending racial-image game has shifted to the more widely watched television screen.

In any event, the real-life saga of Frank Lucas has taken several years to reach the screen from the time that the film’s eventual executive producer Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplays for Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) with director Martin Scorsese, introduced the legendary crime boss and then ex-con Lucas to journalist Jacobson. Producer Brian Grazer entered the scene by optioning the magazine article, and meeting with Mr. Pileggi and Mr. Lucas for a possible film version of the Harlem legend. The rest is now stop-start-start-stop Hollywood history as screenwriter Steven Zaillian and director Ridley Scott ended up as the final creative combo, with Denzel Washington taking on the role of Lucas and Oscar winner Russell Crowe cast as Richie Roberts, the determined narcotics detective who brings Lucas down—and with him, a small army of corrupt narcotics detectives and Mafia kingpins.

Mr. Washington and Mr. Crowe constitute a richly ironic study in contrasts as, respectively, the well-dressed churchgoing family man, community leader and casually homicidal crime boss Frank Lucas, and the usually unkempt, womanizing failed husband and father, but steadfastly honest narcotics detective, Richie Roberts, who has forfeited the trust of his crooked fellow cops by returning a million-dollar haul from a drug raid up to the evidence room where it belonged. The charisma projected by both Mr. Washington and Mr. Crowe makes American Gangster the most felicitously magnetic dual vehicle of the year. It is also perhaps the most damning account ever of the longest and most disastrous war in our history, the 80-year war on drugs, which has jailed so many of our citizens while, in effect, enriching the criminal gangs around the world and multiplying the menaces of addiction.

Even so, the conjoined stories of Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts and their contemporaries would have been hard to believe if these stories had been purely and completely fictional. To imagine that packets of pure heroin were smuggled into the United States from Vietnam in the false bottoms of coffins containing the bodies of American soldiers killed in a separate futile conflict would strain the credulity of the most heartless shlockmeister.

Yet, this is what apparently happened in real life, with the attendant bribery of Army and Air Force officers and pilots. I always suspected that there was something wrong in the Vietnam War after the troops there reportedly booed Bob Hope on one of his intended morale-boosting visits, but I never realized until now that so much of the Army (as well as so many in the peace movement) were so high on drugs. Or that so many narcotics detectives were on the take from drug dealers like Frank Lucas. Is the situation any better and cleaner today? I don’t expect any movie to tell me if it isn’t anytime soon, as they did before this 1968-1975 scandal hit the screen.

Also hard to believe is that Lucas could put a gun to the head of a rival mobster and shoot him in broad daylight on a crowded sidewalk in Harlem, and walk back at a leisurely pace to the luncheonette table where he had been eating with his gang of brothers, without the slightest concern that any witnesses would come forward to point a finger at him. Could it happen today? Well, there are any number of hip-hop songs with the message “don’t snitch.” And there seems to be a profusion of guns at large just about everywhere. So who knows?

As for the percentage of narcotics detectives on the take today, do we ever know immediately how many people in our capitalist system are taking bribes? Still, I was taken aback by the extent of the corruption in American Gangster. Josh Brolin as Detective Trupo, the most aggressive member of a Manhattan delinquent narcotics squad in protecting his turf for his own profit, adds to his laurels from No Country for Old Men as the most venturesome of the antiheroes arrayed against the superkiller played by potential Oscar winner Javier Bardem. Of course, the odds are still stacked against evil characters, though after Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter, who can tell how depraved the Academy has become?

The long-esteemed actress and vibrant force for racial justice, Ruby Dee, now in her feisty 80’s, is alone worth the price of admission as no-nonsense Mama Lucas, who climactically slaps her by now fearsomely vengeful son, and directly diverts him from his utter destruction for killing even crooked cops. Right behind her is the gifted black British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, as Huey Lucas, Lucas’ main man and younger brother, and Puerto Rican beauty Lymari Nadal as Eva, Lucas’ one and only. Cuba Gooding Jr. as Nicky Barnes, another of Lucas’ drug lord antagonists, and Armand Assante as Lucas’ Mafia partner, do not even begin to round out the huge cast of idiosyncratic performers from many branches of showbiz.

By the very nature of the genre, the males outnumber the females by a ratio of about 10 to 1. Hence, aside from Ms. Dee and Ms. Nadal, the only other actresses with more than walk-ons are Carla Gugino as Roberts’ neglected wife and KaDee Strickland as Roberts’ attorney and sexual conquest. By contrast, the respective members of the Lucas and Roberts entourages involve more than a dozen actors with much more than walk-on parts. Still, in the end it is the combined star firepower of Mr. Washington and Mr. Crowe that drives the two eventually merging sagas to a salutary law-and-order finale.

The bristling cinematography of Harris Savides, the lavish production design by Arthur Max, and the perceptively accurate costume design by Janty Yates have greatly assisted Mr. Scott and Mr. Zaillian in concocting one of the most dramatically explosive gangster movies in years. An added dividend is provided with the score devised by composer Marc Streitenfeld and music supervisor Kathy Nelson, with additional source music written and produced by Hank Shocklee. The trick was to exploit the flip sides of hit records of the late 60’s and early 70’s, thereby approximating the sound of the period without drenching the soundtrack with the familiar strains of golden oldies.

Accordingly, one must applaud American Gangster as the kind of socko entertainment many people thought Hollywood filmmakers had become incapable of. It is not to be missed.

In those summer mornings, the managing editor, Molly McKaughan, all bustle and energy, opened the office. Next came the three editorial assistants; one with a desk (Jannika Hurwitt), one with a rolling chair (Lucas Matthiessen) and one perched uncertainly between the tiny bathroom, the front door, and the sliver of a storage room (me). I came in one morning to find a rat swimming in the office toilet, which caused hardly any commotion, it turned out, so unflappable was the staff of George Plimpton's literary magazine.

By mid-morning, George showed up, looking surprised and amused to find us there: still at work, or at work already. He himself was half-dressed; pale blue Brooks Brothers boxers and a hastily buttoned dress shirt, his hair a mop of semi-tarnished silver, his nose, like the beak of wading bird, rising as he peered into the office with furrowed forehead. The idea was that he, too, should already be hard at work, but, alas, here he was, just another boyish Upper East Side WASP male in stocking feet, guiltily retrieving the morning paper from the vestibule instead of getting down to work the bank.

His editor's armchair was wedged alongside a windowsill and a covered radiator that was piled with months-old manuscripts and correspondence awaiting his approval. "Swamped" was the word always used to describe George's schedule; agents and writers demanding final word on a story would be told that George had been swamped, which meant that he was off earning his living by stalking the Imperial Ivory-Billed Woodpecker for Life , or covering the Harvard-Yale game for Sports Illustrated , or managing the Yankees in an exhibition game against the Dodgers at spring training in Florida. The heyday of his participatory journalism was just passing, and putting in a few hours a day as "GAP"--the monogram he always used when marking himself as editor of the literary magazine he had founded in Paris in the summer of 1953 with Peter Matthiessen (fiction editor), Thomas H. Guinzburg (managing editor), William Pène du Bois (art), Donald Hall (poetry), John P. C. Train (business manager), and Harold L. (Doc) Humes and William Styron (advisory editors)--was both his longest-running gig and among the most important achievements of his career.

Half-dressed George would fold himself into his armchair, gloomily pulling on his glasses to look at the topmost query on the pile. Almost immediately a phone would ring, but no one would answer it-it was the Plimptons' private line. After an interval the intercom would buzz from upstairs, and George would be needed on that line. George's voice heard up close for the first time in a quiet room made you complicit in a strange phenomenon. Was he serious? "No one who talked the way George did could ever be serious," the poet Donald Hall recalled thinking when he first met Plimpton in the '50s. Where was that Brahmin drawl from? Kurt Vonnegut called it a "honk"; it was thought to be "British." George himself described it as "Eastern Seaboard cosmopolitan." What people didn't understand was that although it was not a put-on, Plimpton's accent had a playful aspect that took some getting used to. As a boy, George had attended St. Bernard's, a Manhattan private school with a English character. I used to think of George's voice as a headmasterly tone that he had learned at St. Bernard's. George, a winner, also had a mocking notion of victory, and there frequently was not a little self-amused irony in his cool patrician tone.

In any case, he made deliberate use of his voice, and what he most often did with it-at least when he was feeling generous-was to make you an intimate by letting you in on the joke. The joke was that stuffy as he sounded, George Plimpton had in fact made a career by taking stands against the professionalism and adultism that was the bane of his generation. He had started by being suspended from Phillips Exeter Academy in the '40s. Like his friend Jack Kennedy (suspended from Choate in the '30s), Plimpton profoundly disbelieved what the brass had said in the war and what the suits were saying in the 1950s. In private, of course, J.F.K. was a cool, ironic, mocking Irishman. Plimpton was, among the first to use in public the cool voice of sardonic distance.

He triumphed uniquely in this because his career was founded on the expectation that he was not in the end going to win. He did hard work and made it look easy. He had the ability to impart lightness in the form of a touch of self-amusement. He had both the courage to enter worlds where well-trained professionals risked blood and guts and the wit to look at their struggles with the kind of bemusement that puts life itself into perspective. He stepped into the boxing ring with the light heavyweight champion Archie Moore, took the mound as a major league pitcher, and sauntered onto the field as the third-string quarterback for the Detroit Lions-all at a time when sports were becoming increasingly professional and obsessive. Plimpton single-handedly returned sports to pure pleasure, but with a twist, and with hard work.

The twist was in his generous fascination with the way people did things. In a culture that cares more for who people are than for what they do and how they do it, George peered curiously, and with great respect, into the way the game was played. He conveyed the work that went into the game. He revealed both to the players he played with and the readers reading him a new idea in American sports writing: Winners rarely feel like winners. Victory is what the onlooker feels, not the participant. From his vantage point inside the game, Plimpton could see that triumph was expressed not by the exhausted warriors but by their spear-carriers, the fans. Victory had become something to go out to the stadium to see, no longer earned only on the field. His work conveyed, above all, an almost melancholy sense of the price paid by the man in the dust of the arena.

What Plimpton's work was also about was the creation of a character-not an Everyman, or a Walter Mitty, as Hemingway mistakenly had it. George's gift was to have in his genes the capacity for pure enjoyment-the ideal of the gentleman sportsman. George loved his work so intensely you got the impression that he would have paid to do these things (as rich men can now pay to become amateur astronauts). He could afford to be in the position of the admiring amateur, not for financial reasons but because playing at a game didn't compromise his position: he worked too hard for that, and he was already too comfortable in his own skin. "I never had the temerity to pretend I was something that I wasn't," he wrote in Paper Lion . Temerity had nothing to do with it.

His model for participatory journalism was Paul Gallico, a 1921 graduate of Columbia University, who had been reviewing movies for the New York Daily News , when he persuaded Jack Dempsey to spar with him. Gallico had an almost scientific interest in what it would feel like to be hit by the world heavyweight champion. Gallico, knocked out in two minutes, got up, pulled himself together, wrote his story, and went on to become the best-known sports writer in America. Gallico was all about striving; George Plimpton was already where he wanted to be. But because he came from a higher world, and because he worked hard, he elevated the thing admired, which was the professional player of the game.

Journalism set Plimpton apart, and therefore placed him in his natural element, which was to be isolated and alone even among a crowd of people. Of all the things George Plimpton did, and the Paris Review office was nothing if not a living museum of the artifacts of a singular career, the magazine itself was always closest to his heart. "I would feel that a limb had been amputated," he once confided, "if The Paris Review stopped."

Once, in 1960, it almost had. After 25 issues, the editors, now in their thirties, with careers and families, met in New York to decide the magazine's future. Matthiessen and Guinzburg had both moved on to newer projects and voted for closing down The Paris Review . Plimpton, still the editor, was held to account for the lateness of issues and general inefficiency. For his part, George was frustrated and angry at having been abandoned by the other founding editors; he wanted everyone to stay on and work harder. Factions formed, tempers flared, everyone had too much to drink. Finally the poetry editor, Donald Hall, soothed the room with a speech about the magazine's first principles. George, left with the choice to shut the shop or carry on alone with new talent, credited Hall as "the man who saved The Paris Review ." But it was Hall who got closer to the truth that defined Plimpton's whole life: "George never gives up on anyone."

During his first phone conversation of the morning, a second outside line would ring-this one dedicated to the editorial office-and after the usual confusion about the Paris Review no longer being headquartered in Paris but on East 72nd Street but also at 45-39 171 Place in Flushing (where Lillian von Nickern, a stalwart of the ages, served as business manager), a third line would light up-George's private office line.

George was a man of many orbits. The voices on his line seemed to come from lives that functioned as satellites positioned in geostationary orbit around the World of Plimpton. To be a summer intern entrusted to answer the private line was to have an ear to the training camp of the world heavyweight boxing champion, the upper reaches of New York publishing, the scattered membership of the Maidstone, Knickerbocker, and Porcellian clubs, the New York City of the late Ford administration, a still-optimistic city being saved by Felix Rohatyn and polished by Lauren Bacall and Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Ashe and Jacqueline Onassis and Clay Felker and Saul Steinberg and Howard Cosell and Truman Capote and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and William Shawn and Bobby Short.

George's belief in human resilience was the magic thread that wove together all those lives.

Everything and everybody in his life was for the purpose of making work into play and play into work. The world always supposed that George Ames Plimpton was swimming in what was then called Old Money. In fact, George lived within the limits of his income as a working journalist. People never believed it. The basic put-down of Plimpton was that he was nothing more, really, than Bertie Wooster, P.G. Wodehouse's adventuring moneyed fop. But, remember: the singular nature of Bertie is that without Jeeves, he wouldn't survive a day on the streets of New York, let alone in the percussion section of the New York Philharmonic. George could take care of himself. In the end, he was hard core.

His father, Francis T. P. Plimpton, a corporate lawyer, a quintessentially practical Yankee in pinstripes, was amused by a son who dared to climb down out of the seats in Yankee Stadium and pitch to a post-season team of major-league all-stars. That he also got Willie Mays to pop up before collapsing from exhaustion was the Plimpton in him. Father was fond of son. At the same time, Francis appeared to be puzzled at what kind of bird he'd hatched in his New England nest on Manhattan's Upper East Side. In the father-son tug of war, one sensed the greater tension on the father's side: Francis may have been a bit hurt, finally, at being George Plimpton's father and not one of the legendary founding figures at the firm that became Debevoise & Plimpton. George was the middle child, wedged between a charming older brother, Oakes Ames Plimpton, and a artistic younger sister, Sarah Ames Plimpton. But to their mother, the former Pauline Ames, daughter of Oakes Ames, director of Harvard's Botanical Museum, and Blanche Ames Ames, a woman's rights activist who invented an early formula for spermicide as well as a method for using a canning jar sealing ring as a diaphragm, George was the son who drove all the stars out of the sky.

Mrs. Plimpton was a formidable presence in George's life. In The Paris Review 's many editorial offices going back to 1953 and the boardroom in the basement of Les Editions de la Table Ronde on the rue Garancière, the phrase "George's mother" was said to have had a correcting effect on otherwise reckless young men. On one occasion in the winter of 1953, George's mother telephoned Thomas H. Guinzburg, then serving as the magazine's New York editor. Mrs. Plimpton had taken exception to a story in the fourth issue about a grotesquely fat, drug-addicted 19-year-old boy, "The Sleep of Baby Filbertson," by James Leo Herlihy (later to write Midnight Cowboy ). "Tom," said Mrs. Plimpton, "how did you, as head of the New York office, allow that story to go in?" Guinzburg replied that George made all those decisions, in Paris. Mrs. Plimpton considered for a moment, then said, "Well, I'm quite sure he didn't intend it to appear in the Christmas issue."

George took it for granted that he was welcome anywhere, as his Ames ancestors had (not quite) been. George's great-great grandfather Benjamin Franklin Butler (1818-1893), governor of Massachusetts and Greenback-Labor candidate for President of the United States in 1884, made himself at home during the Civil War as the administrator of New Orleans, collecting taxes, seizing local bullion, and spending money without federal approval. George's great-grandfather Adelbert Ames (1835-1933) was elected by carpetbaggers during Reconstruction as governor of Mississippi, then U. S. senator. Ames, the youngest major-general in the Civil War was celebrated sixty-eight years after Appomattox as its last surviving general; he also had a talent for inventing mechanical things, from pencil sharpeners to fire-engine ladders. George, born in 1927, remembered him well. George's maternal grandmother, Blanche A. Ames, a women's rights activist, had patents on a hexagonal lumber cutter (1939), a system for trapping low-flying aircraft (1945), and an anti-pollution device for toilets (1968).

George invented himself. In Paris at the age of 26, he still, however, had no idea what he would do with his life. He thought maybe he would come home and get involved in television, the coming thing. Then he stumbled on his first real invention, "the Paris Review interview."

George and the other editors created an alternative to criticism. They let the authors talk about their work themselves. The Paris Review 's first issue featured an interview with E.M. Forster, in which the old King's College don de-mystified the Malabar Caves scene in A Passage to India by revealing that he had consciously created it as a substitute for violence. The Paris Review interviews, Writers at Work , are the indispensable companion to postwar world literature. Plimpton, who interviewed Ernest Hemingway for issue no. 18, thus made an art form of going to writers better than he and talking about what it was really like to write. There, in other words was the template for his whole career as interested participant on center court at Wimbledon or at the 18th hole at the U. S. Open or in the backfield of the Detroit Lions football team.

Plimpton's generation was guilty about taking play so seriously. In Paper Lion , preparing himself for the Detroit Lions training camp, he trots off to Central Park to toss a football around. The mood is melancholy as Plimpton discovers that on weekdays in the city, "with friends working in their offices, it was difficult finding someone with whom to throw." Out of step with his conventional contemporaries, it's up to Plimpton to make the study of play fascinating enough to distract them from their responsibilities.

There was a degree of guilt always in the background of George's life-guilt at being so fascinated by games and personalities, guilt at not being a man who earned his living at a firm, guilt at being the last of the red-hot bachelors. He dealt first with his guilt by concealing how hard he worked. He could never have resolved having such a good time if he couldn't tell himself that playing tennis with Pancho Gonzalez was hard work.

As with so many things in his life the New York of the 1960's and of his prime was the sunlit city of pretty girls in their summer dresses, he seemed merely amused by pretty girls: he concealed how hard he had taken it when the love of his youth jilted him. The story was allowed to show its nose, but that was all: at Harvard, a faun-like Radcliffe girl named Bea was smart, with a purpose in life besides getting a man. The romance was serious on both sides, but Bea was cautious-perhaps she could see that being married to this young man was a career in itself-and turned George down.

He appeared to take the comic mask as his cover, but in fact he had a strong tragic element. In the blast of a coach's whistle gathering players together at the end of Paper Lion , he could hear "the long bleat...almost one of sorrow." He could "see the girls with their racquets on the tennis court, the sound [of the whistle] catching them in lovely poses of arrest, the bells of hair turning at their shoulders as they stopped their play to turn and listen, peering at the pines, their heads tilted for the sounds drifting up from the practice field beyond." He believed that the world was a sad place, but you had to work at it to avoid sorrow. This more than anything made him kind and sparing and merciful.

He could be the testy Yankee in private but never in public or at parties. The George who peeled away pretense did it in small groups. His books are a liberal education. George's classic bestsellers about the world of professional baseball, football, golf, football (again), boxing- Out of My League , Paper Lion , The Bogey Man , Mad Ducks and Bears , Shadow Box --are not adventures among inarticulate oafs. His amazing illusionist trick was to let the Detroit Lions be articulate, even as he skewered his own intelligence. It remains one of the great trompe l'oeil achievements of postwar American literature.

His prose style-the artless, nonchalant voice of his reporting, the ironist always at work-was one of his great contributions. He was the gentleman out of his depth who remained a gentleman. The 1960s in Manhattan had been the last hurrah for the world George had come from, and he brought the dignity of a real citizen of the world to his grass-stained, blood-trickling transactions in the arena. As time went on, and entertainment took over the world, Plimpton was not needed in quite the same way. But he was still the man who conferred upon our newer world a touch of anthropology and a dash of boyish charm; the mixture still worked through the '80s and '90s: If George Plimpton could be fascinated by fireworks or snakes or whatever, no one else need be embarrassed by it.

He was a celebrity in a minor key. He was famous in a gentlemanly way. He was criticized for being a publicity hound, but in fact, though George loved being famous and worked very hard at it, he never opened the windows on his private life. He never alluded to his childhood, or to episodes of personal pain. He was always George Plimpton, Amateur, and he lived in a world in which painful passions do not exist on the page.

In the end, the cold New England eye was outweighed by his kindness, the kindness that is emphasized along with inventiveness in the biographies of his Calvinist ancestors. He aroused astonishing loyalty. He was a chaplain to the newly arrived among the bright lights of the big city, as well as to all those lost people who had worked hard and still wondered what it was all about. How was it that someone who worked so hard at not being taken seriously aroused such serious loyalty?

He was no Gatsby. He could be wistful, with a tragic look in his eye, and he had his Daisy, and God knows we all went to his parties, but he was not a self-made man. He was, instead, something new in the Republic: a self-unmaking man. But time after time, he came back with one more triumph. How did he do it? He did it with a concealment that is the concealment of intense art. His was not just gentlemanly understatement. Self-deprecation was for the club. Hemingway didn't invent grace under pressure; it was invented by George's gentleman ancestors. George Plimpton's profession, finally, was to be unique; to be George Plimpton, the one and only. No one in the last fifty years of American life has been a professional gentleman in quite the way Plimpton pulled it off. By his early forties, he had established a national reputation. He was never diluted by imitators, and his eye and his "I" never clouded over with the kind of self-parody that finally put cataracts on Mailer's journalism. He went on to his dying day without a single encroacher--in a country of 300 million people. There were thousands of would-be Woodward-and-Bernsteins; hundreds of Tom Wolfe wannabes; numberless phony Hunter Thompsons. But only one George Plimpton.

He was a Yankee to the end. But he could never have been himself in New England. Just as Henry Adams had to go to Washington, D. C., to carry off being Henry Adams, so George had to live his life in Manhattan. To be a hard-working Yankee and carry it off in high style, one perched alongside the East River and worked one's ass off, while of course never being so crass as to say one was working at it.

George talked incessantly about money. Money was a routine topic of conversation in The Paris Review 's editorial office-a surprise to me, at eighteen. In my own middle-class family, the subject of money was an embarrassment. George had an aristocratic unembarrassment about money.

His concern about money centered always around the baby he'd fathered in Paris and been stuck with by his fellow founders. He worried, perhaps, again, out of guilt: George always knew that of all the choices in his life, the "most sensible one," he once told me, "would be to drop The Paris Review ." But he didn't, and from the moment he tapped Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, his Harvard roommate, to be the Paris Review 's first publisher while they were running the bulls in Pamplona, to the somewhat less glamorous but no less loyal publishers of the 1970s (Ron Dante, the music producer and creator of the Archies; Bernard F. Connors, the Canadian soft-drink king), to the creation in the 1990s of a sensibly endowed Paris Review Foundation, fundraising was foremost on his mind.

Money is the key theme--dignity the dominant gift conferred--in his final note to subscribers. It arrived the week before his death as a small printed insert accompanying the dazzlingly chic invitation to the magazine's gala fiftieth anniversary revels. Under The Paris Review 's insignia-talon-gripped dip pen and liberty cap with tricolore cockade-George took note of the fact that the party on October 14 was going to be, in fact, a fund-raiser and that, for some, the ticket prices would be "relatively high." Was George taking pity on the poor subscriber in Kansas City, Kansas, because the cheapest seat would be $500 and it's a long way to New York? Well, no, probably not--but he wanted us all to know that we were welcome, and he turned what might be seen as condescension into a high compliment: "We tend to think of our subscribers as those we would like to have with us at such an occasion and thus the invitation." And having done the cosmopolitan thing, he then wastes no more time before pointing out that if you happen to be unable to come, you still have several options: You might like to make a contribution to the Paris Review Foundation; or simply buy an extra subscription for a friend through The Review 's new Web site; or--the purest of Plimptonian salutes--"simply raise a glass on the 14th of October." He signs off in even purer faith, a classically wistful sounding Plimpton promise: "In any case, the fiftieth anniversary issue will be reaching you next month."

One of the odder byways of nonfiction is the dishy memoir by those who have served the great or the near-great. Think of all those books by former White House staff members: seamstress Lillian Rogers Parks' My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House , chief usher J.B. West's Upstairs at the White House , kennel keeper Traphes Bryant's Dog Days at the White House . England has a long tradition of royalty rip-offs, most famously The Little Princesses: (1953), the royal nanny's best-selling tell-all. The Queen was not amused.

We, of course, don't have royalty-even Presidents don't qualify-but we do have Hollywood. And now we have Frank Sinatra's onetime valet, George Jacobs. With the help of William Stadiem, Jacobs has given us a vivid account of his many years serving The Voice, and of the tragic (to him) denouement of their relationship. Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra is a curious and convincing portrait not only of Sinatra but of Mr. Jacobs himself, and of the kind of mentality that breeds such passionate attachment to a man so spectacularly unworthy of it.

George Jacobs, now 76, was born in New Orleans. Although black, he had Jewish blood on both sides-hence his last name. After a stretch in the Navy, during which he became aide to an admiral and learned to cook Mediterranean style, he married, moved to Los Angeles and, through a series of maneuvers and accidents, found himself Man Friday to agent Swifty Lazar's Robinson Crusoe. Which in turn led to Sinatra snatching him from Swifty-needling Lazar was one of Sinatra's favorite pastimes.

It was love at first sight: "I loved the guy, and I assumed he loved me, too." From 1953 to 1968, George was Frank's shadow. He cooked for him-the Italo-American food Frank craved; he dressed him (orange was Sinatra's favorite color); he ferried Frank's lady friends and call girls to and from the Residence; he palled around with the Rat Pack; he watched over Ava (long after she had bounced Frank) when she needed looking after; he became a link to Sinatra's family-big Nancy and the three kids-and stayed on close terms with Dolly, Sinatra's bar-owning, ward-heeling, midwife/abortionist mother, even after Sinatra booted him; he knew Marilyn ("the girl Dolly wanted her son to marry") and the Kennedys, the notorious Judith Campbell and the dangerous Sam Giancana. And he dealt as best he could with Mia Farrow (when she was Mia Sinatra), whom he clearly despised, even before she became the engine of his fall from grace.

A summer night in L.A. George has the evening to kill before going over to Ava's bungalow, where they would "get plastered, and ... sing to each other until daylight." Looking for action, he stops off at a place called the Candy Store for a few drinks, and along comes Mia. "I thought she was high, high as a kite. 'Dance with me, Georgie Porgie,' she insisted, dragging me out to the floor .... " After they dance "for what seemed an eternity," George slips away to meet Ava. When Frank reads about their dancecapade in Rona Barrett's gossip column, it's over in a flash: George's key suddenly doesn't fit the compound door, and a letter from Frank's lawyer tells George that he's been fired. "I was not to reenter the premises, nor telephone, nor in any way approach or try to contact Mr. Sinatra .... There was no explanation, no apology, no severance pay." And indeed, the two men run into each other only one more time, in 1978, at Don the Beachcomber's. "I took one look at him and broke down into tears. I couldn't stop crying. Mr. S put his arm around me. 'Forget about it, kid,' he said. 'It isn't so bad.' I guess I couldn't forget about it, because the tears didn't stop. Mr. S gave me one last squeeze and was gone .... I was sad he wasn't as sentimental about us as I was."

There are telling discrepancies between what George Jacobs says here and what, in the early 80's, he told Kitty Kelley when she interviewed him for her no-holds-barred Sinatra bio, His Way : "After fourteen years together, he dropped the net on me just like that, and he couldn't even look me in the face to do it. He couldn't fire me in person. He had to have his prick lawyer do it for him. I was so mad afterwards that I threw away everything he'd ever given me-two-thousand-dollar watches, suits, sweaters, shirts, shoes, coats, cameras, radios-everything. I didn't want anything from the bastard around. I got twelve thousand dollars in severance pay and blew it, and then I sold all my shares in Reprise Records." It's not only the forgotten severance pay that stands out here, but the anger that's generally absent or veiled in the new book. Time does heal all wounds.

There was clearly a blurring of lines in the relationship between the two men, as there often is between master and servant. George was definitely more to Frank than a valet, unless your definition of valeting includes procuring, getting chummy with gangsters and Presidents, and baby-sitting Ava Gardner and Marilyn Monroe. We're not talking Jeeves here. To George, Frank was a hero-not only "the most powerful man in the entertainment business" ("the folks in show business feared Sinatra the same way the folks in Communist Russia had feared Stalin"), but also "my best friend, my idol, my boss." What George was-actually-was an adoring courtier to a member of Hollywood's royalty. "It feels great," he tells us, "to be the right hand of a king."

It doesn't feel great, though, to be expelled from paradise. What George Jacobs suffered at Sinatra's hands is the old story of Prince Hal and Falstaff, and of a million less famous examples of favorites being abruptly shed: You think you're a "we" and discover you no longer even exist; the king doesn't need you any more, and wants you out of his sight and off his conscience. Some cast-offs fade gracefully into oblivion; some shriek with rage ( The Devil Wears Prada ); and some put a good face on it, which is what George Jacobs has done in Mr. S. It helps that he has humor and a certain wit, and it's a relief to the reader, who comes to like him, that he managed to make a life for himself after Sinatra, despite the dismal fate of several of his children and an appearance on The Gong Show .

What we discern about Sinatra-and it jibes with other accounts-is that he was a man with profound feelings of inferiority about everything but his music. He was a shrimp; he had scars and a damaged ear from a difficult birth; and he never got over his unlovely background. Hoboken was hardly "class," and no concept was more important to this man who aspired so desperately to be accepted by what he saw as the elite: Fred Astaire, Humphrey Bogart, Bing Crosby, Edie Goetz (Louis B. Mayer's daughter, and supposed doyenne of social Hollywood), the Kennedys. "Mr. S craved class like a junkie craves a needle." But his social aspirations were undercut by his blatant weaknesses-an almost pathological anger and blasts of unforgiving coldness: Tommy Dorsey, Lauren Bacall, his godfather and many others who had been faithful and loyal were brutally banished. He was a serial hater. "Everything about Mr. S had to do with paying debts and settling scores"-the Sinatra family needn't have left Sicily.

Sinatra pursued women voraciously, but did he ever really love anyone except Ava and Dolly? Certainly he cared as a friend for some of his occasional conquests-Marilyn, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, Natalie Wood, Dinah Shore and a hundred more-and he was generous and gallant to his bought women: After all, they gave him what he most wanted, control. He was fun, yet abusive; free from prejudice, yet consorting with and admiring some of the most repellent criminals of his day. And, of course, he was a very great singer.

It's hard to feel sorry for Frank Sinatra, and yet he was crushed by two traumatic defeats. One was the loss of Ava. The other was being dropped by the Kennedys after Jack made it to the White House (with Sinatra's crucial help). By then, Frank's criminal connections were too rank for Bobby and for Ambassador Joe, and Frank in turn became the Falstaff figure, banished by the prince. It was a public humiliation. Indeed, the severest portraits in Mr. Jacobs' book are of Bobby (Sinatra called him "the weasel") and of Dad-Joe Kennedy is probably the one man in the world George Jacobs could be said to have hated. Vile about blacks, Joe was even nastier about Jews. "The Jewish jokes didn't stop. The worst one I can recall: 'What's the difference between a Jew and a pizza? The pizza doesn't cry on its way to the oven.'" "Mr. Ambassador," Jacobs sums up, "if anyone had the guts to spit in his face, a bravery that my boss sadly lacked, should have been called Mr. Asshole." As for Bobby's assassination at the hands of Sirhan Sirhan, the unforgiving Sinatra could only mumble, "It wasn't even one of us ." Peter Lawford? "Cheap, weak, sneak, and freak."

Jack was a different matter. "As much as I disliked his father, that's how much I was crazy about John Fitzgerald Kennedy." Jack was "handsome and funny and naughty and irreverent as Dean Martin," insisting that George call him by his first name and obsessed with Hollywood gossip and Mr. S's love life. According to George, the Senator "was far more in awe of Mr. S than Mr. S was of him." Why? "Because Frank Sinatra controlled the one thing JFK wanted more than anything else: Pussy! Mr. S was the Pope of Pussy, and JFK was honored to kiss his ring." After all, Mr. S could "bestow" not only a Judy Campbell but a Marilyn Monroe. There's a hilarious scene in which Kennedy is being massaged by George while they "talk pussy." The talk has its effect, leading to the punchline: "We better get you laid, Jack."

About Frank himself close up, George is specific and admiring. Ava, weighing up her "one-hundred-twenty-pound runt," put it most succinctly: "There's only ten pounds of Frank but there's one hundred and ten pounds of cock!" On the other hand, Mr. Jacobs may be the only witness to how Sinatra dealt with the problem of size. For Oscar night-the night he won Best Supporting Actor for From Here to Eternity , the night that revived his career-he "had special underpants made, a cross between a panty girdle and a jock strap. The idea was to hold down that big thing of his, so it wouldn't show through his tuxedo pants." Everybody's got problems!

I only wish I'd known about this cunning device the one time I met Sinatra. Among his closest friends were Bill Green (chairman of the Clevepak Corporation) and his wife, Judy, an old school pal of mine. Judy was determined that Frank and I should meet, God knows why, and she set up a formal dinner party. One night during the 70's, I drove up to the Greens' house in Mt. Kisco with Swifty Lazar-Sinatra, by the way, was still on Swifty's case-and I found myself at the end of a long dinner table on one side of Judy, with Sinatra on the other. If I'd known about the dick-suppresser, it might have gotten the conversational ball rolling, but as it was, I was as much at sea as Sinatra about what to say. Finally I blurted out some bland question about Hollywood, and Frank lit up: Here was a subject he could safely address. Leaning over Judy, he looked at me directly for the first time. "You know, Bob," he said, "sometimes Hollywood can be the loneliest town in the world."

Robert Gottlieb is the dance critic for The Observer.

Our Most Dazzling Patriarch, A Bad Boy With a Lusty Streak

by Ted Widmer

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life , by Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster, 590 pages, $30.

Future historians may well ponder the explosion of interest in the 18th century that marked the beginning of the 21st and wonder whether it was a modern version of the intellectual crazes that dotted the landscape of the Enlightenment, like tulipomania or mesmerism. Or maybe it's just one of those generational games of leapfrog, like the obsession with the 50's that oddly accompanied the 70's ( M*A*S*H , Grease , Sha Na Na, the Fonz). Is there a historian who doesn't have a project on the Founding Fathers in the works? Is there a Founding Father left unaccounted for? (Actually, there is-Washington, the biggest of them all-but Joseph Ellis will take care of that.)

Into this crowded swimming pool, the unlikely figure of Walter Isaacson is about to cannonball. On July 4 (natch), his fat new biography of Benjamin Franklin will appear. Until recently the C.E.O. of CNN, and before that the managing editor of Time , Mr. Isaacson is the author of two important books on the foreign-policy establishment, Kissinger (1992) and The Wise Men (which he co-wrote in 1986 with Evan Thomas, who is now the assistant managing editor of Newsweek ). That's quite a résumé. Somehow, over the last few years, in between the AOL-Time Warner merger, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq and the degradation of the Atlantic alliance (the book he should do next), Mr. Isaacson found the time to write a doorstop on one of the most complex figures in American history. Despite the insipid subtitle (who among us has not lived "an American life"?), it's a serious offering, and looks imposing well before one summons the courage to actually read it.

Do we need a new biography of Franklin? Last fall, Yale's Edmund Morgan issued a graceful profile, and three years ago, the prolific historian H.W. Brands published a solid longer study. In truth, Mr. Isaacson's book does not add enormously to the sum of our knowledge. But his clear prose and media savvy may bring in readers who have not ventured into the 18th century before, and Franklin's life is so seminal that he can hardly be written about too often.

He was quite simply the most dazzling American of his time. Adams deserved the boost he got from David McCullough, and Jefferson will always stand for a certain kind of flawed brilliance, but whenever Franklin walked into the room, he sucked all the air out of it. No one else had his range, his street smarts or his flair for publicity. He was a one-man CNN, with his finger on the pulse of an emerging information society and a natural penchant for snappy one-liners ("Love well, whip well"). His autobiography is still the template for all the memoirists who have toiled in his wake. He was funnier than the rest of the Founders, by a wide margin (if you don't believe me, try reading Mather Byles, then considered the great wit of America). He worked harder than the others as he grappled his way up the ladder, literally running away from the grime of his working-class background. And unlike every other Founder, he was a natural urbanite. A lover of cities and all they stand for, from Boston and Philadelphia to London and Paris, where this expatriate American spent the happiest years of his life, far away from his fellow Americans and their dreary money-grubbing (though he could grub with the best). If Barbara Walters had been alive in the 18th century (and it does seem like she's been around that long), no one would have given her a better interview. The least wise thing he ever said was "He that lives carnally, won't live eternally." Franklin is here forever.

As that pious homily suggests, this was a man of great contradictions, his lapses every bit as interesting as his talents. Franklin is indisputably part of our pantheon-the household god of Rotarians and mutual-fund managers-but his life offers fantastic defects for a cunning biographer to explore. As far as we know, he did not commit the unpardonable sin for a Founder (interracial sex), but he did just about everything else. He was a disaster as a family man, emotionally retarded with the people who needed him most, and inclined to long absences that gave him the freedom to range over choicer pastures. Mr. Isaacson is quite good on Franklin's tortured relationship with William Franklin, the bastard son he sired within a year of his marriage, and who in turn sired a bastard who sired a bastard. For reasons that we can only begin to fathom, William Franklin, neglected by his father for much of his life, became an ardent Tory during the Revolution, bringing anguish to both. No other Founding Father could possibly have found himself fighting against one of his children. None had a more ambivalent relationship with the word "father."

Mr. Isaacson has done plenty of research. Franklin's depressing heirs sold his papers in the 19th century, but they have largely been reassembled, and Mr. Isaacson has sifted through many of them-not as many as Edmund Morgan, but enough. He has also brought back the humor missing from the more academic tomes.

Satire was an essential political tool for Franklin. Throughout his life, he made people laugh, and while they were laughing he picked their pockets. As a bored teenager, he invented the fictitious busybody Silence Dogood to get into his brother's newspaper. As a gouty old man in Paris, he invented flippant bagatelles to get into his girlfriends' pantaloons. Mr. Isaacson provides details on all these Franklins and more-including the kaleidoscopic range of names people called him-"the new Prometheus" to Kant, "old Ben lightning rod" to the people, "Dr. Fatsides" to the women he lived with in London, in one of his many suspect domestic arrangements.

But Benjamin Franklin , like its subject, is an imperfect creation. Mr. Isaacson's journalistic background allows him to avoid pontification, but his casual style comes at a price. The writing, if it does not annoy, does not exhilarate either. Too many complicated subjects are dispatched with a cliché or a breathless summary ("the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself"). Mr. Isaacson often interrupts a perfectly good narrative to summarize a point with bullets-a strategy that may work well in a Time sidebar, but which looks strange in the middle of a history book. One also senses that for all his reading on Franklin, certain reaches of the 18th century remain terra incognita for Mr. Isaacson. His thumbnail portraits of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards ignore important subtleties of the Puritan character, and Edwards would have been flabbergasted to learn that he stood for a hierarchical arrangement of society, when he devoted his most trenchant sermons to the godless money hunger that was already tainting American democracy, well before the United States was created.

D.H. Lawrence's hilariously savage essay about Franklin, which Mr. Isaacson dismisses too quickly, pursued a similar attack, loathing the self-help maxims, the false humility, the endless attempt to rob life of its mystery. It remains the best thing written on American smugness, a topic that requires our urgent attention as the world looks at us with fear and loathing. Franklin is too complicated to reduce to simple praise or condemnation, and Mr. Isaacson wisely avoids either extreme. But his inclination is to overlook these harder points, which deserve to be heard along with the hosannas. For Lawrence, for Herman Melville, and for many of Franklin's contemporaries, there was something a little suspect about Franklin's bromides. It does not diminish Franklin's greatness to look more deeply into the less flattering side of the story.

If biography is always secretly autobiography, what drew Mr. Isaacson to Franklin in the first place? It's not as odd a choice as it first seems. Like Henry Kissinger, Franklin merged celebrity and foreign policy, and he would have approved both the sentiment and the pithiness of Mr. Kissinger's most lasting thought: "Power is the greatest aphrodisiac." Like the policymakers Mr. Isaacson studied in The Wise Men , Franklin radiated an insider's confidence; he knew what was best for the country without needing to tell too many people the details. And, of course, Franklin was a journalist before he was a statesman: Like Walter Lippman, like James "Scotty" Reston, he deftly made the leap from covering events to shaping them. That's got to be exciting if you happen to have risen to the top of the journalistic heap and have nowhere left to climb.

Benjamin Franklin is not the final word on Old Ben Lightning Rod; I doubt any book ever will be-as Poor Richard tells us, cryptically, "men and melons are hard to know." Mr. Isaacson's ambitious new study signals an important effort to bring Franklin back into focus. A new generation of readers needs to know more about the Founder who most appealingly embodies our great resourcefulness as a people-and more than a few of our weaknesses, too.

Ted Widmer is director of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.

Nostalgia at the Ballpark: Gravest Threat to the Game

by Mark Costello

The Teammates , by David Halberstam. Hyperion, 217 pages, $22.95.

So it's June again, 2003. Summer comes, the kids are getting out of school, and even semi-with-it fans of baseball begin to check the box scores with their coffee. April and May baseball-a quarter of the season-is the stretch run of mirage and statistical bizzarerie. Wiser minds ignore it. No, the lowly Royals will not win the A.L. Central, despite leading for six weeks (it couldn't last, and didn't). And no, Jason Giambi, the Yankees' onetime M.V.P., slumping early on, will not strike out 300 times and hit .192. The Royals fade. Giambi homers twice to beat the Cardinals in the Bronx. June is when the season starts to act its age.

Sanity's return, welcome every year, is particularly welcome now. It hasn't been a good time for the game. Let's list some of the outrages. A season-ending players' strike was narrowly averted in August of last year. In the spring, two former All-Stars, Ken Caminetti and Jose Canseco, alleged that at least half of the players are dependent on steroids, speed and other banned supplements. In March, as if to prove the point, a young reliever for the Orioles died while jogging in the outfield-a death caused, the coroner would find, by the reckless use of Ephedra, a potent weight-loss medication. The fans, weary of bloated player contracts, drug-related scandals and the plague of $30 trinkets at the ballparks, have been tuning out. Ratings and attendance, sliding for a while, are down again this year, imperiling the very economics of the game. The Montreal Expos have been placed in M.L.B. receivership and, desperate to draw crowds, now play a portion of their "home" games in that Francophone heaven, San Juan, Puerto Rico. This spring, as the Royals made their early bid for greatness, an ex-managing general partner of the Texas Rangers bombed and conquered a country named Iraq. The ex-managing general partner's name is George Walker Bush. We'll see how this transaction pans out for everybody's favorite Texas Ranger.

Problems seem to follow baseball, even to the White House. Perhaps it's appropriate that baseball faces what is either a midlife crisis or possibly old age with an actual baseball man as President. The game has always been the self-anointed microcosm of the nation. And in a time of doubt, baseball does what America is busy doing now, it seems to me: turning inward, looking backward.

Proof of this can be found in the latest crop of baseball books. Strikingly, most focus on some golden yesteryear. The classic of the genre-and it truly deserves that title-is Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer , published 30 years ago, a bittersweet memoir of Brooklyn, boyhood and the beloved Dodgers. But The Boys of Summer was written by a grown man, and not in summer but in the moral fall of the late 1960's, a time of riots, burning cities and assassination. The subject may be baseball, but the theme is what we've lost.

The problem with nostalgia is that it works. The Boys of Summer surely worked, crashing the best-seller lists. But nostalgia is a trap. It leads nowhere except back. Literarily, it leads to imitation. Brooklyn has been done to death, but this doesn't kill the appetite or stop the quest for other special, golden, magical teams and times and places.

Roger Kahn's latest book, October Men , is a blow-by-blow of the 1979 New York Yankees, which featured such humble, noble figures as the alcoholic Billy Martin, the egoholic Reggie Jackson and the plutocratic owner, George Steinbrenner. In a funny way, of course, nostalgia is promiscuous. It can embrace Roger Kahn's plucky, funky Dodgers of the 50's, the antithesis of New Baseball, money and free agency, the reign of "I got mine." Then a decade or two passes, and Roger Kahn can write another book waxing elegiac over the Yankees of the late 70's, who pretty much embodied those new forces.

At least the Yankees won. In David Halberstam's The Teammates: A Portrait of a Friendship , the teammates are left fielder Ted Williams, center fielder Dom DiMaggio (Joltin' Joe's little brother), second baseman Bobby Doerr and the slap-hitting shortstop, Johnny Pesky. These men formed the core of the Boston Red Sox in the 1940's, a team that, in the great Red Sox tradition, almost won. They were all fine players (Doerr and the great Williams are in the Hall of Fame), but also, Mr. Halberstam believes, symbols of a country largely gone. They were, he tells us, "men of a certain generation ... special men-smart, purposeful, hardworking-and they had seized on baseball as their one chance to get ahead in America." In short, these are the guys, or the kind of guys, who hit the sands on D-Day and whipped the Japs at Iwo Jima. It's a baseball version of The Greatest Generation .

To his credit, Mr. Halberstam is less interested in baseball or the Red Sox than in the strange and spiky byways of male friendship. Williams, Doerr, DiMaggio and Pesky came up more or less together in the early 40's, playing as a unit until 1951, separate lives "forever linked in a thousand box scores, through long hours of traveling on trains together." But much of The Teammates happens afterwards in the 80's and the 90's, well outside the box scores. The boys grow old. They squabble and go fishing. One of them gets sick. The others gently help him die. Many of these scenes are very powerful.

But over everything, and over all of baseball, lies the goo of reminiscence. Hey, Ted, remember '46?

The game is changing, and the changes may be fatal, though I doubt it. Free agency, that hated innovation, is surely better and more just than the old plantation days of the reserve clause, when a club controlled a man for life without negotiation. Fan interest may be down in the United States, but it's up in Asia and in many other markets, and not everything important happens in the U.S.A. In the end, the biggest threat to baseball as the pulse rate of a healthy culture may not be the future, but the goo-the backward gaze, the pastime of past time.

Mark Costello's most recent novel is Big If (Harvest).

From Gospel to Gangsta: Naming the Soul of Black Music

by Stephen Metcalf

Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music , by Arthur Kempton. Pantheon,498 pages, $27.50.

In the early 1920's, Columbia Records was on the verge of extinction when it released a song called "Downhearted Blues" by a bawdy torch singer named Bessie Smith. The record was a smash, Columbia Records was saved, and "race music," as it was bluntly labeled at the time, forever became the basis for America's pop-aural universe. That older classification is no longer suitable, of course; but how to bind together the many genres, from soul to funk to rap, that have descended to us from gospel and the blues? Arthur Kempton, unaffiliated musicologist and frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books , has come up with a suggestion. "Boogaloo" was both a dance craze from the mid-60's-not coincidentally, the time of Mr. Kempton's coming-of-age as a music fan-and, he insists, a music insider's term of art for black popular music in the soul idiom. Etymology and usage aside, as a single thread with which to bind gospel and gangsta rap, "boogaloo" is very much Mr. Kempton's own invention. But does one spirit really preside over "Peace in the Valley," "Baby Love," Maggot Brain and "Straight Outta Compton"?

Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music is a contrary book: It's a shambling-rambling, loose-jointed, prolix argument in favor of, well, a quintessence : a single, unifying spirit to all the popular music made by African-Americans. Pivotally, Mr. Kempton downgrades the blues as its true source to the advantage of gospel. And so for the first half of the book, at least, "boogaloo" seems to mean the precarious balance between the sacred and the profane, as best exemplified by those most omni of omni-Americans, Thomas A. Dorsey and Sam Cooke. Dorsey essentially invented gospel, by smuggling the aura of sexual intoxication of Ma Rainey, for whom he had once played back-up piano, into the church, while smuggling back into popular music the wild devotional zeal of Southern Baptists. Cooke, of course, was the first true soul singer. He had apprenticed for years as the front man for the divine gospel ensemble the Soul Stirrers, before striking out on his own as one of the earliest crossover heartthrobs. Think of songs that reshaped the world (Elvis' "That's Alright, Mama" or Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti"); Sam Cooke's ditty "You Send Me," with its wafting and endlessly repetitive chorus, doesn't come immediately to mind. But in fact it gave birth to boogaloo's new tension, between the grit and soulfulness of music made by and for blacks, and the mass appeal of black music meant to ingratiate itself with whites.

Beethoven or Mozart? Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Stax or Motown? You don't have to choose, but if you do a deep moral allegiance is at stake. Mr. Kempton tries to have his cake and eat it too; he claims both Stax and Motown as manifestations of boogaloo. Stax, after all, made soul music: Otis Redding, Aretha, Isaac Hayes. Motown made black pop for white teens. With Motown, Mr. Kempton's single-thread theory starts to fray. In post-riot, post-white-flight Detroit, Berry Gordy's empire clung to a fake reality. Motown continued to make some captivating records, of course, but the truth was harder than anything Lionel Ritchie could convey. While Mr. Gordy was racing thoroughbreds, and Michael Jackson was shilling for Pepsi, a segment of black America had hardened into a seemingly permanent underclass. The new reality of inner-city life-draconian drug laws, Jamaican posses-required a new music. All organic connection to the black Southern Baptist church, and any fealty to the dulcet Sam Cooke, was lost forever.

Mr. Kempton does his best to bridge the yawning gap between the death of Motown and the birth of hip-hop by stretching our understanding of funk. But though he does some sweet justice to the magpie genius of George Clinton-and though dozens of rap records sample Funkadelic-by now the term "boogaloo" has too many smoothed corners and caveats to sustain itself. Where, after all, is the Louis Armstrong of the Hot Fives, the Duke Ellington of the great Blanton-Webster years? Why introduce Charley Patton as "Charlie Patton," only to drop him quickly, even though his genius towers over American music, from every funk bass player, living or dead, to Hendrix and flat-picking pioneer John Fahey? But Fahey, of course, is what Mr. Kempton, son of the great Upper West Side journalist Murray Kempton, would refer to as a "white boy." Here we start to see what "boogaloo" really refers to: not some quality intrinsic to black music, but the brand of authenticity Mr. Kempton aspires to as its ultimate crossover fan. Every white person writing about black music is in danger of falling into the same trap, and the warning sign is always a look, ma, they let me on the Mothership! zinginess to the prose. When Arthur Kempton was a little boy, he wanted to be an Afronaut.

Any book intent on giving Holland-Dozier-Holland their due, and that resurrects, if only in passing, the name of the great forgotten purveyors of Philly soul, the Delfonics, is a book worth poring over. But in addition to its murky thesis, Boogaloo suffers from a more serious deficiency: It's hopelessly derivative. (The footnotes, a virtually uninterrupted string of ibid. 's, are a dead giveaway. The most egregious example: Mr. Kempton's chapter on Stax records has 55 footnotes; no less than 52 of them refer to Rob Bowman's 2000 book, Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records .) A book dependent on other people's primary research is in dire need of a rich, compelling thesis, and the notion of "boogaloo" simply doesn't fit the bill.

And all the while, another thesis has been staring Mr. Kempton in the face. Thomas A. Dorsey, Sam Cooke, Berry Gordy, George Clinton and Suge Knight all have something in common, and it's not some Af-Am chi called boogaloo. As Mr. Kempton's own book shows, all these men were empire builders or would-be empire builders. It should never be forgotten, oh felix culpa , that blues is the child of the field holler, and soul music a legacy of Jim Crow. But the music of black Americans is so routinely portrayed as a dignified response to exploitation-and as the wellspring of an authenticity born of sweltering oppression-that Mr. Kempton can't see what his own research, derivative as it is, has handed him: Black-on-black exploitation has always been deeply embedded in the music itself. Mr. Kempton has tried to make Boogaloo the story of Afro-Christianity, but it's not. From Thomas Dorsey's Bill Gates-like manipulation of copyright laws to Suge Knight absconding with Tupac Shakur's master tapes, it's the story of Afro-capitalism, through and through.

Stephen Metcalf reviews books regularly for The Observer .

Chick Lit Meets Skin Flick: More Dark Tales of Motherhood

by Sheelah Kolhatkar

The Porno Girl and Other Stories , by Merin Wexler. St. Martin's Press, 225 pages, $22.95.

A young woman with a baby strapped to her chest ducks into the Pussy Cat Palace, an X-rated theater and store full of "dildos and vibrators ... rubber buttocks, plump oversized vulvas, phony breasts plus enough chains and leather for an entire S&M Olympics." She's taking in a skin flick when her baby gets hungry, so she starts nursing and inserts a coin in the video slot. And another, and another.

This isn't the opening of a snuff film, but the title story of The Porno Girl and Other Stories , a debut collection of short fiction by Merin Wexler. Ms. Wexler's heroines aren't fascinating because of their problems, but because of the ways they deal with them. Mostly upper-middle-class women living in New York or some place like it, they act out their darkest impulses, the ones the rest of us try to suppress. They watch porn, sleep with the wrong people, flout widely accepted truths. Their predicaments are familiar: They juggle careers and kids and cope with men who let them down. The author makes their life crises hilarious and painful at the same time.

Several of these 11 stories are good, but the book is worth reading for the "The Porno Girl" alone (it brings to mind the stories of Mary Gaitskill). "It wasn't sex I was after," explains the woman who visits the porn theater with her newborn under her coat, "I wasn't aroused; I was becalmed .... And in that faint tranquility I could begin to feel briefly myself, meaning my prebaby self, which, since the birth, seemed to have died." Afraid that she's "sick, an unfit mother," she flees to a new mother's group, only to be horrified by the "coffee klatch" of big-haired breast-feeders arrayed in a circle. She earns our sympathy as she struggles to fit the unforgiving mold of the Stepford mom.

Ms. Wexler brings the Manhattan version of Mommy-and-me culture to brilliant life. Our heroine spends days searching for Dreft, the "fabled" detergent the baby books insist she use. She wonders if it's just "another fiction to distract new mothers from staring down the truth of their inalterable new state." She attends Gymboree, baby massage and baby yoga, trying to be normal. But she has already met Rodman, the African clerk at the porn palace near Times Square. Rodman is unfazed by the fact that she's brought an infant into the world of triple-X. He asks if she's breast-feeding and talks pacifiers; he's a new daddy himself. Rodman's practical attitude toward parenting, in which children aren't so precious-they're integrated rather than quarantined-exposes the maternity fantasy for what it is. The Porno Girl can choose to subscribe to it or not.

Stories like "What Marcia Wanted" and "Waiting to Discover Electricity" are also compelling, although less outrageous. In the former, 14-year-old Evelyn falls in and out of awe with her neighbor Marcia, a tragic figure whose husband is coming out of the closet. Marcia is "a skinny drunk, as if everything she poured in poured right out." Ms. Wexler renders Evelyn's coming of age with painful realism: "Inside me, I felt something taking root, seeds of panic and regret. What had I done wrong?" Evelyn asks. "To be so suddenly connected to another human being, it was terrifying." In "Waiting to Discover Electricity," college-bound Schuyler idolizes Carolyn, the mother of her baby-sitting charges. She dresses up in Carolyn's clothes, struts for her in a bikini, tries her first glass of wine with her. The story conjures up every older sister and baby-sitter from one's formative years. Schuyler's simultaneous love and betrayal of her mentor exposes the dark undercurrent of intimate relationships.

In some instances, Ms. Wexler is less successful at exploiting her subjects. "The Nanny Trap," in which a career woman gets pregnant a second time so as to hold onto her nanny, will speak to anyone who's keeping too many balls in the air: "Finally I had everything arranged in a way that I could handle: my job, my child, my marriage," the narrator tells us. If it weren't for Nola, her West Indian helper, "the precarious arrangement that comprised my life could instantly collapse." The unlikely scenario is ripe for the grim comedy that's so satisfying elsewhere in the book. Unfortunately, the nameless narrator morphs into the appalling house mistress from The Nanny Diaries . "One nanny I knew had the nerve to get pregnant and ask for maternity leave," she says. She has nightmares about her unborn child having "brown skin and full lips, his hair braided like [Nola's] in cornrows around his head .... He spoke to me in a voice like Bob Marley's and said he wanted curried goat."

In an otherwise bleak emotional environment, we encounter simple, sensual images. Evelyn, in "What Marcia Wanted," sips her first martini: "It made my head swirl, and I felt the wind rush inside my skirt, soft as chinchilla." After trying marijuana, she hears "wildlife whispering on the bay: the gulls in their dialect, the tadpoles quibbling, crickets, the squawk of gulls." Euphoric after a date, Miss Hendl, in "Helen of Alexandria," "felt light-headed and limber, the top flap of her shoulder bag flung open, precious contents exposed."

These moments of poetry stand out; elsewhere the prose is relentlessly crisp, as detached as many of Ms. Wexler's worldly-wise New York heroines, who are rarely shocked by anything, even their own transgressions. The author refrains from painting broad urban landscapes; her specialty is interiors, the confines of apartments "hanging over the rushing traffic," Manhattan shuddering beyond the windows.

With its unhappy depictions of family life and exclusively feminine perspective, The Porno Girl and Other Stories belongs to the current wave of fiction and nonfiction battering the women-having-it-all myth. Modern motherhood causes more than its share of agony, and writers such as Amy Koppelman, in her post-partum novel A Mouthful of Air , and contributors to the recent anthology The Bitch in the House aren't shy about acknowledging it. I note, however, that Merin Wexler, a native New Yorker, is married, with two children. So this is the more hopeful lesson I take away from my brief affair with her book: Relationships, maternal and otherwise, are difficult but not impossible.

Sheelah Kolhatkar has written for Forward and The New Internationalist .

Who Was Christa Worthington? Murdered Woman Tells No Tales

by Sara Nelson

Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod , by Maria Flook. Broadway Books, 403 pages, $24.95.

Pity the poor true-crime writer. To tell a compelling tale of murder and madness, she must have the skills of a reporter, the eye of a novelist and the mind of a shrink. It also helps if she has some knowledge of the place and the people she's writing about. Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me , about mass murderer Ted Bundy, is a classic of the genre not because Ms. Rule is a great stylist-if the story's strong enough, sentence structure hardly matters-but because she actually knew Bundy. Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song , about Gary Gilmore, is astonishing because the author already had plenty of experience looking into the heart of darkness and, well, because he's a formidable craftsman.

Maria Flook is an accomplished fiction writer- Open Water , Family Night and the weird and almost goth collection, You Have the Wrong Man . To judge from her searing memoir, My Sister Life , she's also no stranger to the twisted side of humanity. But her first foray into reportage, Invisible Eden , about the murder a year and a half ago of Christa Worthington, the glam fashion writer turned Cape Cod single mom, is only marginally successful.

Maybe you read the newspaper accounts of the Worthington murder, coming as they did, in early 2002, as a kind of tabloid relief after months of relentless Sept. 11 coverage. Worthington, a 46-year-old former fashion writer for such publications as Women's Wear Daily , was found stabbed to death in her Truro, Mass., bungalow, her 2 11/42-year-old out-of-wedlock daughter, Ava, cuddling her corpse-and, horrifically, trying to nurse. The murder shocked the resort town that had seen little violence, though plenty of gossip. Christa was a Worthington, a member of a slightly down-at-the-heels but nonetheless patrician New England family that had been summering there for years. Known to slum, the Vassar grad had taken up with Tony Jackett, the local cocksman, a married harbormaster and "shellfish constable," and borne his child. It was a "town/gown" relationship about which everybody knew-even, eventually, Mr. Jackett's long-suffering wife Susan. Initially, Mr. Jackett was a suspect-or what Ms. Flook's main source, First Assistant District Attorney Michael O'Keefe, describes as "in the orbit of opportunity." Another traveler in that orbit was Worthington's latest boyfriend, Tim Arnold, who discovered her body that January night when he came over, he said, to return a flashlight he'd borrowed.

This is great, dramatic stuff-the kind of story dozens of journalists would have loved to sign book deals for. And early on, Ms. Flook suggests why she's the right woman for the job: "Christa and I lived one mile apart, but we had never met," she writes in her opening. Like Worthington, Ms. Flook is also a single mother, and a writer. She even suggests a more mysterious connection: "In the checkerboard of snapshots [of Christa at the crime scene] I see my face reflected."

So it's ironic that, for all her connections, for all her understanding of local custom and politics, and for all her dozens of interviews and sound bites from Mr. O'Keefe, Mr. Jackett, Mr. Arnold, local journalists, her Vassar friends, her New York pals (including New York Times critic Ben Brantley) and her ex-boyfriends, Ms. Flook never quite gets the story. Who killed Christa Worthington, and why? After 400 pages of prose that can be laughably purple-"he captained her onto the pillowy pier of her Posturepedic"-we don't know any more than we did from those initial reports: The most Ms. Flook can suggest is that the killer was either Jackett or Arnold or some other current or ex-lover, of which Christa had many.

But the even more important question that Ms. Flook doesn't answer is this: Who was Christa Worthington, and why should we care? Part victim of her Brahmin background, part unhappy career woman who voiced the typical fashion-magazine writer's complaint ( "I should have at least two books written by now, if I was going to be a real writer"), part sexual adventurer, the Christa who emerges is wildly incomplete and almost wholly unlikable. And while Ms. Flook stops just short of suggesting that a "promiscuous" woman gets what she deserves, there's a decidedly reactionary social attitude at work.

Which is surprising, since the author, both in her previous works and in this one, reveals herself to be far from traditional when it comes to social behavior. Admitting she had to "work backward to find [Christa]," Ms. Flook often proudly attaches herself to the single-mom aspect of the story, wearing her own similar social status as a badge of courage. ("Being a single mom isn't a single job but a thousand tasks in one," she writes self-congratulatingly at one point, echoing many other similar comments.) What's more, she recounts-sometimes in embarrassingly revealing detail-her interviews with newly divorced assistant D.A. O'Keefe, who comes off as tantalizingly "town" to Ms. Flook's "gown"-just like Tony Jackett and Christa.

It's the Flook-O'Keefe relationship, in fact, that has many early readers on Cape Cod up in arms. The assistant D.A. gave Ms. Flook access that the police withheld from all other journalists, and he opined about the victim's lifestyle, they say. Ms. Flook portrays many of her meetings with Mr. O'Keefe as almost date-like; she comments on his eating habits, and he tells her that her lipstick is smudged. Along with the relationship Christa had with Mr. Jackett, this is the partnership at the center of Invisible Eden , an ultimately frustrating book. Too bad all those suggestive echoes don't tell us much about either the murderer or the victim.

Sara Nelson, the publishing columnist for The Observer , is a senior contributing editor at Glamour .

The New York Times jumped on its scandal and scrubbed hard on Sunday, harder than readers could believe. But the scandal hasn't gone away.

"This is the worst ten days I've ever seen at the paper," said Times columnist Clyde Haberman, who went through his own nightmare as a young man in a more innocent time: for a single insertion of prank copy in 1966 within the text of the Times , Mr. Haberman was punished and excommunicated from the paper before fighting his way back to becoming a respectable elder statesman-"including death. Frankly it's worse than death. It's monstrous what's been done to us."

But what has been done to "us"? And by whom? That's what the next few weeks and months will answer at the New York Times . Was it a single man's consistent, compulsive crime, or was it an endemic illness in the Times ' system? Was the damage not as bad as imagined, or worse? Did The Times' punishment fit the crime, or was Jayson Blair made an example of as the Times management wailed histrionic? Was it really the worst "black eye" in the 152-year history of the paper? Did race really matter in this case, as William Safire and many others have suggested, or was it just the taut, bizarre tension of the newsroom in the greatest, most somberly nutty newspaper in the world, a magnificent vessel that constantly spits up its own Queegs and Blighs as well as Halseys and Nimitzes? And what kind of punishment have they subjected Mr. Blair to? What does a young man do after being put in the stockade of public opinion at the age of 27 by the most powerful newspaper in the world? You may say: He should have thought of that.

But it can fairly be said that when it comes to The New York Times , nobody ever truly understands its power until they've run up against it.

Which is, of course, part of the problem.

In his own beginning as a man, the only thing Jayson Blair ever wanted to be-for whatever reasons-was a journalist.

People who knew him as a reporter, then editor, of The Diamondback , the newspaper at the University of Maryland, said he spent his early mornings, late nights and weekends in the newsroom. He had no hobbies to speak of, he played no sports. All his spare time was spent on the phones and working over copy.

"He was always working," remembered his classmate Catherine Welch. "He was always making phone calls. You heard all these people talking about what they were going to do after they made it, and here he was, doing it."

Doing what? First, he was an intern at The Boston Globe and a freelancer for The Washington Post , then an intern and finally a reporter for The New York Times . Mr. Blair wrote heartfelt stories on families who'd lost their children in battle, and broke national news.

Or what sounded like it.

It seems that until his own undoing and public disgrace, it was easy to say that we knew Mr. Blair. For those of us who have spent our formative years in newsrooms, Mr. Blair was a particular kind of acolyte-nurtured by mentors and advisers and editors from the time they're 19 or 20, ready to rule. Mr. Blair was the product of a hyper-ambitious generation, reared in journalism schools and internships, where advancement can be perceived as coming at the cost of others. Until his May 1 resignation from The New York Times , Mr. Blair was golden.

On Sunday, May 11, The New York Times allocated 7,200 words-more than half the number of words it gave to Richard Nixon's obituary-running across two full pages, to disemboweling the reporter it had lifted to stardom.

On those pages, we learned that during his tenure at The New York Times , he fabricated datelines, plagiarized reports from sources, invented conversations with subjects. We learned that an alarmed warning from metro editor Jonathan Landman went unheeded. We learned that when asked to work on the paper's "Portraits of Grief" series following the attacks on Sept. 11, Mr. Blair said he couldn't, because he was grieving for a relative in the Pentagon attack. Contacted by Times reporters, the man's family said Mr. Blair was not related to him.

Because of his transgressions, Jayson Blair has entered the Janet Cooke–Stephen Glass territory of being less than an actual person, reviled by his hurt and somewhat terrified colleagues who head for the hills, worrying for the sanctity of their profession; he becomes a symbol of the peril reached when potential and journalistic ambition is prized more than experience; when youth is moved out of whack with experience; when cultural diversity carries the day; when the strange arrogance of a great journalistic institution becomes gnarled and unchallengeable.

Mr. Blair was a polarizing reporter, but it's clear that he loved his profession: People who knew him at Maryland said his real home was in the journalism building. Carl Sessions Stepp, a Maryland journalism professor who's married to Washington Post writer Laura Sessions Stepp, said Mr. Blair was one of those students who "who was always around …. He was interested in stories. He'd come by to talk about my wife's stories. He'd always read her stories and he had ideas about them."

Mr. Blair was prone to backbiting and office politicking. Following his election as editor of The Diamondback in 1996, Mr. Stepp said, the paper's staff nearly mutinied.

"My tendency was to write it off as office politics," Mr. Stepp said. "But as time went on it was clear he'd become a polarizing force in the newsroom. People whom I respected questioned his management style and his trustworthiness."

That extended outside the paper, said Jeremy Settle, who ran the campus news broadcast while Mr. Blair headed The Diamondback . In 1997, The Diamondback speculated that a student died of a cocaine overdose, though a coroner later revealed the death was due to a rare heart condition.

"He was hell-bent on saying the kid died of a cocaine overdose," Mr. Settle said of Mr. Blair. "Even though all the evidence proved otherwise."

And yet Mr. Blair rose, making enemies and the right friends. At The Boston Globe , sources who worked with Mr. Blair said the interns complained about Mr. Blair's suspect reporting to superiors but were ignored. Martin Baron, editor of The Globe said the paper was looking into any complaints lodged against him as part of the paper's investigation.

He first joined The New York Times as an intern in 1998, before being hired as an intermediate reporter in 1999, and a full reporter in 2001. There he became a fixture first, inside the newsroom, and later, sources say, at the Robert Emmetts bar on 44th and Eighth Avenue. As reported in the Daily News , Mr. Blair began dating Polish émigré Zuza Glowacka, a friend of Polish-born Krystyna Stachowiak, the wife of Times executive editor Howell Raines.

Tony Marcano, an editor on the metro desk who describes himself as a "casual" friend of Mr. Blair's, said Mr. Blair would often arrive at parties, having rounded up eight or nine young staffers as his posse. The one time he visited Mr. Blair's apartment, Mr. Marcano deemed the space a "disaster." "He was always making vague references to personal problems," Mr. Marcano said.

Mr. Blair, when contacted, declined an interview request by Off the Record. And a Times spokesperson said both Mr. Raines and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. were unavailable for comment. But The Times , furiously exorcising Mr. Blair, is now in the business of moving from investigating one of its own to putting its own house in order.

On Wednesday, May 14, executive editor Howell Raines-whose top-heavy management many at the paper blame for the situation-will meet with the entirety of the newsroom staff to discuss the situation. According to one Times source, the company's board of directors has "become aware" of the growing discontent in the newsroom, spurred and pricked by the Blair disaster from roilings to overt complaints.

While the May 11 story buried Mr. Blair, both as a person and reporter at The Times , the piece reaffirmed metro editor Jonathan Landman's position as a loud guard along the fence in what's been a somewhat suppressed Raines regime. A maverick who hasn't been afraid to publicly criticize Mr. Raines, he spoke extensively, and not always favorably, to Ken Auletta for his lengthy June 2002 profile of Mr. Raines in The New Yorker . In the May 11 piece, Mr. Landman got the first word, a prophet on the fence who repeatedly warned others of Mr. Blair's disregard for the facts, stated pungently in his now well-known April 2002 e-mail to newsroom administrators: "We have to stop Jayson from writing for The Times . Right now."

"In a story that probably doesn't have any heroes," Mr. Haberman said. "Jon would certainly count as one. Had his word been heeded, a lot of this could have been prevented. He was a man ahead of his time." Fellow columnist Joyce Purnick said of Mr. Landman, "he's straightforward, direct and candid, we need as many people here like him as we can."

As for Mr. Landman, he said he "didn't see much room for heroes in all of this" and added: "It's all too sad and horrible for words."