Paul John Eakin has written an important book for whoever teaches autobiography as a genre, reads it as a source of pleasure and insight, or might be considering writing their own autobiography. "How Our Lives Become Stories" is thoroughly researched, and carefully written.

Even before he starts to discuss how autobiographies ever get to be written, or how one person feels the need to write one, Eakin discusses the very existence of that which needs: the self. Starting with a review of the age-old discussion of the Cartesian cogito, Eakin goes on to consider the work of scholars who maintain that a sense of self cannot exist without a sense of the body. Is the self the product of the complex interconnections of the brain circuitry? Is it possible to possess a self without a body? Eakin uses John M Hull's "Touching the Stone: An Experience in Blindness", and Oliver Sacks's "A Leg to Stand On" to dramatise the ecological foundation of the self.

The second chapter, "Relational Selves, Relational Lives, Autobiography and the Myth of Autonomy," as its title suggests, challenges the myth of autonomy which, for Eakin, suggests "that the very act of writing a life story promotes a sense of self-determination not only in autobiographers but in their readers" as well. But Eakin also challenges the idea that women's autobiographies reveal that their identity formation is done in a more "relational" form than men's. Using examples as diverse as Kim Chernin's "In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story", John Edgar "Wideman's Brothers and Keepers", Sally Morgan's "My Place", and Art Spiegelman's "Maus: A Survivor's Tale", Eakin shows both how these autobiographies by men and women exemplify a "relational model of identity," as well as how they differ from the class of collaborative "as-told-to" autobiographies.

In each case, the "story of the story," or the narration of how each writer comes to write his/her autobiography has to necessarily pass through a very complex relationship with others, both in the family and in society. The self, here, is not the product of an individual force; rather, it is the result of a process in which the influence of parents or siblings has a crucial importance. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s "Colored People: A Memoir", and Leslie Marmon Silko's "Storyteller" are two of the texts Eakin uses to illustrate how the community -- its members, their own stories, their storytelling tradition -- becomes part of the self, as well as how the self acquires the characteristics it has precisely because it is part of this community.

The next chapter, "Storied Selves, Identity Through Self-Narration" explores how, in a child's development, self-narration is a powerful tool for the construction of identity. Using the example provided by a particularly telling episode in Penelope Lively's "Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived", Eakin argues that "memories. . . are constructed, and memory, itself. . . is plural." The creation or re-creation of one's stories, the cementing of memory, has different phases. From the child's perception of the passing of time -- the difference between the "now," and the "then" in Lively's example -- to what he calls "the memory talk," narrative plays a crucial part in the creation and maintenance of a sense of identity.

There exist, of course, what some consider "narrative disorders," such as "Dysnarrativia" and "Hypernarrativia." The problem, as Eakin cautions--after Foucault--is the "potentially disciplinary dimensions of these regulations of identity, especially when it is a question of labelling an individuals as healthy or diseased." A last chapter discusses the ethical and legal problems that may arise from memoirs: as a person tells her/his story, this narrative involves events in which other persons appear; the disclosures of this narrative can cause harm, and pain. Eakin showcases Kathryn Harrison's memoir "The Kiss" and the controversy it stirred both as a "merchandising of pain," and as a media event which put its author and her intentions under scrutiny.

But "The Kiss" is an extreme example, so Eakin uses Philip Roth's "Patrimony", as a kind of antidote, to dramatise the interpenetration of the story of the "other" (in this case Roth's father), and the self of the person writing the memoir. Indeed, as Eakin skilfully proves, it is impossible to legislate the whole practice of autobiography wholesale. One way or another, the need to tell one's story will continue being a necessary part of individual human development, whether as individuals or parts of a community.

In June 1908, a Russian democrat wrote to his wife from a Kresty Prison cell in St Petersburg: "Have just received your dear little letter with the butterfly from Volodya. I was very touched. Tell him there are no butterflies here in the prison yard except rhamni and P brassicae. Have you found any egerias?" Two years earlier, the boy had captured his first butterfly at the age of seven. His mother had taught him how to pin the insect to a board. The boy, however, grew up to be more famous for his literary prowess than his proficiency in lepidoptery. For all his name and fame as an acclaimed writer, Vladimir Nabokov remained a lepidopterophile till the last day of his life.

From Charles Darwin onwards there have been many instances of zoologists leaving their mark as powerful writers, but writers who have also been accomplished zoologists are a rare species. Nabokov was a rare bird; nay, a butterfly. He was passionate about both words and butterflies, but it were the former for which he is best remembered today. Yet, his critically acclaimed work on the latter remains largely unacknowledged outside lepidopterological circles. Nabokov, shattered as a youngster when he came to know that he had not discovered a new butterfly species, went on to actually discover many. Some were even named after him. He became an authority on the taxonomy of a family known as the Blues.

"The pleasures and rewards of literary inspiration are nothing beside the rapture of discovering a new organ under the microscope or an undescribed species on a mountainside in Iran or Peru. It is not improbable," he said in an interview in 1966, "that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology." Nabokov was to write elsewhere that he hunted butterflies "as a pretty boy in knickerbockers and sailor cap; as a lanky cosmopolitan expatriate in flannel bags and beret; as a fat hairless old man in shorts". Shortly after the American publication of his literary piece de resistance "Lolita", Nabokov was to say: "I do not know if (Anton) Chekhov was a good doctor, or Ingres a good fiddler, but I was certainly an ambitious lepidopterist..." He was.

This mammoth volume, collated from the Russian writer's fiction, letters, diaries, essays and interviews, as well his unpublished and uncorrected writings on the subject of butterflies, have been edited and annotated by Nabokov's biographer Brian Boyd, with Robert Michael Pyle, an expert on butterflies. All translations are by Nabokov's son Dmitri. The problem, if any, is that the sheer size of the anthology makes it a bit tiring at times for those interested in Nabokov the author; nevertheless it is a fascinating account of Nabokov the butterfly taxonomist.

One sees the relation between his writings and his attention to the natural world when one reads: "From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender." Nabokov's first work about butterflies was "In A Few Notes on Crimean Lepidoptera", published in 1920 by "The Entomologist", where he listed the specimens he had captured during the family's flight from the Soviet Revolution. The bulk of his scientific work was carried out in the years after his arrival in America, following another flight -- from Adolf Hitler. The 1941-47 period at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology was his most memorable as a lepidopterist.

He was not without flaws. All that talk about the artist and scientist begins to fall flat when his hostility towards evolutionary science becomes all-pervading. In a preface to the posthumous Russian edition of his poems, his widow Vera wrote that the concern with the "beyond" was Nabokov's "main theme". Somewhere down the line his metaphysical inclinations got the better of him, and he believed that the mimicry (the ability of butterflies to look like a pair of owl's eyes or a worm-infested leaf) of butterflies were "the secret decrees of nature". He did not believe in natural selection.

The last word comes from Dmitri Nabokov's memoir of his father, originally read at a memorial gathering in New York in 1977. "A few days before he died there was a moment I remember with special clarity. During our penultimate farewell, after I had kissed his still-warm forehead - as I had for years when saying goodnight or goodbye - tears suddenly welled in Father's eyes. I asked him why. He replied that a certain butterfly was already on the wing; and his eyes told me he no longer hoped that he would live to pursue it again."

Say you want to visit Yosemite. What difference will it make if you learn that the great national park was "discovered" in 1851 by a battalion of American soldiers while chasing a band of Native Americans? Or if you know that the nature subsequently understood as an American "Eden" was in fact the product of careful horticultural principles, long practised by the Miwok-Paiute tribe? If you think such knowledge will make a difference, On Vacation is an excellent book to take along; it's not, as we say, a day at the beach, but Lofgren wears a wide range of reference very lightly and commands a breezy reference to specialist knowledge in the burgeoning study of travel and tourism. On the other hand, if you don't especially care about all the history that has had to be effaced in order for the pure presentness of any vacation spot to come about, then you probably don't care much for reading anyway--so have a good trip.

Lofgren himself did, merely in writing this book; the Swedish academic thanks the University of California, Santa Cruz for being able to stay at the provost's house, overlooking Monterey Bay. Some of his zest for being on vacation is conveyed through mention of his own vacations, as he recounts a series of chapters about everybody learning how to enjoy themselves at everywhere from the boardwalk of Santa Cruz to the Hua Hin Railway Hotel in Thailand. (Mostly, though, the purview is strictly American and Eurocentric.) Conceptually, the book is organised in terms of a distinction by a French sociologist between those who travel in search of new sights (termed the Phileas Fogg model, grounded on the eighteen-century Grand Tour) and those who travel in search of escape (the Robinson Crusoe model, developed into the "symbolic vacation universes" of modern tourism). But the strength of these pages is not in their conception; indeed, in many places, the distinction just collapses, and we could say that vacationing today is founded on its collapse.

Instead, what keeps the pages turning is our author's sunny regard for all manner of familiar and not-so-familiar questions. How did Niagara Falls become "sublime?" Why does the cottage culture of the Swedish west coast have so much in common with Martha's Vineyard? How did the Riviera come to be invented as a tourist narrative? What makes the Canary Islands distinctive in the context of Mediterranean tourism? Answers and anecdotes to all these and more can be found here. A final section, on the Global Beach, radiates from Waikiki, and eventually encompasses England's Butlin's Holiday Camps as well as Las Vegas. Even when On Vocation seems, well, on holiday from any particular thesis, the book is fun to read. At one point, we read the following comment: "To me the most striking characteristic of a souvenir is its openness, its readiness to carry the mind in all directions." The same might be said about Lofgren himself. Nothing to do with vacations is foreign to him. He doesn't even patronise the people who take even the most banal of them. The major triumph of this book is in a sense its equanimous tone, rare in any sort of discussion of anything to do with tourism Did people go on vacations before they went our tours? Is a vacation the same as a tour? What's the difference, if any, between a tourist and a traveller?

Lofgren simply doesn't present his material in this way, although he almost always flirts with doing so. It's as if the author, in conjunction with the University of California Press, has made an effort to produce a scholarly book, which uses words like "sociogram," in the form of a popular survey, which is as likely to cite the comic strip, Doonesbury, as yet another French sociologist. Few of the subjects examined in this book are original. What's original is that so much-a few pages of mini-history on the postcard, a paragraph on the pleasures of "theme park slums"-is included in the book, and packaged with so much wit and intelligence as well as amplitude. The pictures of Swedish tourists (one pair leaving on vacation, the other returning , both bedecked in the most improbable sunglasses) on p. 175 and p. 272, respectively, are each alone worth the price of the book.

Evolutionary science may said to be still in its infancy. Many theories pertaining to evolutionary psychology, hence, seem fantastic. Geoffrey Miller's theories about sexual selection in evolution has drawn mixed reactions. While many have dismissed Miller as a capricious storyteller, taking his theories with more than a pinch of salt; still others have found nothing wrong with them. Perhaps it depends on which side of the evolutionary divide one is on. Whatever be one's predilections, one thing is certain - after reading this book, one will always keep wondering. Dating will never be the same again. Neither will be mating. There is one thing this provocative book is bound to achieve - it is likely to change one's perceptions about creativity and intelligence forever.

Charles Darwin's greatest contribution to evolutionary theory was his contention of "natural selection", leading to the corollary about survival of the fittest". His other theory of "sexual selection by mate choice" contended that creatures which reproduce sexually must evolve features to attract mates, for they will not leave behind offspring unless they do. Darwin introduced the concept in "The Origin of Species" (1859) and pursued it further in "The Descent of Man" (1871). While the first came to be widely accepted and talked and written about, the second remained largely ignored for more than a century. While this argument (the latter) was virtually scoffed at, the former could not satisfactorily explain why humans of all beings were the most creative, why their brains were the most developed. Miller argues it has all to do with sexual selection.

According to Miller, natural selection is about living long enough to reproduce while sexual selection is about convincing others to mate with you. He says biologists have failed to understand the human mind - why they are so creative -- simply because they did not make the right association between Darwin's evolutionary theory and the humanities. The size of the human brain has more than doubled in the past two million years, from 700 ml to around 1450 ml. Critics say that the evolved natures of humans happened during this period. But Miller insists that technological innovation had remained relatively stagnant during this era. He says when the brain stopped increasing in size, axes and picks were still in use, and goes on to assert that there is hardly any correlation between the two phenomena.

When human lineage split from chimpanzees about six million years ago, selection for social intelligence played a key role. For survival and procreation, the one factor that stands out in the determination of social intelligence was sexual selection - the choice of a mate. It is here that Miller's theory takes a bizarre turn - one that has drawn considerable flak. As he delves deeper into evolutionary psychology (which arguably lies somewhere between evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology), what emerges is the idea that the human brain did not just evolve for survival, but also for courtship, to attract sexual partners. He harps on the handicap principle of Amotz Zahavi and says it does not apply so much to intelligence as it does to behaviours like art, music, and poetic rendition of language.

It is sexual selection that has evolved the sexes differently, not only in terms of their physical attributes, but also in their thinking. Miller tries to steer away from stereotype arguments about men look for beauty and women for status. The biggest advantage of the brain is to attract a mate and pass on the genes. Men and women were just as attracted to partners with wit and intelligence, as they were with good looks and bodies. These were traits that were sexually attractive and went a long way in ensuring a fertile, healthy and qualitative passing on of genes down the generations. In other words, "the richness and subtlety of human language, art, music, creativity, and morality are all the result of sexual choices made over countless generations", says Miller, is a senior research fellow at the Centre of Economic Learning and Social Evolution at University College, London.