Paul Q. Kane.

Paul Q. Kane is Commonweal's business manager.

The Kanes "were Roosevelt Republicans and then Roosevelt Democrats," my father used to say. From a broad-brush opening like that, he'd go directly into minute details, and bring to life some aspect of our family history. People, places, decisions made in a different time and place, all these became vivid and immediate in the spell of his stories.

Reading David McCullough's John Adams (Simon and Schuster, $35, 751 pp.) reminded me of sitting at the kitchen table listening to my Dad. In this best-selling biography, McCullough transports readers to the domestic and national dramas of the late eighteenth century. When people think of John Adams, if at all, they remember him as the one-term, second president who was involved in the American Revolution, and who wrote a lot of letters to his wife Abigail. But McCullough introduces a real family (the book is as much about the Adams clan as it is about John), making real choices and sacrifices for revolutionary events that had no definitive outcome.

John and Abigail Adams had strong opinions and feelings, which they expressed in the intimacy of letters. John worked hard to learn French for his diplomatic mission to Paris, and found his fellow diplomat, Benjamin Franklin, lazy but charming. John and Abigail's long separations left them both feeling lonely. McCullough uses the letters to paint vivid pictures of the key people involved in the early republic, among them Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton who with political ruthlessness successfully developed the American economy as Treasury secretary. Seldom would I describe a historical biography as gripping, but this one works on so many levels that I finished it in only a few days.

Most successfully, McCullough makes history accessible to a general audience in a way which might inform and direct our democracy. Adams's world, as much as our own, was filled with great change, political infighting, and intrigue. As president, John Adams signed into law the Anti-Sedition Act when the United States entered an undeclared sea war with France. The law was pushed by his own Federalist Party to keep their Republican opponents in check, under the guise of protecting the United States from subversives. It was not the president's finest moment. Certainly it provides a cautionary tale about leadership under the conditions of war, and consequent threats to civil liberties.

Like many things really old, dinosaurs are a recent discovery. The people who made the discovery and began the classification of dinosaurs experienced wonder and awe about these creatures' size, variety, and ultimate extinction. Deborah Cadbury's Terrible Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science (Henry Holt and Company, $27.50, 374 pp.) tells about those early days of dinosaur study, just before the controversies of evolution were to galvanize sectors of religious faith and science.

Cadbury begins her story in 1812 on the coast of England where Mary Anning (of "She sells sea shells by the seashore" tongue-twister fame) spent much of her life walking the shore near her hometown of Dorset, collecting and selling petrified curios to tourists, in order to support her family. On one excursion, she discovered the fossil of an unknown crocodile-like creature which raised the interest of scholars in the developing field of geology. Some of their hypotheses seem ludicrous in light of later discoveries, but others, such as Gideon Mantell's theory of seventy-foot dinosaurs, based only on small skeletal remains, were fairly accurate. Cadbury portrays well the dinosaur pioneers' struggles for knowledge, fame, and influence, as well as their lasting contributions.

Because of the Jody and Mary Attard case, much ink has been spilled recently on the ethical and ontological questions posed by conjoined twins. Conjoined twins were once referred to as Siamese twins, after the nationality of Chang and Eng Bunker, who lived from 1811 to 1874. Born into a world where modern surgery was just beginning to take shape, these two men (conjoined at the hip and sharing a stomach) lived not only under the scrutiny of the emerging medical profession, but also in an era of traveling "freak shows." Darin Strauss's novel, Chang and Eng (Dutton, $13, 323 pp.), faithfully portrays the twins' cultural context and its assumptions even as it reflects contemporary notions of privacy and identity.

The few known facts about Chang and Eng are the stuff of pulp fiction. They were born along the Mekong River in what is now known as Thailand, traveled to the United States, were placed on display in various world-traveling road shows, and eventually settled in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, during the Civil War, as pig farmers. There they married sisters and fathered twenty-one--yes, twenty-one--children between them.

Strauss tells their story from the point of view of Eng, who longs to be separate from Chang, envies his brother's seeming ability to accept their lot in life, and struggles with being on tour and display. Separation is impossible, as doctors repeatedly determine that severing the band uniting the stomach they share would lead to their deaths. Readers will sympathize with Eng as he expresses thoughts such as, "But, my brother, it is my very togetherness with you that ruins everything." What would modern life be without the paradox of seeking full individuality, with its promise of freedom, while simultaneously desiring intimate connection and unity with other human beings? This tension creates good drama, and the book also succeeds in exploring what it means to live well under duress.