While the cassette was dumped long ago by the music industry, it has lived on among publishers of audio books. Many people prefer cassettes because they make it easy to pick up in the same place where the listener left off, or to rewind in case a certain sentence is missed. For Hachette, however, demand had slowed so much that it released its last book on cassette in June, with “Sail,” a novel by James Patterson and Howard Roughan.

The funeral at Hachette — an office party in the audio-book department — mirrored the broader demise of cassettes, which gave vinyl a run for its money before being eclipsed by the compact disc. (The CD, too, is in rapid decline, thanks to Internet music stores, but that is a different story.)

Cassettes have limped along for some time, partly because of their usefulness in recording conversations or making a tape of favorite songs, say, for a girlfriend. But sales of portable tape players, which peaked at 18 million in 1994, sank to 480,000 in 2007, according to the Consumer Electronics Association. The group predicts that sales will taper to 86,000 in 2012.

“I bet you would be hard pressed to find a household in the U.S. that doesn’t have at least a couple cassette tapes hanging around,” said Shawn DuBravac, an economist with the Consumer Electronics Association. Even if publishers of music and audio books stopped using cassettes entirely, people would still shop for tape players because of “the huge libraries of legacy content consumers have kept,” he said.

As long as people keep mix tapes from a high-school sweetheart up in the attic, Mr. DuBravac said, there will still be the urge to hear them. “People have a tremendous amount of installed content and an innate curiosity when coming across a box of tapes to say, ‘Hey, what’s on these?’ ” he said.

The tapes started to really take off in 1979, the year that a radical new cassette player — the Sony Walkman — was introduced, enabling people to listen to Donna Summer and the Knack’s “My Sharona” while they were jogging (remember jogging?). The heft of the early Walkman — slightly smaller and lighter than a brick — is comical by today’s wispy iPod standards, but during the Carter administration it seemed sleek.

Nowadays, listening to music on cassettes is a dying pastime. None of Billboard’s Top 10 albums last week were issued on cassette, though half were released on vinyl, which has been resurging. Last year, only 400,000 music tapes were sold, representing one-tenth of 1 percent of all physical and digital music sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. In 1997, the figure was 173 million, and that was when cassettes were already getting a drubbing by CDs. (The iPod wasn’t introduced until 2001.)

“I would not expect to see a revival of cassettes like we’ve seen in the LP market,” Mr. DuBravac said. While vinyl records have always been prized artifacts for their devotees, the plastic cassette tape has little sex appeal.

Such was the case for the eight-track format as well, which was popular in the late 1960s and ’70s. It died relatively quickly with the advent of cassettes because eight-tracks were not widely used for personal recording or mix tapes, Mr. DuBravac said.

While the chances of finding cassette players in a dorm room today are slim, they are still available for sale: on Amazon, Sony alone offers 23 tape players, from the Walkman to boomboxes.

Popping a cassette in the car tape deck is also passé. Only 4 percent of vehicles sold in the United States during the 2007 model year had factory-installed cassette players, according to Ward’s Automotive Yearbook. As recently as the 2005 model year, 23 percent of vehicles had them.

Given that the median age of a car in the United States is nine years old, said Alan K. Binder, the editor of Ward’s yearbook, it is most likely that the majority of the 200 million cars and light trucks on America’s roads have cassette players (though how many have had the same Bob Seger tape lodged unplayable in them for 11 years is impossible to determine).

Cassette tapes’ tendency to hiss — and to melt in the summer and snap in the winter — turns off audiophiles. But for audio books, the cassette is an oddly elegant medium: you can eject it from your car, carry it home and stick it in a boombox, and it will pick up in the same place, an analog feat beyond the ability of the CD.

Cassettes accounted for 7 percent of all sales in the $923 million audio-book industry in 2006, the latest year for which data is available, according to the Audio Publishers Association. While many publishers, like Random House and Macmillan, stopped producing books on cassette in the last couple of years, there are holdouts.

At Blackstone Audio, which produces cassette versions of its roughly 340 annual titles, Josh Stanton, the executive vice president, said there was still demand from libraries and truckers, who buy them at truck stops. But he could forecast only that his company would produce cassettes through 2009.

Recorded Books, whose authors include Philip Roth and Jodi Picoult, still issues cassettes of all its titles, roughly 700 a year. Retailers like Borders and Barnes & Noble have essentially stopped ordering them, but libraries have been slower to abandon them, said Brian Downing, the company’s publisher.

The Web sites of Barnes & Noble and Borders, however, indicate that they still offer some cassettes, though publishers say the stores’ buyers have expressed little interest in ordering more in the future.

At some point, the cassette will go the way of the eight-track, Mr. Downing acknowledged, and his company will publish only in other formats.

“Bob Novak is the one that hit me?” said 86-year-old Don Clifford Liljenquist, sounding astonished when WMAL (630 AM) reporter Troy Russell told him that the driver was Novak. “Well, everybody knows who Bob Novak is! He’s a famous journalist! … I was struck by Bob Novak? … Well, I think that makes it a great story!”

Novak, 77, whose column appears in The Washington Post, has said that he did not know he hit Liljenquist until a bicyclist stopped him a short distance from the site of Wednesday morning’s incident, at 18th and K Streets NW. Speaking to the radio station by phone from his room at George Washington University Medical Center, Liljenquist did not dispute Novak’s account.

“Yeah, it’s possible that he didn’t know he hit me,” Liljenquist said. “The vehicle was moving at 10 miles per hour or something like that, and the driver might not have seen me, because I rolled off and fell down to the pavement. So, yeah, it’s possible that he didn’t see me. He wasn’t paying attention to his driving.”

Witnesses said Novak was driving his black 2004 Corvette convertible north on 18th near K when he struck Liljenquist, who was walking across 18th. David Bono, who was bicycling to his law office, said Liljenquist “went up on the hood, up on the windshield” and “rolled off the hood and landed on the street.”

Liljenquist, a resident of a homeless shelter, largely confirmed Bono’s account, though he repeatedly used a garbled word to describe a part of the Corvette.

“I had the right of way,” he said. “But an automobile was approaching on K Street. He just kept going… . His bumper run under me. And I did a maneuver. I rolled across his …”

He paused, until Russell finally said, “The hood of his car?”

Liljenquist continued, “Across his [unintelligible] and then fell down to the pavement.”

Bono and others said in interviews that they think Novak was attempting to flee the scene before Bono stopped him, but Novak said he did not know he had hit a pedestrian until Bono told him.

In any case, when D.C. police arrived, Novak’s car was stopped on the service road beside K Street, about a block from where Liljenquist was hit, so Novak was not charged with leaving the scene. An officer issued him a $50 traffic citation accusing him of failing to yield to a pedestrian. Police initially misspelled Liljenquist’s name and mistakenly gave his age as 66.

As for Liljenquist’s injuries, a Washington Post reporter went to his hospital room yesterday and saw him sitting on the side of his bed, his gray hair falling to his shoulders, talking with social workers. A relative said Liljenquist did not want to be interviewed.

Later, though, on WMAL, he said: “The doctors reset my shoulder. I’m doing fine… . I’m a pretty tough guy, you know. And when I saw I was being hit, I rolled with the punch. I used my training in judo to roll with the punch.”

He did not answer definitively when asked whether he is contemplating legal action against Novak.

Dr. Pausch, 47, who turned the lecture into a book, said that no one would have been interested in his words of wisdom were he not a man in his 40s with a terminal illness, leaving behind a wife and three young children.

According to Dr. Pausch’s Web site, a biopsy last week revealed that the cancer had progressed further than expected, based on recent PETscans.

“Since last week, Randy has also taken a step down and is much sicker than he had been,” the Web site said. “He’s now enrolled in hospice. He’s no longer able to post here so I’m a friend posting on his behalf because we know that many folks are watching this space for updates.”

Last fall, Dr. Pausch delivered the lecture at CMU, which still posts it on its Web site. The lecture has attracted more than six million viewers.

In the year preceding the lecture, he had gone through rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, but refused to give in to morbidity or self-pity. Instead of focusing on the cancer, he talked about how to fulfill childhood dreams and the lessons he learned on his life’s journey.

In his 10 years at CMU, he helped found the Entertainment Technology Center, established an annual virtual reality contest and helped start the Alice program, an animation-based curriculum for teaching high school and college students.

After the lecture, he moved to Chesapeake, Va., to spend his remaining time with his wife, children and family.

“Randy had an enormous and lasting impact on Carnegie Mellon,” said university President Jared L. Cohon. “He was a brilliant researcher and gifted teacher. His love of teaching, his sense of fun and his brilliance came together in the Alice project, which teaches students computer programming while enabling them to do something fun — making animated movies and games. Carnegie Mellon — and the world — are better places for having had Randy Pausch in them.”

With the help of Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, Dr. Pausch wrote a book, “The Last Lecture,” which was published earlier this year and has now been translated into 30 languages. He elaborated on his lecture and emphasized the value he placed on hard work and learning from criticism. His words were intended as a legacy for his young children.

In May, Dr. Pausch spoke at the Carnegie Mellon University commencement. He said a friend recently told him he was “beating the [Grim] Reaper” because it’s now been nine months since his doctor told him he would die in six.

“But we don’t beat the Reaper by living longer. We beat the Reaper by living well,” said Dr. Pausch, who urged the graduates to find and pursue their passion. He put an exclamation point at the end of his remarks by kissing his wife, Jai, and carrying her off stage.

In addition to his wife, Dr. Pausch is survived by his children, Dylan, Logan and Chloe. Also surviving are his mother, Virginia Pausch of Columbia, Md., and a sister, Tamara Mason of Lynchburg, Va. The family plans a private burial in Virginia. A campus memorial service is being planned. Details will be announced at a later date. In September, Carnegie Mellon announced a plan to honor Dr. Pausch’s memory and his work as “a tireless advocate and enabler of collaboration between artistic and technical faculty members.” CMU is to build the Randy Pausch Memorial Footbridge, which will connect the Gates Center for Computer Science, now under construction, with an adjacent arts building.

The online retailer’s profit doubled in the second quarter, as revenue rose 41 percent despite consumer anxiety about the economy.

“This is a very robust performance and it clearly shows that online selling is holding up very well even if consumer confidence is lower,” said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein. “Even if people are buying less over all, Amazon is benefiting.”

Amazon’s report, announced Wednesday, caps a week of largely mixed results from technology companies. EBay, the online marketplace, showed that it was not immune to the slumping economy when it reported last week that auction growth was slowing, although its profit continued to grow.

Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said the company appeared to prosper as more customers went online to shop instead of driving to stores. “Even just driving 10 miles to the store can mean a few dollars,” Mr. Bezos said in a conference call with analysts on Wednesday. “We think consumers are taking that into account.”

Mr. Bezos also said that more customers signed up for the company’s $79-a-year all-you-can-ship program, Amazon Prime, and that the company had no plans to change Amazon’s free-shipping policy on many items, despite rising gas prices.

Amazon’s net shipping cost rose to $128 million from $75 million in the quarter a year earlier, but company executives said that revenue from shipping increased as well, to $186 million from $152 million.

Amazon reported net income of $158 million, or 37 cents a share, up from $78 million, or 19 cents a share, in the second quarter of 2007.

Operating income rose 86 percent, to $217 million, which includes a $53 million noncash gain from Amazon’s sale of its European DVD rental assets and by the effect of the weak dollar.

Revenue rose 41 percent, to $4.06 billion, from $2.89 billion in the year-ago quarter. Excluding the benefit of exchange rates, Amazon’s sales would have been roughly $3.9 billion.

Shares of Amazon rose more than 8 percent in after-hours trading, when the earnings were released. They had gained 3.8 percent, or $2.57, to $70.54, in regular trading.

The results surpassed analysts’ forecasts of 26 cents a share on $3.96 billion in revenue, according to a survey by Thomson Financial.

Looking ahead, the company said it now expects sales of as much as $4.43 billion in the current quarter, or 36 percent higher than a year ago. For the full year, Amazon forecast sales of up to $20.1 billion.

Gross margin declined slightly to 23.8 percent from 24.3 percent, mainly because Amazon lowered prices on some items, said Tom Szkutak, Amazon’s chief finance officer.

North America sales, including Amazon’s American and Canadian sites, were up 35 percent from a year ago, to $2.17 billion, while international sales were up 47 percent, to $1.89 billion. But adjusting for the effect of exchange rates, international sales grew 34 percent.

“We don’t think we are a good barometer for the economy,” Mr. Szkutak said.

Amazon, which is based in Seattle, has been making considerable enhancements to its offerings in recent months, in search of new revenue opportunities. In April, it announced a new service, called TextBuyIt, that allows customers to shop for products via text messaging on their cellphones. Earlier, the company lowered the price of its Kindle electronic reading device by $40, to $359, hoping to bolster sales.

Holtzman, the former Tribune and Sun-Times writer and later MLB’s official historian, indeed belonged to the entire baseball world. He seemed to know everyone in the game while simultaneously knowing everything about the game.

Praise poured in from around the country for the Hall of Famer, from management and union, managers and players.

“Those of us who knew him and worked with him will always remember his good humor, his fairness and his love for baseball,” Commissioner Bud Selig said. “He was a very good friend of mine throughout my career in the game and I will miss his friendship and counsel. I extend my deepest sympathies to his wife, Marilyn, to his children and to his many friends.”

The men who sat across from Selig during labor negotiations—a fairly new wrinkle in the game that Holtzman became an expert at covering—remembered him just as fondly.

“I saw Jerry at Cooperstown a few years ago and we talked old times well into the night,” said Marvin Miller, the first executive director of the Players Association. “We always had a good relationship. He was a careful writer and, covering a subject matter he was not familiar with, he did a remarkably good job.”

“You don’t develop the reputation he had by accident,” said present-day union boss Donald Fehr. “He spent a good amount of time and effort to understand the circumstances [of labor issues]. He made extraordinary efforts at what the real issues were.”

Holtzman was even a good friend to the umpires, perhaps the only writer to arrive at the ballpark early so he could spend time with them, mostly exchanging stories and laughs.

“He was the fairest and best writer I’ve ever known,” said Marty Springstead, a former umpire who is now a supervisor. “He was a credit to the game and an excellent friend of the umpires. He would stop in all the time. We’ll all miss him greatly.”

Roland Hemond, longtime White Sox general manager under Bill Veeck, recalled Holtzman as “an outstanding newspaperman. He was really diligent in covering all aspects of the game. He covered the labor relations story as well as anybody,” Hemond said.

“He played a pretty good third base too. When I got to Chicago we used to have little games on this field out behind the left-field wall at [old] Comiskey Park. He looked good out there on the field. He must have played quite a bit as a kid. He had pretty good actions.”

Holtzman was widely remembered as an old-time reporter, one who wore suits and smoked big cigars. But he also was in touch with today’s figures of the game.

“He had the ultimate class as a journalist and a person,” said White Sox general manager Ken Williams, who first knew Holtzman as a player. “I consider myself fortunate to have had conversations with him not only about baseball but about life.

“We [players] followed a lot of the labor stuff through Jerome in the paper. He was probably the last [allowed] in the clubhouse with a cigar, but everybody respected him enough not to say anything.”

Former Cubs President Andy MacPhail, currently GM of the Orioles, comes from a family of baseball executives, all of whom knew Holtzman.

“Scouts, owners, GMs, players—he was one of the few people held in universally high respect and regard,” MacPhail said. “He always had an overriding sense of fairness. He was the standard-bearer of his time.

“He broke one of the biggest stories ever. He ran the protected lists of every team prior to the first expansion draft. [Minneapolis writer] Patrick Reusse wrote that it was a good thing Major League Baseball wasn’t holding the secrets to the atomic bomb.”

Cubs Chairman Crane Kenney remembered Holtzman as “an accomplished writer who earned respect from both his readers and from those whom he covered. On behalf of the entire Chicago Cubs family, I send our heartfelt condolences to Jerome’s wife, Marilyn, and his family.”

“Baseball lost a great advocate and fan, and I lost a dear friend,” White Sox Chairman Jerry Reinsdorf said. “I will miss his visits to the ballpark and his phone calls to discuss the latest baseball news. In the way baseball is covered by the media, in the creation of the save rule and in the history and tradition of this game, Jerome truly left his mark on the game he loved and followed passionately for decades.

“Perhaps no one person has done as much to promote the game of baseball to millions. There is no greater tribute or legacy a person can leave behind for future generations of baseball fans.”

White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen knew Holtzman from the time he was a rookie in 1985 and described him as “an amazing baseball guy. He gave his life to baseball and we’ll always remember how great he was.”

St. Louis manager Tony La Russa landed his first big league managerial job when Holtzman was splitting time covering Chicago’s two teams.

“He gave me my first compliment I ever had as a manager,” La Russa said. “He said I had a good feel for handling pitchers. That was after 20 criticisms, but that was the first compliment.”

White Sox announcer Steve Stone, a fixture in Chicago baseball for 25 years, recalled spending hours talking baseball with Holtzman.

“I still believe every closer should have sent a yearly check to Jerome for coming up with the ‘save’ rule,” Stone said. “That contribution alone [created] decisions on how baseball teams were made up.”

“Jerome was responsible for me breaking the [save] record here [in 1980] because of the save rule,” said Ed Farmer, Stone’s broadcast partner and a former reliever. “He was a warm person with a great sense of humor.”

Nowhere does the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, mention that the book is a roman à clef that includes James Taylor, or that the author used to be his wife.

Indeed, Mr. Taylor is not the only boldface name who gets a fictional alter ego. The novel, to be released next month, is about a young woman who leaves her husband, a famous musician, and their unhappy marriage for an adventure in Venice.

Ms. Walker confirmed in a phone interview that some other characters in the book were drawn from Carly Simon (Mr. Taylor’s first ex-wife), Jason Robards (a long-ago acting buddy) and Douglas Kenney, a co-founder of National Lampoon (and Ms. Walker’s longtime boyfriend, who died in 1980).

Ms. Walker said that, though she had not run anything about the book by her ex-husband, “I think it would make James laugh.”

Still, nothing in the marketing indicates that the author was married to Sweet Baby James for a decade or hung out with a driving force behind the movie “Animal House.” Or that the portraits in the book of Mr. Taylor, Ms. Simon and Mr. Taylor’s current wife, Caroline Smedvig, a former Boston Symphony Orchestra public relations executive, are not very flattering.

So why isn’t Knopf doing some name-dropping to give the book a promotional boost? All signs are that it could use one: advance orders have been modest, as have requests for Ms. Walker to do readings and interviews. She is scheduled to appear at bookstores in Washington, Conn., and Santa Fe, where she has homes.

The prepublication reviews have been mixed, but none have connected the celebrity dots.

So, I would say that on the conscious level, I came up with the idea probably through three different things; one-just plain curiosity about the year between World War One and the Roaring Twenties.

I was curious about what happened in America in the aftermath of the war. I’ve always been fascinated by the aftermath of war so I was curious about a year that I knew nothing about except the Paris Peace Conference (at Versailles). So I wanted to know what happened in this country during that time. And, also, the president (Woodrow Wilson), was gone for most of the year so that made it doubly interesting to me.

I’m very interested in the aftermath of war as a topic anyhow because I think war is a habit that’s hard to break and we have this illusion; wars never end when we believe they end and when we are told they end. They never end in cease-fires, right?

They go on and on because it’s a mentality, it’s a habit that is very hard to break. So the devastation of war can go on and on in peacetime and so I thought that it would be interesting to look into the distance….Distant mirrors are important to us because it gives us the safety of distance to look at ourselves…

I think 1919 is the first year of the 20th Century. Wars don’t end the moment they say they do. Centuries don’t end exactly in the double ‘00’ years. I really think that’s the first year of the 20th Century. So much of what happened shaped the American Century.

I’ve lived most of my life in the 20th Century. I was curious about that year (1919), the sources of the kind of paradigms that have existed for most of my life in this country. Boy, that year is where it all began. So much happened, so much that shaped this nation for the rest of the century. For the people of my generation it shaped our identities in a way, our sense of who we are as Americans, who we are as citizens of a democracy.

I had this curiosity on an intellectual level. And then there was the curiosity that was unconscious…I think as we get older not only do we want to connect the dots between our nation’s past and present but I think that also we want answers to questions that popped up as we were kids…

“Deceptively Delicious,” the cookbook by Jessica Seinfeld whose recipes for concealing puréed vegetables in comfort food for children bore such similarities to another cookbook’s that it inspired a lawsuit from that book’s author, shot to the top of the Amazon best-seller list on Wednesday, nine months after it was published.

The sharp rise in sales caught the eyes of both books’ publishers, who traced it to the rerun on Tuesday of an episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show” that featured Ms. Seinfeld. The appearance also subsequently lifted sales of “The Sneaky Chef,” by Missy Chase Lapine, the author who is suing Ms. Seinfeld.

The books, similar in theme, content and appearance, remain inextricably tied to each other. On Amazon, shoppers viewing “Deceptively Delicious” are prodded to order “The Sneaky Chef,” and vice versa.

And both books’ newfound popularity came as Ms. Lapine vowed on Friday to press ahead with her lawsuit against Ms. Seinfeld and her husband, Jerry Seinfeld, originally filed in January. The suit charged that the Seinfelds were guilty of copyright infringement and defamation. (It was Mr. Seinfeld who, during an appearance on “Late Show with David Letterman,” before calling Ms. Lapine a “wacko,” mockingly suggested that his wife was accused of “vegetable plagiarism.”)

Armed with a new set of lawyers, Ms. Lapine recently extended her lawsuit against the Seinfelds to include HarperCollins, the publisher of Ms. Seinfeld’s cookbook. Ms. Lapine’s original lawyers left the case because they also represent News Corporation, which owns HarperCollins, Ms. Lapine said.

Ms. Lapine is seeking unspecified damages.

The Seinfelds called Ms. Lapine’s charges “trumped up,” pointing out that sneaking vegetables into children’s foods has been done in cookbooks since the early 1970s. (A lawyer for the Seinfelds did not return calls for comment on Friday.)

In a telephone interview from her literary agent’s office on Friday, Ms. Lapine said she would continue her lawsuit as long as necessary. “I have no expectations or requirements on time,” she said. “I’d love to see truth and justice and fairness prevail.”

Steve Ross, the publisher of Collins, the imprint that published “Deceptively Delicious,” said the inclusion of HarperCollins in the lawsuit did not change its support of Ms. Seinfeld.

“HarperCollins remains thrilled to count Jessica Seinfeld on its roster of talented authors, and continues to stand unequivocally behind her work,” he said.

The “Sneaky Chef” dispute began last summer, when Ms. Lapine received an eight-page promotional brochure for “Deceptively Delicious,” a sort of mini-version of the book. Ms. Lapine said she was stunned to see the similarities between the books, down to Ms. Seinfeld’s cover (a winking chef and an attempt to hide carrots).

Ms. Lapine’s book had been rejected by HarperCollins and was eventually published in April 2007 by Running Press, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group. Six months later Ms. Seinfeld’s book was published.

Each book became a best seller, but Ms. Seinfeld’s celebrity status helped her win a coveted appearance on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” the ultimate book promotion. As of this week, Ms. Seinfeld’s publisher said 2.4 million copies of “Deceptively Delicious” were in print, while Ms. Lapine’s publisher said more than 200,000 copies of “The Sneaky Chef” were in print.

In March Ms. Lapine published a second “Sneaky Chef” cookbook, directed at women trying to persuade their spouses to eat healthier food. She is currently working on a third cookbook, “Sneaky Chef to the Rescue,” built around specific food-related questions she has received from readers, like cooking for holidays, for dieters and for people with food allergies.

The Perseus Books Group, Ms. Lapine’s publisher, is not a party to the lawsuit, but its chief executive, David Steinberger, has signaled his solidarity with her. “We support our author’s right to take steps to protect her intellectual property and reputation,” Mr. Steinberger said in an e-mail message on Friday.

Thomas Girardi, one of Ms. Lapine’s new lawyers, did not give details on the damages that Ms. Lapine is seeking, but said he expected the lawsuit to stretch into the fall. “This is not something that’s going to be resolved a week from Tuesday,” he said.

Mr. Ross, Ms. Seinfeld’s publisher, said despite the pending lawsuit and the swirl of controversy surrounding her book, HarperCollins has tentatively planned a new book with Ms. Seinfeld, which will be announced sometime this summer.

Radar magazine proclaimed: “On the gossip front, the novel doesn’t disappoint,” adding that its steamy and lurid scenes were “sure to send the White House into a fury.”

MSNBC.com called the sex scenes “too graphic to reprint.”

The cover of this fantasy version of Laura Bush’s life, “American Wife,” is alluring, a woman’s shapely figure in a white gown, with white opera gloves and a diamond ring.

The author is not Anonymous, or Eponymous or Pseudonymous, yet there is the air of a “Primary Colors” stunt about this political roman à clef, which is timed to come out during the Republican convention.

Still, it’s not a salacious tell-all, and words like “smear” and “gossip” are misplaced. It’s a well-researched book that imagines what lies behind that placid facade of the first lady, a women’s book-club novel by a young woman named Curtis Sittenfeld who has written two best sellers, including “Prep.”

It’s the sort of novel Laura Bush might curl up with in the White House solarium if it were not about Laura Bush. It would be interesting to hear how that lover of fiction feels about being the subject of fiction.

You don’t get any fingerprints from Laura Bush. When you look into her eyes during an interview, you feel as if she is there somewhere, deep inside herself, miles and miles down. But though she is lovely and gracious, the main vibe she gives off is an emphatic: “I am not going to show you anything.”

Once in a while, you’ll read about something she’s said, like that legendary line she uttered to her future in-laws — “I read, I smoke, and I admire” — that makes you realize how intriguing it would be to see the real Laura. One with her guard down and outside of the Kabuki-like job of first lady.

But there’s only one vessel that can ferry you past Laura’s moat, and that’s fiction. Ms. Sittenfeld has creatively applied her crayons to all the ambiguous blanks in the coloring book. It isn’t an invasion of privacy. Art has always been made out of the stories of kings and queens. Fictionalizing historical figures is fine. Fantasies about public figures are inevitable. The question of an ostensibly ordinary girl who lives through extraordinary things will always be gripping. For “Madame Bovary,” Flaubert partly drew on the real-life story of Delphine Delamare, a village doctor’s unhappy wife who had lots of lovers and a premature and humiliating death.

And the story of the quiet, pretty librarian who could suffer the fate of being an old maid if not rescued by the dashing hero is a favorite American narrative — from “The Music Man” to “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

During her husband’s presidential runs, many reporters shied away from asking Laura Bush about the freakishly horrible accident she had when she was 17. Hurrying to a party, she ran a stop sign in Midland, Tex., one night on Farm Road 868 and ran into a car that turned out to be driven by the golden boy of her high school, a cute star athlete she was believed to have had a crush on. He died instantly of a broken neck.

As Ann Gerhart wrote in “The Perfect Wife”: “Killing another person was a tragic, shattering error for a girl to make at 17. It was one of those hinges in a life, a moment when destiny shuddered, then lurched in a new direction. In its aftermath, Laura became more cautious and less spontaneous, more inclined to be compassionate.”

Laura has rarely spoken publicly about it, except to say in 2000 that “it was crushing … for the family involved and for me as well.”

How could a novelist not be drawn to such a tragedy? It’s easy to imagine all that guilt, shame, conscience, fear, sex and nightmares in the hands of Eudora Welty or Larry McMurtry.

Ms. Sittenfeld was not out to sensationalize but sympathize. The portraits of Laura and W. — known as Alice and Charlie Blackwell here — are trenchant and make you like them more. The Barbara Bush doppelgänger, dubbed “Maj,” for Her Majesty, is as tart as ever. “When she turned her attention to me,” Alice says of Maj, “I always felt, and not in a positive way, as if we were the only ones in the room and total vigilance were required.”

In 2004, Ms. Sittenfeld wrote a Salon piece confessing that despite her “flaming” liberalism and disdain for W.’s policies, she loved Laura Bush. She called the first lady “an easy heroine to root for — smart and nice, but just flawed enough (she still sneaks cigarettes!) to remain likable.” She identified with Laura’s omnivorous fiction reading.

The strange new worlds he created were an odd mix: dark and horror-filled, humorous and playful. His work outfoxed readers’ expectations, one critic said, and made labeling a chore for publishers.

But being outside the box was a Disch trademark.

“Tom Disch is one of the few people I have ever met who I would consider a genius,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. “He was like a brilliant child in the richness of his imagination, although certainly no child had as dark and twisted an imagination as Tom did.”

Disch, 68, who has been called one of the most important science fiction writers of his generation, fatally shot himself in the head July 5, according to the New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Friends said he was found dead inside his New York apartment.

Disch also wrote poetry, drama criticism, book reviews, opera librettos, plays, children’s books and an interactive computer novel.

Critic John Clute once wrote that Disch was “perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank SF writers.”

Though he never won mainstream fame, Disch was highly regarded in the world of science fiction.

Three of his novels, “Camp Concentration,” “334” and “On Wings of Song” were named in “Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels,” a survey by critic David Pringle.

Disch’s nonfiction work “The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World” received a Hugo Award in 1999.

Disch was far better known in England, where he lived for a time, than in the U.S., Gioia said. In the 1960s he was part of a New Wave movement in which writers introduced modernist and surrealist techniques into science fiction. Disch’s work was ripe with political and social satire and irony.

“334,” published in 1974, is set in a housing project in an overcrowded, controlled New York of the 2020s. One character, Birdie Ludd, must convince officials that he is fit to procreate. Another, Mrs. Hanson, must convince them that she has nothing to live for.

The book is “a cry for help, a voice from a future not so far off — or, if you like, from a present we may never leave behind,” M. John Harrison wrote in the introduction to “334.”

“On Wings of Song,” published in 1979, tells the story of a repressive Amesville, Iowa, in the 21st century. The main character, Daniel Weinreb, tries to master the art of song and flight, “driven by the knowledge that some have attained flight, their spirits separated from their physical bodies and propelled on the waves of their own singing voices — literally born on wings of song.”

For his efforts, Daniel is sent to a prison without bars: Each prisoner carries in his stomach an electrically controlled explosive that can be detonated from headquarters.

That Disch’s books were often described as dark did not trouble him. His work, he said, had the same proportion of tragedy and merriment as Shakespeare’s.

“In entertainment terms, evil has been good box office since the Greek theater,” Disch said in a 1999 article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “The closer you get to genuine high tragedy, the more willing to let terrible things happen to good people, the more you will grab the reader. Evil is an inexhaustible source when you want to discuss the nature of human beings.”

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, on Feb. 2, 1940, Disch spent his childhood in Minnesota towns, moving with his father, who was a salesman. He was homely, gawky and shy, and felt different because he was an intellectual.

In the years that followed high school, he worked odd jobs and attended college in New York.

But in 1962, after the magazine “Fantastic Stories” published one of his short stories, Disch left school to write.

His first novel, “The Genocides,” was published in 1965. The story told of the last days of human existence and of aliens who wipe out humans the way humans kill insects in a garden.

Prolific and diverse in his literary output, Disch also was the author of “The Brave Little Toaster,” a children’s book that was made into an animated film by Disney, and “Amnesia,” an interactive computer novel. Earlier this month his satire “The Word of God: Or, Holy Writ Rewritten” was released.

As a poet, Disch wrote in standard forms: sonnets, villanelles, epigrams, “always clever and full of wordplay,” said Thomas Heacox, who teaches English at College of William and Mary, where Disch served as a writer-in-residence in the 1990s.

His volumes of poetry include “Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poetry,” published in 1989.

The home he shared for years with his partner, Charles Naylor, allowed friends to see a whimsical, humorous side. Disch was “an enormously creative, infinitely amusing and often unhappy genius,” said Gioia, who is also a poet and had known Disch for many years.

In recent years Disch suffered a series of problems: Naylor died, health and financial issues ensued, and Disch battled to remain in his apartment.

As an author, Mr. Bugliosi has written three No. 1 best sellers and won three Edgar Allan Poe awards, the top honor for crime writers. More than 30 years ago he co-wrote the best seller “Helter Skelter,” about the Manson case.

So Mr. Bugliosi could be forgiven for perhaps thinking that a new book would generate considerable interest, among reviewers and on the broadcast talk-show circuit.

But if he thought that, he would have been mistaken: his latest, a polemic with the provocative title “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” has risen to best-seller status with nary a peep from the usual outlets that help sell books: cable television and book reviews in major daily newspapers.

Internet advertising has been abundant, but ABC Radio refused to accept an advertisement for the book during the Don Imus show, said Roger Cooper, the publisher of Vanguard Press, which put out the book.

ABC Radio did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Bugliosi, in a recent telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles, said he had expected some resistance from the mainstream media because of the subject matter — the book lays a legal case for holding President Bush “criminally responsible” for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq — but not a virtual blackout.

His publisher and publicist said they had expected that Mr. Bugliosi’s credentials would ensure coverage — he is, after all, fairly mainstream. His last book, a 1,612-page volume on the Kennedy assassination, “Reclaiming History,” which was published last year, sought to debunk the conspiracy theorists. It is being made into a 10-hour miniseries by HBO and the actor Tom Hanks.

Mr. Bugliosi said bookers for cable television, where he has made regular appearances to promote books, have ignored his latest offering. MSNBC and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” were two outlets Mr. Bugliosi had thought would show interest, but neither did.

“They are not responding at all,” he said. “I think it all goes back to fear. If the liberal media would put me on national television, I think they’d fear that they would be savaged by the right wing. The left wing fears the right, but the right does not fear the left.”

A spokeswoman for Comedy Central said the staff of “The Daily Show” was on vacation and unavailable for comment. A representative for MSNBC said: “We get many pitches to interview authors and very few end up on our programs.”

The editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham, said he had not read the manuscript, but he offered a reason why the media might be silent: “I think there’s a kind of Bush-bashing fatigue out there.”

“If it’s selling well,” Mr. Meacham said, “it’s another sign that the traditional channels of commerce have been blown up. If a dedicated part of the Internet community wants to move something, it doesn’t need a benediction from the mainstream media and might benefit from not having one.”

The book was published in late May by Vanguard Press, a division of the Perseus Books Group — which also owns PublicAffairs, the publisher of the recent memoir by a former White House spokesman, Scott McClellan — and has sold about 130,000 copies. On Sunday it was No. 14 on the New York Times best-seller list. (The Times published a lengthy review of Mr. Bugliosi’s Kennedy book last year by the writer Bryan Burrough of Vanity Fair; his latest book is under consideration for review, said Robert R. Harris, the deputy editor of The New York Times Book Review.)

For the Bush book, the equation for success seems to be this: Mr. Bugliosi’s reputation plus talk radio plus the viral nature of the Internet.

Sara Nelson, the editor in chief of Publisher’s Weekly, said, “130,000 copies is an enormous number of copies of anything.”

“You should never underestimate the power of a brand name author to circumvent the normal publicity and marketing channels,” Ms. Nelson said. “Somebody was very smart to see that something subversive like this is best marketed on the anonymous and youthful medium of the Internet.”

Ms. Nelson said that if the book becomes successful, “the same people who didn’t want to give him publicity in advance would give him publicity after the fact.”

Mr. Cooper of Vanguard Press said, “We publish books on all sides of the political fence and all kinds of political thought.” The company’s sibling, PublicAffairs, has also published one of President Bush’s favorite writers: Natan Sharansky, the onetime Soviet dissident whose book “The Case for Democracy” is said to have influenced Mr. Bush’s foreign policy agenda.

On Mr. Bugliosi’s book, Mr. Cooper said, “I expected there would be people who would choose not to talk about it. But I thought some would.”

Mr. Bugliosi has had more than 100 radio interviews about the book, and Vanguard was behind an aggressive Internet campaign that included ads on liberal blogs. “It’s been frustrating on one hand but exhilarating on the other,” Mr. Cooper said. “Using the Internet has been an integral fact in the success of this book. I feel terrific about the sales of this book.”

While Mr. Bugliosi’s Kennedy book got the star treatment from Hollywood in Mr. Hanks, he had to look outside the United States to find money for a film on his Bush polemic. Jim Shaban, a theater owner in Windsor, Ontario, financed a documentary on the book that is almost complete. The movie, directed by David Burke, does not yet have a distributor. But it will not carry the same name as the book. “Mad as Hell” is one name under consideration, according to Peter Miller, of the PMA Literary and Film Agency, who has represented Mr. Bugliosi for about 25 years.

Mr. Helms’s former chief of staff, James W.C. Broughton, said that the senator died at the Mayview Convalescent Center in Raleigh, where he had lived for the last several years. Mr. Helms had been in “a period of declining health” recently, Mr. Broughton said.

In a 52-year political career that ended with his retirement from the Senate in 2002, Mr. Helms became a beacon for the right wing of American politics, a lightning rod for the left, and, often, a mighty pain for Presidents whatever their political leaning.

Ronald Reagan, a friend who could thank Mr. Helms for critical campaign help, once described him as a “thorn in my side.” Mr. Helms was known for taking on anyone, even leaders of his own party, who strayed from his idea of ideological purity.

“I didn’t come to Washington to be a yes man for any President, Democrat or Republican,” he said in an interview in 1989. “I didn’t come to Washington to get along and win any popularity contests.”

Perhaps his most visible accomplishments in the Senate came two decades apart. One was a 1996 measure that tightened trade sanctions against the Marxist government of Fidel Castro in Cuba. The other, a 1973 amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act, prevented American money from going to international family planning organizations that, in his words, “provide or promote” abortion. He also introduced amendments to reduce or eliminate funds for foreign aid, welfare programs and the arts.

David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, said recently that Mr. Helms’s contribution to the conservative movement was “incredibly important.”

For one thing, he said, Mr. Helms was alert to technological change, especially the importance of direct mail, and readily signed fund-raising letters that helped conservative organizations get started.

Mr. Helms was also instrumental in keeping Mr. Reagan’s presidential campaign alive in 1976 when it was broke and limping after a series of defeats in the Republican primaries.

And in the Senate, Mr. Keene said, Mr. Helms was a rallying point for conservatives. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he supported Mr. Reagan on issues like aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. “Without Jesse, it would have been hard for Reagan to hold the line,” he said.

Mr. Helms saw himself as a simple man — he even used the word “redneck” to describe himself — protecting simple American values from the onslaught of permissiveness, foreign influence and moral relativism. For 30 years he cut a familiar figure on the Senate floor, typically wearing horn-rimmed glasses, black wing tip shoes and, on the lapels of his gray suits, American flag and Free Masonry pins.

He liked his art uncomplicated.

“The self-proclaimed, self-anointed art experts would scoff and say, ‘Oooh, terrible,’ but I like beautiful things, not modern art,” he told The New York Times in 1989, during a pitched battle over federal subsidies to the arts. “I can’t even figure out that sculpture in the Hart Building.” He was referring to an Alexander Calder mobile.

In the 1980’s he took on the National Endowment for the Arts for subsidizing art that he found offensive, chiefly that of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who explored gay themes in some of his work, and of the artist Andres Serrano, who depicted a crucifix submerged in urine. He later led an ill-fated attempt to take over CBS, exhorting conservatives to buy up stock in order to stop what he saw as a liberal bias in its news reporting.

He was also well known for holding up votes on treaties and appointments to win a point. His willingness to block the business of the Senate or the will of Presidents earned him the sobriquet “Senator No” — a label he relished.

In campaigns and in the Senate, Mr. Helms stood out in both his words and his tactics.

He fought bitterly against Federal aid for AIDS research and treatment, saying the disease resulted from “unnatural” and “disgusting” homosexual behavior.

“Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.”

In his last year in the Senate, he decided to support AIDS measures in Africa, where heterosexual transmission of the disease is most common.

Trailing in a tough re-election fight in 1990 against a black opponent, Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, Mr. Helms unveiled a nakedly racial campaign ad in which a pair of hands belonging to a white job-seeker crumpled a rejection slip as an announcer explained that the job had been given to an unqualified member of a minority. Mr. Helms went on to victory.

In 1994, angered at President Clinton, Mr. Helms suggested in print that if Mr. Clinton was to visit North Carolina, “He’d better bring a bodyguard.” He later said the remark had been “a mistake.”

His bruising style and right-wing politics won him many friends in his home state and across the nation, but he also created a legion of enemies. Millions of dollars were raised outside North Carolina both from those who flocked to his ideological banner and from those who ached to see him defeated. He never won more than 55 percent of the vote in five campaigns for the Senate.

“He was a very polarizing politician,” said Ferrell Guillory, a veteran North Carolina journalist. “He was not a consensus builder. He didn’t want everybody to vote for him. He just wanted enough.”

But as tough as he could be in the political theater, Mr. Helms could exhibit a softer, warmer, even impish side in his personal dealings, even with political adversaries.

In 1963, after 21 years of marriage, Mr. Helms and his wife, Dorothy, adopted a disabled child, Charles, after they read a newspaper article in which the child, who was nine at the time, plaintively said that he wanted a mother and father for Christmas.

Claude Sitton, the editor of The Raleigh News and Observer, a newspaper whose coverage and editorials gave Mr. Helms fits, was startled when Mr. Helms sent him a gift at his retirement party. It was a fine bay horse. “This is Jesse,” said a sign hung around the horse’s neck. “You been riding Jesse for years. Don’t stop now.”

He welcomed teen-agers. Even when lobbyists could not get in to see him, high school students could. His office once calculated that he had met with 170,000 teen-agers in his 30 years in the Senate.

Jesse Alexander Helms Jr. was born to Jesse Sr. and Ethel Mae Helms on Oct. 18, 1921 in Monroe, N.C., where his father was the chief of police. A hamlet in the North Carolina Piedmont, Monroe embodied the kind of small-town virtue that he would vigorously promote throughout his career. “Everybody understood everybody else,” he said of his hometown. “Everybody understood that it was important not to do certain things, and that, if you did them, you would pay for it.”

For Mr. Helms, the orderliness of the small town even encompassed racial segregation; as a child, he saw it not as a great evil but as an accepted part of his world. Mr. Helms always insisted that journalism had been his first choice for a career. He quit Wake Forest College before he graduated to become a reporter for The Raleigh Times. In 1942, he married the former Dorothy Coble, of Raleigh, whom he had met at Wake Forest. They went on to have three children.

He is survived by his wife, Dorothy, and three children, Jane Helms Knox of Raleigh; Nancy Helms Grigg of Chapel Hill, and Charles Helms, of Winston-Salem, N.C. He is also survived by seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

After serving in the Navy in World War II, Mr. Helms became news and program director at WRAL, a radio station in Raleigh, from 1948 to 1951. It was at WRAL that he cut his political teeth, covering the 1950 race for the Senate between Frank Porter Graham, the former President of the University of North Carolina, and Willis Smith, the former Speaker of the North Carolina House. The race was nasty. At one point, Willis supporters passed out handbills bearing a doctored photograph depicting Mr. Graham’s wife dancing with a black man.

Though his station covered the campaign, Mr. Helms also served as an unofficial adviser to the Willis campaign. He denied having anything to do with the handbills, or that they were even printed by the campaign. Mr. Willis won, and Mr. Helms went with him to Washington to work in his Senatorial office.

In 1953, however, he left Washington to become the chairman of the North Carolina Bankers Association. Four years later he was elected to the Raleigh City Council and served on it until 1961.

From 1960 to 1972 he did political commentary on WRAL radio, WRAL-TV and the Tobacco Radio Network. The stations’ statewide reach and Mr. Helms’s piquant commentaries against communism, the “lax” criminal justice system and welfare turned Mr. Helms into a household name, both loved and hated.

“Look carefully into the faces of the people participating,” he said in a 1968 editorial against anti-Vietnam war protests. “What you will see, for the most part, are dirty, unshaven, often crude young men and stringy-haired awkward young women who cannot attract attention any other way.”

In 1970 he switched his party registration to Republican from Democrat. Two years later, he upset the favorite by a convincing 120,000 votes to win a Senate seat.

The first few years as a Senator were difficult for Mr. Helms. He was overshadowed by the state’s better-known Senator, Sam Ervin. His conservative idol, President Richard M. Nixon, was driven from office by the Watergate scandal, and his vote against Nelson Rockefeller, President Ford’s choice for vice president, alienated him from the party’s leadership. He was in debt. He considered retiring after his first term, but changed his mind.

“I looked around the Senate and thought that it needed conservative votes and that it didn’t have too many,” he said.

Mr. Helms’s political longevity and his national stature were enhanced when he and his close political adviser, Tom Ellis, a North Carolina lawyer, started the North Carolina Congressional Club. Originally formed to help pay off Mr. Helms’s campaign debts from the 1972 campaign, the club, which later changed its name to the National Congressional Club, grew to be a political action committee and the centerpiece of a multimillion-dollar set of nonprofit corporations, tax-exempt foundations and political education committees. Compiling nationwide lists of donors, they raised money and dispersed it to support conservative causes.

The effort, in Mr. Ellis’s view, was necessary to counter the influence of the huge liberal-oriented foundations that dominated national politics at the time. But the effort also turned Mr. Helms into a national figure, with a power base outside the Republican party and with the ability to get his message out without having to rely on what he considered the liberal national news media.

Mr. Helms also showed his political power in 1976, when he threw his weight and political organization behind Mr. Reagan’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Reagan had lost a string of primaries to the incumbent, Gerald R. Ford, and it was believed that if the President defeated him in North Carolina, Mr. Reagan’s bid, and perhaps his political career, would end.

As the glowing reviews piled up I resisted this temptation — I questioned how this book could ever live up to the hype that it was getting? People were literally stopping me in the street to ask if I had read it yet? Finally, I gave in.

“Netherland” is the story of Hans, a Dutch banker living in New York City with his English wife and infant son. When 9/11 occurs the family is forced to relocate to the Chelsea Hotel. The destruction at the World Trade Center towers serves as the catalyst for the detonation of their marriage. Shortly thereafter, Hans watches numbly as his wife and child move back to England.

O’Neill employs a series of time shifts in “Netherland.” As the story begins Hans has just learned that his good friend Chuck has been murdered back in New York. Hans is living in London when a reporter from the New York Times calls to ask him about the late Chuck.

Learning about the deceased seems like a classic crime fiction opening. The dearly departed Chuck passed away in twisted fashion. Much of the book consists of flashbacks to the times that Hans and Chuck had spent together.

When his wife leaves him Hans becomes untethered, lost. Every other weekend he flies to England to visit his son. Back in New York he has too much time on his hands. He doesn’t seem to have any friends. By a chance circumstance Hans becomes involved with a group of men who play cricket every weekend.

These cricket players are all immigrants. Through cricket Hans meets Chuck Ramkissoon, a flamboyant wheeler dealer from Trinidad. They become friends. Chuck gives Hans driving lessons. It eventually dawns on Hans that Chuck is engaged in some criminal enterprises while using Hans as his driver.

O’Neill is an astute observer, gifted in his expression. Hans observes that “like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.”

As Hans reflects on the collapse of his marriage he sees “that the steamboat of marriage must be fed incessantly with the coals of communication.” As his relationship languishes Hans becomes obsessed with playing cricket. Apparently, the author is a long-time cricket enthusiast.

Is “Netherland” an entertaining piece of fiction? Most definitely. Will it be honored as one of the classics, a great American novel? I think not. It reminded me of eating certain types of cuisine. It had some delicious flavors and textures but nothing that really stuck to this reviewer’s ribs. It lacked substance.

I want eternal life.

I don’t want to go to hell.

My god answers prayers.

Anything is better than being an atheist.