June 20, 2004

And Bear in Mind

HE SECOND MARK: Courage, Corruption, and the Battle for Olympic Gold, by Joy Goodwin. (Simon & Schuster, $25.) Goodwin, a skating producer for ABC, uses her insider's access to excellent purpose; her account of the scandal-tarnished pairs final at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City is knowledgeable and empathetic, and does not substitute moral posturing for analysis.

INSIDE THE VICTORIAN HOME: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England, by Judith Flanders. (Norton, $34.95.) A nimble piece of social history that draws from archives, novels, advice manuals and newspapers to show home becoming what it still ideally is: a refuge from the Industrial Revolution and an expression of morality sequestered from the harsh world.

THE CREATION OF THE MEDIA: Political Origins of Modern Communications, by Paul Starr. (Basic Books, $27.50.) A scholar's cautious, detailed, convincing account of the deliberate framing of information carriers, from cheap postage to privatized electronics (telegraph, telephone, radio) to saturation by movies, networks and magazines.

THE HOLLYWOOD DODO, by Geoff Nicholson. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) The author's highly professional 14th novel concerns an aspiring director who wants to make a dodo movie; a 17th-century scientist who tries to save the bird back in the 1660's; and well-handled cliches of popular culture (success and failure in movies are equally corrupting).

WILCO: Learning How to Die, by Greg Kot. (Broadway, paper, $14.) A brisk, entertaining biography of Jeff Tweedy, the uncommonly thoughtful and inquisitive (or paranoid?) leader of the band Wilco, reporting his struggles with music, the music business, his bandmates, his family and himself.

BEASTS OF EDEN: Walking Whales, Dawn Horses, and Other Enigmas of Mammal Evolution, by David Rains Wallace. (University of California, $24.95.) A lively and deeply researched history of the ''bone hunters'' who have scoured the earth since the 18th century to elucidate mammal development in geological time and work out theories to account for it, from catastrophism through transmutation to Darwinian evolution.

SO YOU WANNA BE A ROCK & ROLL STAR: How I Machine-Gunned a Roomful of Record Executives and Other True Tales From a Drummer's Life, by Jacob Slichter. (Broadway, $21.95.) An unusual rock memoir by the drummer of the Minneapolis power-pop band Semisonic, unusual because of Slichter's understanding of business principles and his undampened enthusiasm for his craft.

DYLAN'S VISIONS OF SIN, by Christopher Ricks. (Ecco, $26.95.) Ricks, the notable critic who has been elected the next professor of poetry at Oxford University, brings close, intense, learned scrutiny of the text -- the basic tool of the New Criticism -- to the songs of Bob Dylan, unveiling allusions, teasing out recalcitrant intentions and otherwise treating Dylan as he has treated Housman and Tennyson.