Sex, Drugs, a Greek Mathematician and Mastodons

But military abuses were just the beginning. All the recent outrages of drug company behavior are evident in amphetamine's history -- the publishing of only favorable studies, the enlisting of ordinary doctors to do pseudo-research, even the ghostwriting of articles for "opinion-leader" academic physicians.

Amphetamine was marketed as the first scientific anti-depressant; combined with a barbiturate sedative as "Dexamyl" after the war, it became a suburban speedball for the Age of Anxiety. It also had a life as a diet pill. And all along, in the shadows, was its "recreational" career, first with the Beats, then with the free-love movement in the '60s and finally with the pitiful meth freaks of our day.

-- David Brown

THE LEGACY OF THE MASTODON The Golden Age of Fossils in America By Keith Thomson | Yale Univ. 386 pp. $35

The year was 1799, and one of the more peculiar episodes in the annals of paleontology was unfolding in Orange County, N.Y. Word had spread that the fossilized remains of a giant elephant-like creature had been uncovered, and soon souvenir hunters and professional fossil-finders sped to the site.

The mastodon fossils were of particular interest to Thomas Jefferson, soon to be elected the nation's third president. Intrigued by large bones from a previous find, at Great Bone Lick in Ohio, Jefferson had incorporated the fossils into a defense of America's wildlife, which Europeans had disparaged as weak and small. It seems odd now, but Jefferson and his allies were eager in 1799 to uncover mastodon bones both to promote the size (and fierceness) of America's animals and to attack political rivals who tended to be more enamored of European ideas.

This tale begins Thomson's look at the early years of American fossil hunting. In addition to a history of paleontology, it is an account of the opening of the West and of how adventurous and often egotistical men mined the new land for fossils. The book explains how Darwinian evolution made the second half of this "golden age" important scientifically, but Thomson really succeeds by bringing to life the fossil-finders and their world.

-- Marc Kaufman

The reviewers are science writers for The Washington Post.