The younger McGwire submitted a 58-page proposal to a number of publishers last week, offering to tell the story of how he had introduced his brother, who is eighth on the career list for home runs, to performance-enhancing drugs.

But several publishers who have seen the proposal for the book, which Jay McGwire is calling “The McGwire Family Secret: The Truth About Steroids, a Slugger and Ultimate Redemption,” have passed on it.

“There are so many things about it that I find suspect,” said David Hirshey, the executive editor of HarperCollins. “If Jay McGwire is to be believed, he says he is setting the record straight out of quote love unquote for his brother, although a cynic might say it’s out of love for a big payday.”

Hirshey said that McGwire’s proposal landed on his desk the week that a grand jury met to hear evidence that could lead to the indictment of Roger Clemens for perjury after he testified in a Congressional hearing that he never used performance-enhancing drugs.

McGwire’s proposal also arrived as “Based Loaded,” a memoir by Kirk Radomski, a confessed steroids dealer, is poised to hit bookstores Tuesday.

Frank Scatoni, McGwire’s agent, did not respond to an e-mail message or call seeking comment.

In his proposal, first reported by the Web site deadspin.com, Jay McGwire, a bodybuilder, said he introduced his brother to steroids in 1994. That contradicts claims made by José Canseco in his 2005 memoir, “Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ’Roids, Smash Hits and How Baseball Got Big,” in which he said he started injecting Mark McGwire with performance-enhancing drugs in 1988.

William Shinker, the president and publisher of Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group USA that published “Game of Shadows,” a book about steroids in sports by the journalists Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, said he also passed on McGwire’s book. He said he was in part turned off by the fact that the book would be “a brother ratting out a brother.”

Shinker said he also believed that audiences might be fatigued with Mark McGwire’s story after his Congressional testimony four years ago, in which he declined to answer questions about whether he had used steroids.

There is evidence that a broader sense of steroid weariness is setting in among book-buyers, after some early successes. “Juiced,” published by Regan Books, a now-defunct imprint of HarperCollins, sold 157,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of sales. “Game of Shadows,” published in 2006, sold 124,000 copies in hardcover. But “Vindicated: Big Names, Big Liars, and the Battle to Save Baseball,” Canseco’s follow-up to “Juiced,” published last year by Simon Spotlight, sold only 22,000 copies in hardcover.

“The whole steroid thing has been done,” said Frank Sanchez, the head buyer at Kepler’s Books and Magazines, an independent bookstore in Menlo Park, Calif. “There have been so many articles in local papers and magazines, so people feel like they’ve already read about that and they just don’t care anymore.”

At Borders Group, Zan Farr, a sports book buyer, said she had ordered Radomski’s book in just enough quantities to stack on tables at the front of the chain’s stores.

“I’m not sure people in this environment are going to be coming to it the same way they did the other books,” Farr said.

WMUB has broadcast from Miami University for 58 years, however, due to its rural location and signal strength, it has not been able to achieve the audience and listener pledges that urban-based public radio stations receive. Consequently WMUB receives more than $500,000 in annual direct subsidy from the university plus more than $300,000 in indirect support.

“We have come to this decision with deep regret because of our long history with WMUB and the excellent staff there now, but the financial obligation of WMUB can no longer be borne by the university with the economic challenges we face,” said Miami President David Hodge.

The university chose not to sell the station, as it would have likely meant losing the public radio programming that it now provides to the Miami Valley.

This decision follows a two-year process of exploring options for the future of WMUB, which did not result in an economically viable way to continue WMUB as a stand-alone station. Under this operating agreement, WMUB would join public radio stations WGUC FM and WVXU FM, which are owned and operated by Cincinnati Public Radio. WVXU and WMUB currently offer similar programming. With this alliance, WMUB will maintain its emphasis on news and information offerings on 88.5 FM as well as offer opportunities for student development.

WMUB’s signal direction means most of its listeners are in Montgomery and Butler counties and parts of eastern Indiana. The combination of WMUB, WVXU and WGUC would create a radio alliance that would serve both WMUB’s audience and the rest of the tri-state region, and, under this agreement, Miami would also receive air time to promote both its faculty expertise and its cultural, arts and educational programs to a broader audience in Greater Cincinnati and throughout southwest Ohio.

President Hodge, Provost Jeffrey Herbst and Vice President for Finance and Business Services David Creamer will host a community forum to provide background on plans for the station at 5 p.m. Wednesday, January 28, in 102 Benton Hall on High Street on Miami’s Oxford campus.

Schoedinger is offering live web streaming and archived online video for use by military personnel overseas and others who cannot be present for a loved one’s funeral.

It’s a way for mourners to take part in the experience without the time and expense of a long-distance trip, especially one arranged on short notice.

“This just allows people to share in the grief and share in the grief experience with everyone,” company President Michael Schoedinger said.

The family organising the funeral controls who has access to the private website used for broadcasting. The company offers the service for free but eventually may charge a fee to cover its costs, Schoedinger said.

Funeral directors say better technology and cheaper equipment have prompted more funeral homes to offer webcasting and videotaping services nationwide.

It’s also been more appealing as the internet has become part of everyday life for many Americans domestically and abroad, said Ellery Bowker, the president of North Carolina-based Director’s Advantage, which specialises in technological products for the funeral industry and debuted its webcasting service last year.

The service allowed one soldier in Iraq to watch his grandmother’s funeral in North Carolina, Bowker said. In another case, comrades of a soldier who died overseas were able to view his memorial in the U.S.

The use of funeral webcasting is an emerging trend but hasn’t been tracked statistically, though some companies have offered those services for years, said Jessica Koth, a spokeswoman for the National Funeral Director’s Association.

Webcasting companies are also jumping in, offering packages to funeral homes that include tripods, cameras with microphones, and cables and cords, either for lease or purchase outright. Some ceremonies can even be webcast to iPods.

The Jenkins-Soffe Funeral Chapels and Cremation Centre in suburban Salt Lake City began offering funeral webcasts about a decade ago as a way to include overseas missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in their relatives’ funerals, owner Kurt Soffe said.

The centre’s funeral packages, which include webcasting, video and audio recording, typically cost about $300 more than other packages. About one in every 50 funerals at the centre opts for the multimedia, he said.

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.

As a boy growing up in Indonesia, Mr. Obama learned about the American civil rights movement through books his mother gave him. Later, as a fledgling community organizer in Chicago, he found inspiration in “Parting the Waters,” the first installment of Taylor Branch’s multivolume biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

More recently, books have supplied Mr. Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead” are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

Mr. Obama has said that he wrote “very bad poetry” in college and his biographer David Mendell suggests that he once “harbored some thoughts of writing fiction as an avocation.” For that matter, “Dreams From My Father” evinces an instinctive storytelling talent (which would later serve the author well on the campaign trail) and that odd combination of empathy and detachment gifted novelists possess. In that memoir, Mr. Obama seamlessly managed to convey points of view different from his own (a harbinger, perhaps, of his promises to bridge partisan divides and his ability to channel voters’ hopes and dreams) while conjuring the many places he lived during his peripatetic childhood. He is at once the solitary outsider who learns to stop pressing his nose to the glass and the coolly omniscient observer providing us with a choral view of his past.

As Baldwin once observed, language is both “a political instrument, means, and proof of power,” and “the most vivid and crucial key to identity: it reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.”

For Mr. Obama, whose improbable life story many voters regard as the embodiment of the American Dream, identity and the relationship between the personal and the public remain crucial issues. Indeed, “Dreams From My Father,” written before he entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots — a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.

Like “Dreams From My Father,” many of the novels Mr. Obama reportedly admires deal with the question of identity: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” concerns a man’s efforts to discover his origins and come to terms with his roots; Doris Lessing’s “Golden Notebook” recounts a woman’s struggles to articulate her own sense of self; and Ellison’s “Invisible Man” grapples with the difficulty of self-definition in a race-conscious America and the possibility of transcendence. The poems of Elizabeth Alexander, whom Mr. Obama chose as his inaugural poet, probe the intersection between the private and the political, time present and time past, while the verse of Derek Walcott (a copy of whose collected poems was recently glimpsed in Mr. Obama’s hands) explores what it means to be a “divided child,” caught on the margins of different cultures, dislocated and rootless perhaps, but free to invent a new self.

This notion of self-creation is a deeply American one — a founding principle of this country, and a trope addressed by such classic works as “The Great Gatsby” — and it seems to exert a strong hold on Mr. Obama’s imagination.

In a 2005 essay in Time magazine, he wrote of the humble beginnings that he and Lincoln shared, adding that the 16th president reminded him of “a larger, fundamental element of American life — the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

Though some critics have taken Mr. Obama to task for self-consciously italicizing parallels between himself and Lincoln, there are in fact a host of uncanny correspondences between these two former Illinois state legislators who had short stints in Congress under their belts before coming to national prominence with speeches showcasing their eloquence: two cool, self-contained men, who managed to stay calm and graceful under pressure; two stoics embracing the virtues of moderation and balance; two relatively new politicians who were initially criticized for their lack of experience and for questioning an invasion of a country that, in Lincoln’s words, was “in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S.”

As Fred Kaplan’s illuminating new biography (“Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer”) makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading — most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare — which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln’s case, Mr. Kaplan notes, “the tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him.”

I turned to my friend and asked, “Who the heck is Barack Obama?”

I had never heard of Obama before that day. On July 27, 2004, many Americans first noticed Barack Obama when he gave the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. His marvelous speech served notice of a rising star in politics.

He won that Senate seat in 2004. Last November Barack Obama was elected our President. How did he do it? Well, one good reason why Obama was able to overcome such incredible odds to attain the highest office in the land is that he is one of the greatest public speakers of our generation.

A new book, “Say It Like Obama — The Power of Speaking with Purpose and Vision” by Shel Leanne, analyzes exactly what it is that Obama does when he makes his superb speeches.

Speeches are more than words. The words are important, of course, but the method of delivery is just as crucial. Leanne describes how “Barack Obama walks onto the stage with a brisk, purposeful, confident gait. He makes immediate visual contact with the audience, clapping his hands along with them.”

His body language is as powerful as his rich baritone voice: “Obama makes his way to the lectern, planting his feet firmly, shoulders squared. He touches each hand to the lectern, possessing it — a posture of confidence and authority. With chin lifted, he bows ever-so-slightly to the audience, his gesture of appreciation and gratitude. As the applause continues, Obama folds his hands neatly on the lectern and smiles humbly, seeming to gain strength from the crowd’s enthusiasm.”

Then Obama speaks and the real magic happens. Leanne examines all the subtle things that Obama does when he makes his speeches — from the way he says things to the gestures that he employs.

He possesses such rare charisma that he draws comparisons with great orators of the past: John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ronald Reagan. Leanne states that “the words often used to describe Barack Obama — magnetic, electrifying, energizing and inspiring — speak of his charisma as a leader. Obama has a presentation and style that enable him to earn the confidence of listeners, inspire them, and move them to action.”

It has been reported that President-elect Obama has been paying close attention to how President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the concerns of a nation mired in the Great Depression when FDR gave his first inaugural address. Obama recently admitted that he has been studying the speeches of another president who took office in the midst of a great crisis, Abraham Lincoln.

His death was confirmed by his agent, Katherine Vile, who said he had been ill for some time.

Mr. Mortimer is known best in this country for creating the Rumpole character, an endearing and enduring relic of the British legal system who became a television hero of the courtroom comedy.

But as a barrister in Britain, Mr. Mortimer came to be known in the 1960s as a defender of free speech and human rights for taking up cases that he said were “alleged to be testing the frontiers of tolerance.” He became a Queen’s Counsel just in time to tackle some of the civil rights cases that arose in Britain in that decade, all the while writing fiction, nonfiction, drama and comedy.

To read Rumpole, or to watch the episodes of the popular television series “Rumpole of the Bailey,” is to enter not only Rumpole’s stuffy flat or crowded legal chambers but also to feel the itch of his yellowing court wig and the flapping of his disheveled, cigar-ash-dusted courtroom gown.

Rumpole spends his days quoting Keats and his nights quaffing claret at Pommeroy’s wine bar, putting off the time that he must return to his wife, Hilda, more commonly known as She Who Must Be Obeyed.

Using his wit and low-comedy distractions, Rumpole sees that justice is done, more often than not by outsmarting the “old sweethearts” and “old darlings” of the bench and revealing the inner good — or at least the integrity and inconsistency — of the accused, including clans like the Timsons, whose crimes have kept generations of police officers busy.

Rumpole began as a BBC teleplay in 1975. The television series was produced in Britain by ITV, beginning in 1978. Once one has seen Leo McKern in the role, it is difficult to read the Rumpole stories without hearing his rich narration.

There is a certain predictability to the Rumpole stories. Mr. Mortimerhimself acknowledged in a 2006 interview with the The Guardian newspaper that Rumpole had not “developed” in more than 30 years of stories, television scripts and novels. “What keeps him going is that he can comment on whatever’s going on at the time,” he said.

Mr. Mortimer continued to churn out the Rumpole adventures for many years. In “Rumpole and the Reign of Terror” (2006), Rumpole defends a suspect being held under Britain’s antiterrorism laws, giving Mr. Mortimer the opportunity to attack the broad-brush laws that he believed imperiled human rights.

He also adapted Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited” for television, years after he became enthralled with the book as a young man. Somehow, despite the demands of his chosen careers — a “schizoid business of being a writer who had barristering as a day job,” he said — Mr. Mortimer also found time to pursue his lifelong interest in women, write for newspapers and keep up the garden nurtured by his father, Clifford Mortimer, whose outsize shadow remained with him all his life.

The elder Mr. Mortimer, who was known for his anger and harsh tongue, was a barrister who specialized in divorce petitions and wills. He lost his sight when John was a boy, but the blindness was never discussed or acknowledged, and the father carried on much as he had before. His wife would accompany him to court on the train, reading his legal briefs aloud en route so that he could keep up on his cases while often treating fellow commuters to detailed accusations of marital infractions.

Mr. Mortimer brought his father and their relationship to the stage in “A Voyage Round My Father,” which was eventually produced as a television movie in 1981, filmed at the family home, Turville Heath Cottage, near Henley on Thames, where the younger Mr. Mortimer grew up. Laurence Olivier played Clifford Mortimer, re-enacting his death in the same bed where the father died.

Sir John eventually took over his father’s law practice. After trying his hand at novels, writing in the morning before court, he turned to radio scripts and had his first success in 1957 with “The Dock Brief,” broadcast by BBC radio. It was produced onstage years later.

His memoirs, including “Clinging to the Wreckage” (1982) and “Murderers and Other Friends: Another Part of Life” (1994), drop dozens of names of the theater and movie people he spent time with. There are trays upon trays of cocktails in his stories, and in later years interviewers often noted the presence of what one described as a “comfortably large Guinness that he is drinking for his health, even though it is still a long time until lunch.”

John Clifford Mortimer was born on April 21, 1923, in London to Clifford and Kathleen May Smith Mortimer. He attended Brasenose College, Oxford. In 1949 he married Penelope Fletcher, a writer, who came to the marriage with three children. They had two children, Sally and Jeremy, and divorced. He later married Penelope Gollop, or “Penny the Second,” as he has referred to her. Their children are Rosamond and Emily.

A heretofore-unknown son, Ross Bentley, born of a liaison with Wendy Craig, an actress, surfaced when Mr. Mortimer was in his 70s, and the author proclaimed himself delighted to welcome the son and new grandchildren to the family.

The existence of Ross Bentley came out in “The Devil’s Advocate,” an unauthorized biography by Graham Lord (2005), which asserted that Mr. Mortimer had known about the son all along. He denied this.

An authorized biography, “A Voyage Round John Mortimer” (Viking), by Valerie Grove, was published in 2007.

As a defender of free speech, Sir John championed the punk rock group the Sex Pistols, who released an album that was initially held to have an obscene title, as well as “Last Exit to Brooklyn,” by Hubert Selby Jr., a novel deemed unacceptable under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959.

He also appeared on behalf of the London edition of Oz magazine, which had produced a “school kids” edition written and illustrated by student readers. Among other items that offended the censors, the magazine depicted the head of the children’s character Rupert Bear grafted atop a body drawn by Robert Crumb, showing Rupert in a state of sexual excitement.

“Doing these cases,” he wrote, “I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended.”

In addition, he went to Nigeria to help in the defense of the playwright and poet Wole Soyinka on a criminal charge.

In recent years, despite poor health, Mr. Mortimer was a fixture at London parties and social gatherings. He also maintained an active writing schedule, frequently contributing opinion articles to London newspapers.

In “Murderers and Other Friends,” one of his memoirs, Mr. Mortimer recounted an interview for a radio program in which the questioner handed him the script of his own obituary, suggesting it might be “great fun” if he read it aloud for listeners. He refused. But he devoted a great deal of thought to death and dying.

He wrote about the indignities of old age: the daunting stairway to the restaurant restroom, the benefits of a wheelchair in airports and its disadvantages at cocktail parties, giving the user what he described as a child’s-eye view of the party and a crotch-level view of the guests.

studies suggesting a link between cell phone use and brain cancer

euphemisms for death

pointed throat clearing

people who ask you what’s wrong with your face

smells that travel through thick walls

drunks operating chainsaws

flavorless food

telemarketers

ex-best friends

sitting on a bee

The question of waterboarding was the first issue to be raised at the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings of Mr. Holder for attorney general. As expected, he also came under close questioning over his role as deputy attorney general in the pardoning of Marc Rich, a billionaire who had fled the country rather than face federal tax evasion charges, at the end of President Bill Clinton’s second term.

Saturday, February 07, 2009 Book signing Blue Jacket Books Xenia, OH 2-4 p.m.

Tuesday, February 03, 2009 Presentation and book signing Dayton Metro Library Dayton, OH 7 p.m.

Saturday, March 21, 2009 Presentation and book signing Northmont Branch Library, Englewood, OH 2 p.m.

Friday, February 27, 2009 Book presentation Union Township Heritage Center, West Milton, OH 7-9 p.m.

Thursday, March 12, 2009 Book presentation Arcanum-Wayne Trail Historical Society, Arcanum, OH 7-9 p.m.

Another favorite of mine is Jan Burke. She created a series that features the reporter Irene Kelly. Burke is a meticulous researcher. In 1999, her novel in the series “Bones” won the most prestigious honor a mystery writer can get, the Edgar Award.

A new book from Jan Burke is always a noteworthy event. A few pages into her latest novel, “The Messenger,” I made a startling discovery; it’s not crime fiction. “The Messenger” marks a radical departure for Burke. Her latest book is a supernatural thriller.

I called Burke to find out what led her to write it. She explained that in the course of her work writing crime fiction that she had pondered some recurring themes. She wondered what it would be like to create a character who could communicate with people who were dying, a character who could transmit those final thoughts and desires to loved ones who were unable to know their final words without some supernatural assistance.

She dreamed up a character, Tyler Hawthorne, who has the mission to locate people who are dying so that he can pass along these final requests. Tyler is “The Messenger.” He also is eternally 24 years old, rich, handsome and immortal. His constant companion is a big black dog, an immortal canine partner.

As the story opens, we catch a glimpse of Lord Adrian Varre, our villain. I asked Burke how she conceived of this unsavory fellow. She told me that “it’s really important to have a villain who’s up to weight for your hero. Tyler’s not all that vulnerable. Something really nasty has to come after him. For as good an individual as Tyler is, there had to be a counterpoint there to bring any tension into the story. My villain Adrian is utterly selfish.”

And repulsive. Adrian Varre is the most disgusting literary monster this reviewer has encountered in years. So, you might be wondering; is Tyler Hawthorne a vampire? Amanda Clarke, a genuine 24-year-old who is Tyler’s love interest in the book, actually asks him that question. You can’t kill him. But he walks in the daylight. Who is he?

“The Messenger” builds to an astonishing finale that simply begs for a sequel. And it makes us ponder whether living forever would really be a such good thing? Burke explains that “the more I thought about it, the more I realized there is a certain gift that comes with aging, in not having life go on and on — if you outlive all your peers and you outlive everyone you love …”

Samuel J. Wurzelbacher says he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting and explaining why Israeli forces are mounting attacks against Hamas.

He told WNWO-TV in Toledo that he wants “go over there and let their ‘Average Joes’ share their story.”

Wurzelbacher became a household name during the final weeks of the presidential campaign after asking Barack Obama about his tax plan at a campaign stop near Toledo.

Wurzelbacher then joined Republican John McCain on the campaign trail.

The publishing house, in announcing the agreement on Monday, said the memoir is expected to be released in 2010. Sally McDonough, first lady Laura Bush’s press secretary, declined to say how much Bush is being paid for the book.

“As a rare witness to the private moments of one of our country’s most consequential presidencies, and as a first lady who has maintained a notable level of discretion, her memoir will provide a candid and personal perspective, and an enduring record, of the years that have already determined the court of the 21st century,” said Susan Maldow, executive vice president and publisher of Scribner.

Maldow negotiated the book deal with Washington attorney Robert Barnett, whose many clients include former President Bill Clinton, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Edward Kennedy. Nan Graham, vice president and editor in chief of Scribner, will edit the memoir.

A memoir from Laura Bush could be the political equivalent of “Garbo Speaks.” The public has long been fascinated by the first lady, if only because she has said so little about herself, and her life is already a best seller in fictional form, in Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel “American Wife.”

Publishers seem to have a much higher regard for the first lady, a former schoolteacher known as a passionate reader, than for President George W. Bush, and the book deal — even during a dire economy — would likely be worth at least as much as Hillary Clinton’s $8 million for the memoir “Living History.”

Books by recent first ladies, including Laura Bush’s mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, have had more dependable commercial appeal than those by former presidents Laura Bush said she looked forward to working with the publisher “as I tell the stories of the extraordinary events and people I’ve met in my life, particularly during my years in the White House.”

President George W. Bush said last year that he, too, wants to write a book. Publishers, noting his poor approval ratings, have urged him to wait.

One of my favorite books from the past year was “Knockemstiff” by Donald Ray Pollock. This collection of short stories was set in a rural community in southern Ohio. Pollock knows how much I liked his book. The other day he suggested that I might enjoy “The Dart League King” by Keith Lee Morris.

Pollock says that “people will be reading ‘The Dart League King’ for years to come. I’d wager a 12-pack on it.” I had never heard of Morris so Pollock’s recommendation led me to a novel I probably would not have read otherwise.

The story unfolds on a Thursday night — dart night in Garnet Lake, Idaho. Most of the action revolves around a dart league having a match at a bar called the 321 Club.

Morris assembles a cast of characters who circulate through the tavern. Each character portrays the action taking place from his or her point of view. There’s almost a cinematic quality to the way time elapses. As each chapter opens the action is rewound an extra notch to the last moments from the previous chapter.

This technique gives the story a herky-jerky quality that becomes rather hypnotic. Morris ratchets up the heat and the friction until the tension is so tightly twisted that these characters and his readers are all just about ready to scream.

Morris imagines characters that are so real, so human, so vulnerable, so damaged, that we feel like we are learning the dirty little secrets we always wanted to know about people we have observed but never really understood.

There’s Russell Harmon. He’s the Dart League King of the title. Russell’s got a bit of a drug problem. He’s a small-time drug peddler working a job he hates, cutting down trees in the timber industry. His only happiness comes from being the best dart player in town.

Vince Thompson is Russell’s cocaine supplier. Vince is 42 years old and angry. Russell owes Vince a lot of money. As the dart tournament begins Vince is trying to decide whether he’s angry enough to do Russell serious harm.

Tristan Mackey is a member of Russell’s dart team. He seems to have everything going his way but he’s really just a huge mess. Brice Habersham is actually the best dart player in town. Brice has a big secret. And Kelly Ashton can’t decide between Russell or Tristan.

The most compelling characters — Russell, Vince, and Kelly — share a common bond; they miss their fathers. Vince, the enraged drug dealer, talks to himself in a nonstop stream of profanity that is somehow amazingly endearing.

Mr. Westlake collapsed as he was headed to New Year’s Eve dinner while on vacation in Mexico, said his wife, Abigail Westlake.

The cause was a heart attack, she said.

Mr. Westlake, considered one of the most successful and versatile mystery writers in the United States, received an Academy Award nomination for a screenplay, three Edgar Awards and the title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America in 1993.

Since his first novel, “The Mercenaries,” was published by Random House in 1960, Mr. Westlake had written under his own name and several pseudonyms, including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West. Despite the diversity of pen names, most of his books shared one feature: They were set in New York City, where he was born.

Mr. Westlake used different names in part to combat skepticism over his rapid rate of writing books, sometimes as many as four a year, his friends said.

“In the beginning, people didn’t want to publish more than one book a year by the same author,” said Susan Richman, his publicist at Grand Central Publishing.

Later in his career, Mr. Westlake limited himself to two pen names, each generally focusing on one primary character: He used his own name to write about an unintentionally comical criminal named John Dortmunder, and as Richard Stark wrote a series about an anti-hero and criminal named Parker.

Mr. Westlake occasionally wrote about other characters, such as Burke Devore, the downsized executive turned murderer in “The Ax,” whom The New York Times described in 1997 “as emblematic of his time as George F. Babbitt and Holden Caulfield and Capt. John Yossarian were of theirs.”

The full panoply of Mr. Westlake’s books was a spectacle to behold, his friends said. “We were in his library, this beautiful library surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of titles,” said Laurence Kirshbaum, his agent, “and I realized that every single book was written by Donald Westlake, English-language and foreign-language editions.”

Mr. Westlake’s cinematic style of storytelling, along with his carefully crafted plots and crisp dialogue, translated well on the screen. More than 15 of his books were made into movies. In addition, he wrote a number of screenplays, including “The Grifters,” which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991.

Mr. Westlake wrote seven days a week, his friends said. His productiveness was honed in part by an era in which publishing houses churned out books at a relentless pace. During that time, he also wrote erotic literature, science fiction and westerns.

Mr. Westlake resisted computers and typed his manuscripts on manual typewriters. “They came in perfectly typed,” Mr. Kirshbaum said. “You felt like it was almost written by hand.”

Otto Penzler, a longtime friend of Mr. Westlake’s and the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in TriBeCa, said, “He hated the idea of an electric typewriter because, he said, ‘I don’t want to sit there while I am thinking and have something hum at me.’ ”

Mr. Westlake kept four or five typewriters and cannibalized their parts when any one broke, as the typewriter model was no longer manufactured, his friends said.

“He lived in fear that he wouldn’t have his little portable typewriter,” said Mr. Penzler, who once gave him a similar typewriter that he had found in a secondhand store.

Donald Edwin Westlake was born to Lillian and Albert Westlake on July 12, 1933, in Brooklyn, and was raised in Yonkers and Albany. He attended colleges in New York, but did not graduate. He married Abigail Adams in 1979, and the couple settled in Gallatin, N.Y. He was previously married to Nedra Henderson and Sandra Kalb.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Westlake is survived by four sons, Sean Westlake, Steven Westlake, Paul Westlake and Tod Westlake; two stepdaughters, Adrienne Adams and Katherine Adams; a stepson, Patrick Adams; a sister, Virginia VanDermark; and four grandchildren.