Steve Coll’s riveting new book not only gives us the most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet, but in telling the epic story of Osama bin Laden’s extended family, it also reveals the crucial role that his relatives and their relationship with the royal house of Saud played in shaping his thinking, his ambitions, his technological expertise and his tactics.

“The Bin Ladens” uses the prism of one family to examine the mind-boggling, culture-rocking effects that sudden oil wealth had on Saudi Arabia, while shedding new light on the “troubled, compulsive, greed-inflected, secret-burdened” relationship that developed between that desert nation and the United States, and the conflicts many Saudis felt, pulled between the traditional pieties of their ancestors and the glittering temptations of the West.

It is a book that possesses the novelistic energy of a rags-to-riches family epic, following its sprawling cast of characters as they travel from Mecca and Medina to Las Vegas and Disney World, and yet, at the same time, it is a book that, in tracing the connections between the public and the private, the political and the personal, stands as a substantive bookend to Mr. Coll’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning 2004 book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to Sept. 10, 2001.”

That earlier work focused on the rise of Islamic extremism during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s in Afghanistan, where Mr. bin Laden first emerged as a leader, while this volume looks at the familial, cultural and political forces that shaped him as he came of age in Saudi Arabia.

Parts of Mr. Coll’s narrative are heavily indebted to other reporters’ pioneering work on this subject — most notably, Peter Bergen’s two books on Mr. bin Laden, and “The Looming Tower,” Lawrence Wright’s searing book about Al Qaeda and the road to 9/11. But by focusing on Mr. bin Laden’s conflicted relationship with his family and that family’s complicated relationship with the West, Mr. Coll, a staff writer for The New Yorker who also worked for many years at The Washington Post, has added fascinating new details to our understanding of how Mr. bin Laden evolved from a loyal family adjutant into an angry black sheep, intent on lashing out at the very people — the Saudi royal family and the United States of America — that his father and brothers had cultivated in their business dealings for years.

Just as recent books like Jacob Weisberg’s “Bush Tragedy” have underscored the role Oedipal rivalries may have played in George W. Bush’s presidency and his decision to go to war against Iraq, so this volume underscores the role that Freudian family dynamics may have played in Mr. bin Laden’s radicalization and his declaration of war against America.

Mr. Coll traces how Osama — who was still a boy when his father, Muhammad, was killed in an airplane accident in 1967 — found a succession of father figures in a series of radical mentors, including a high school gym teacher who involved him in an after-school Islamic study group and Abdullah Azzam, a charismatic scholar who introduced the young Osama to “the concept of transnational jihad.”

Mr. Coll’s book also traces a host of bizarre connections among its dramatis personae, suggesting that there are often less than six degrees of separation when it comes to the new globalized world of international finance. We learn, for instance, that Muhammad bin Laden began his rise by working as a bricklayer and mason for Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, which had been formed to manage the oil rights of the Standard Oil Company of California, and that the huge international company that the bin Ladens built would come to do business with well-known American firms like General Electric, and draw on advice from the law firm Baker Botts, headed by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state and Bush family adviser.

We also learn that Jim Bath, a former reserve pilot with the Texas Air National Guard who used to carouse with George W. Bush, later became a business partner in Houston with Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half-brother.

The ultimate self-made man, the family patriarch Muhammad bin Laden left an impoverished and deeply religious canyon village to seek his fortune (during an early interlude in the pilgrim city of Jeddah, he was so poor that he reportedly slept in a ditch he dug in the sand) and through a combination of skill, acumen and the assiduous cultivation of the royal family, became the king’s principal builder, overseeing renovations of sacred sites in Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. He would bequeath to his children not just a fortune, but also what Mr. Coll calls a “transforming vision of ambition and religious faith in a borderless world.” His British-educated son, Salem, who took over the company after his death, would expand its international reach, and he would also embrace a Westernized, jet-set existence that allowed him to indulge his eccentricities to the fullest.

In fact, Salem emerges from this volume as a compelling, larger-than-life figure, a picaresque playboy, at once guileless, brilliant and self-indulgent, who held together the increasingly fractious bin Laden clan through sheer force of will and charisma. Salem, who dressed in jeans, loved airplanes and liked to play the harmonica, reportedly “paid a bandleader at an Academy Awards party in Los Angeles hundreds of dollars to let him sing ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in seven languages.”

Mr. Coll reports that Salem organized family expeditions to Las Vegas, shipped thousands of cases of Tabasco sauce back to Saudi Arabia and dreamed of marrying four women from four Western nations: his estate, he imagined, would resemble the United Nations, with four houses, one flying an American flag, one a German flag, one a French flag and one the Union Jack. Salem died in 1988 in a plane accident in Texas.

As for Osama bin Laden, Mr. Coll, like Mr. Wright in “The Looming Tower,” suggests that the Qaeda founder’s turn to international war against the United States was not inevitable. Mr. Coll writes that when the Saudi royal family agreed in the summer of 1990 to the arrival of American troops in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Mr. bin Laden “offered no public dissent” at the time, but “moved quickly with the rest of his family to protect his personal fortune against the possibility that the Al-Saud regime might collapse.” Although he had come to see himself as an “international Islamic guerrilla leader,” his views at the time, Mr. Coll writes, were still “nuanced, changeable and laced with contradictions.”

Increasingly at odds with the Saudi royal family, Mr. bin Laden left the kingdom in 1991 for the Sudan, where he bought a farm and raised horses and sunflowers while training jihadis (whom he sent to places like Bosnia). “Osama seemed to believe during this period,” Mr. Coll writes, “that he could have it all in Sudan — wives, children, business, horticulture, horse breeding, leisure, pious devotion and jihad — all of it buoyed by the deference and public reputation due a proper sheikh. He did not yet seem to grasp that his enterprise, particularly in its support for violence against governments friendly to or dependent upon the Al-Saud, might prove difficult to reconcile with the interests of his family in Jeddah.”

In June 1993, Mr. Coll reports, the family, most likely under pressure from the Saudi government, moved to expel Osama as a shareholder of the Muhammad bin Laden Company and the Saudi bin Laden Group. The following year the family publicly repudiated him, the Ministry of Interior announced that he had been formally stripped of his Saudi citizenship, and Mr. bin Laden began writing lengthy essays denouncing the royal family, which he circulated by fax.

By 1995, Mr. Coll writes, there was “a hint of King Lear in the wilderness” to his exile: he was out of money, one of his wives had divorced him, and his eldest son had left him to return to Saudi Arabia. Isolation fueled Mr. bin Laden’s self-righteousness, however, and his wrath increasingly focused on the United States, particularly after Washington put pressure on Sudan’s government to expel him from Khartoum, leading to his exile in 1996 back to the harsh lands of Afghanistan.

While he careered toward violence, other members of his family moved to strengthen their ties with the West. There were family investments in enterprises ranging from Iridium, a satellite communications network, to the Hard Rock Cafe franchise in the Middle East.

In the days after 9/11 Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador in Washington — who met with President Bush on the evening of September 13 — helped arrange (with F.B.I. permission) a special chartered plane flight to carry more than a dozen bin Ladens, some of whom had been living in the United States for years, back home to Saudi Arabia. Subsequent F.B.I. investigations “turned up no evidence of complicity by the bin Laden family in terrorist violence,” Mr. Coll writes, and a decision seems to have been made at the White House sometime early in 2002 that, barring the emergence of new evidence, “the U.S. government would not sanction the bin Laden family in any way because of its history with Osama.”

One F.B.I. analyst summed up the bureau’s assessment this way: there were “millions” of bin Ladens “running around” and “99.999999 percent of them are of the non-evil variety.”

I tried to show that radical Islamism is a modern philosophy, not just a heap of medieval prejudices. In its sundry versions, it draws on local and religious roots, just as it claims to do. But it also draws on totalitarian inspirations from 20th-century Europe. I wanted my readers to understand that with its double roots, religious and modern, perversely intertwined, radical Islamism wields a lot more power, intellectually speaking, than naïve observers might suppose.

I declared myself happy in principle with the notion of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, just as I was happy to see the Taliban chased from power. But I wanted everyone to understand that military action, by itself, could never defeat an ideology like radical Islamism — could never contribute more than 10 percent (I invented this statistic, as an illustrative figure) to a larger solution. I hammered away on that point in the days before the war. And today I have to acknowledge that, for all my hammering, radical Islamism, in several of its resilient branches, the ultra-radical and the beyond-ultra-radical, has proved to be stronger even than I suggested.

A lot of people right now make the common-sense supposition that if extremist ideologies have lately entered a sort of grisly golden age, the Bush administration’s all-too-predictable blundering in Iraq must bear the blame. Yes, certainly; but that can’t be the only explanation.

Extremist movements have been growing bigger and wilder for more than three decades now, during that period, America has tried pretty much everything from a policy point of view. Our presidents have been satanic (Richard Nixon), angelic (Jimmy Carter), a sleepy idiot savant (Ronald Reagan), a cagey realist (George H. W. Bush), wonderfully charming (Bill Clinton) and famously otherwise (George W. Bush). And each president’s Middle Eastern policy has conformed to his character.

In regard to Saddam Hussein alone, our government has lent him support (Mr. Reagan), conducted a limited war against him (the first President Bush), inflicted sanctions and bombings (Mr. Clinton, in other than his charming mode), and crudely overthrown him. Every one of those policies has left the Iraqi people worse off than before, even if nowadays, from beneath the rubble, the devastated survivors can at least ruminate about a better future — though I doubt that many of them are in any mood to do so.

And each new calamity for Iraq has, like manure, lent new fertility to the various extremist organizations. The entire sequence of events may suggest that America is uniquely destined to do the wrong thing. All too likely! But it may also suggest that America is not the fulcrum of the universe, and extremist ideologies have prospered because of their own ability to adapt and survive — their strength, in a word.

I notice a little gloomily that I may have underestimated the extremist ideologies in still another respect. Five years ago, anyone who took an interest in Middle Eastern affairs would easily have recalled that, over the course of a century, the intellectuals of the region have gone through any number of phases — liberal, Marxist, secularist, pious, traditionalist, nationalist, anti-imperialist and so forth, just like intellectuals everywhere else in the world.

Western intellectuals without any sort of Middle Eastern background would naturally have manifested an ardent solidarity with their Middle Eastern and Muslim counterparts who stand in the liberal vein — the Muslim free spirits of our own time, who argue in favor of human rights, rational thought (as opposed to dogma), tolerance and an open society.

But that was then. In today’s Middle East, the various radical Islamists, basking in their success, paint their liberal rivals and opponents as traitors to Muslim civilization, stooges of crusader or Zionist aggression. And, weirdly enough, all too many intellectuals in the Western countries have lately assented to those preposterous accusations, in a sanitized version suitable for Western consumption.

Even in the Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example. But instead of enjoying the unstinting support of their non-Muslim colleagues, the Muslim liberals find themselves routinely berated in the highbrow magazines and the universities as deracinated nonentities, alienated from the Muslim world. Or they find themselves pilloried as stooges of the neoconservative conspiracy — quite as if any writer from a Muslim background who fails to adhere to at least a few anti-imperialist or anti-Zionist tenets of the Islamist doctrine must be incapable of thinking his or her own thoughts.

A dismaying development. One more sign of the power of the extremist ideologies — one more surprising turn of events, on top of all the other dreadful and gut-wrenching surprises.

The American novelist Jay McInerney has suggested that writing comes ‘out of a deep well of loneliness and a desire to fill some gap. No one in his right mind would sit down to write a book if he were a well-adjusted, happy man.’ This too is not quite nonsense, but comes close to being so. What about P. G. Wodehouse, by all accounts as happy as a lark, who was able to say ‘I love writing’, even though he also said that his way of working was to ‘put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and curse a bit’.

There are writers of course who seem always to have worn a hair shirt, Conrad for instance who claimed that the sight of a pen and inkwell made him angry. His letters are full of moans about the difficulty of writing; it’s a dismal trade that is making him ill. Nevertheless it was the trade he chose and he stuck at it. Surely there was some satisfaction to be found.

It may be that many of us do indeed take to writing because we are not, as Beryl Bainbridge has said, very good at living. So we try to make sense of things on paper instead. This may be why success is so often bad for a writer; it allows him to suppose he has mastered life. Complacency sets in; he is less curious about himself and other people, and his work suffers.

There are simpler explanations. Ambition is one — the desire to be well thought of. Being a writer may not get you a better table at a restaurant, but it does make you more interesting, to some people at least. Their initial interest may well be disappointed on further acquaintance, but while it exists, it is gratifying. Orwell, despite asserting that everything he wrote was in the cause of advancing democratic socialism, was honest enough to admit that the desire to be praised and make a show in the world was one motive for writing. For anyone who lacked confidence in youth or had a thin time of it at school, writing is a form of revenge. Even the most self-effacing of writers is crying out ‘look at me’ in every book or even newspaper article.
More admirable is the simple pleasure to be had from making something, common to the practice of any art or craft. To bring into being what did not previously exist, and to present it in an agreeable shape, is deeply satisfying — even if the final result is always inevitably less than you looked to achieve. Plato was right: the ideal work of art exists only in the imagination and the reality must always disappoint. Fortunately however, in the least satisfactory work, there will usually be some pages, some scenes, some characters that delight their creator, and so persuade him to go on. This is why Eric Linklater, a couple of years before his death, was able to say that the best times in his life had been when he was working on a novel and it was going well.

Scott Fitzgerald thought it was ‘a hell of a profession’ — I prefer the word trade; also that ‘you don’t write because you want to say something; you write because you have something to say’. That’s questionable. If you have something to say, you write an article, not a novel. A novel is, for writer and reader alike, a voyage of exploration; in the writer’s case it’s a way of entering unknown territory and finding out what he thinks and feels. If he can take the reader with him all the way to the end, so much the better. But for him the journey itself is enough. Curiosity sets narrative going and the writer, like the reader, will, if all goes well, find himself surprised by much that he writes. Write because you have something to say? No: it’s a novel, not a tract or argument. The old line — how do I know what I think till I see what I’ve said? — is more to the point.

Finally it’s an addiction. Few novelists retire — and not only because they can’t afford to. Without a book to work on, we wouldn’t know how to get through the day.

To that extent, writing is an escape from boredom; also, oddly, from yourself.

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In 1994, Matthew Israel and David Marsh obtained a patent for an “apparatus for administering electrical aversive stimulus.” (An image from the patent is shown here.) They dubbed the device a Graduated Electronic Decelerator, or GED, its purpose being to “decelerate” a patient engaged in inappropriate behavior by administering an electric shock.

In the GEDs used at the Rotenberg Center, battery and receiver are bundled into a backpack, with electrodes routed through the straps to make contact with the patient’s skin. Guards carry remote control devices with patients’ photos emblazoned on them.

In filing his patent, Israel followed the example of Skinner. Among Skinner’s best-known inventions was the operant conditioning box, or Skinner Box, a cage designed to allow researchers to administer rewards (food) and punishments (electric shocks) to lab animals without having to interact directly with the animal. Skinner also invented the “air crib,” a box for taking care of infants without having to swaddle or diaper them. Among his most controversial inventions, it was also jokingly called an “heir conditioner.”

“The method of treatment of this invention,” according to the patent, consists in “securing a remotely activated apparatus for administering electrical aversive stimulus to a patient to be treated. The patient is then observed for signs of undesired behavior.” The patent specifies self-injury as the sort of behavior to be deterred. But, according to a January article in the Globe, therapists at the Rotenberg Center have been accused of being more liberal in their definition of “undesired behavior,” delivering shocks for offenses such as swearing or shouting. In August of last year, therapists at the school received a call from a disgruntled patient posing as a staff member, who ordered them to administer multiple shocks (in one case, as many as 77) to two students with whom he was having a dispute. The shocks were administered before the hoax was discovered.

In Skinner’s “Walden Two” the founder explains that children in the community are taught to control their impulses “[b]y having the children ‘take’ a more and more painful shock” because, he explains, “[s]ome of us learn [self-]control, more or less by accident. The rest of us go all our lives not even understanding how it is possible, and blaming our failure on being born the wrong way.” The problem with utopian solutions in real-life communities like the Rotenberg Center, of course, is that not only the children need to learn self-control; self-control is also required of those with their fingers on the shock button.

I hovered behind them while pretending to be foreign, so that if they tried to speak to me I could pretend I couldn’t speak English and thus avoid becoming an accessory to their thuggery. When the next train arrived there was a mad scrum of people pushing, shoving, kicking, and trampling over each other. I was bemused: I had been under the impression we were about to board a train to Manchester, not the last space shuttle sent to whisk mankind away from Planet Earth’s apocalyptic doom.

I found a seat in the corner and huddled under my coat so that no one would acknowledge or speak to me. The last thing I wanted was a conversation with a stranger at eight in the morning about his kids whom I’ve never met. It’s fine on a ten-minute journey, but you run out of things to say after half an hour, and that is when they start showing you pictures on their mobile. I have no idea why people sit next to me on a train and then open up to me like I’m their official biographer, but I don’t like it – and therefore opt for an icy demeanour, and maybe a forced smile as I thrust my way past to the buffet car.

One rowdy football supporter shouted: “I hope they bloody win. The last seven times I’ve been up here the silly idiots have lost.” He was drinking vodka at 8am and his attitude was rather frightening, so I was amazed when his phone rang to the tune of The Sound of Music. He then said: “Yeh mate, I’m on the train, on the train yeh, she was OK, I dunno I used the garden hose on her, she loved it I’ll give her a go on the lawnmower next, she wants it.”

I could feel the concern rising in the carriage. It sounded like this man had tried to hose down his poor wife to death and had been unsuccessful, so was now resorting to lawn-mowering her. It’s always disturbing listening to people’s private lives, more so when you don’t get the full picture, just a rather bizarre piece of the jigsaw.

Carrying this book around recently I’ve caught more than a little flak, not least from my kids, who once thought of me as a literary intellectual, or at the very least as a guy who espoused the virtues of reading. Hey, really, I told them — as well as my wife and the guy sitting next to me on the subway — no kidding, it’s a serious book, written by a professor of literature who’s also a psychoanalyst. A French professor/shrink, no less, who’s written books on Proust, Maupassant, Balzac, Laclos and Stendhal, among other canonical heavyweights. So lay off.

It seems hard to believe that a book called “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” would hit the best-seller lists in France, where books are still regarded as sacred objects and the writer occupies a social position somewhere between the priest and the rock star. The ostensible anti-intellectualism of the title seems more Anglo-Saxon than Gallic, an impression reinforced by the epigram from Oscar Wilde: “I never read a book I must review; it prejudices you so.”

Bayard’s critique of reading involves practical and theoretical as well as social considerations, and at times it seems like a tongue-in-cheek example of reader-response criticism, which emphasizes the reader’s role in creating meaning. He wants to show us how much we lie about the way we read, to ourselves as well as to others, and to assuage our guilt about the way we actually read and talk about books. “I know few areas of private life, with the exception of finance and sex, in which it’s as difficult to obtain accurate information,” he writes. There are many ways of relating to books that are not acknowledged in educated company, including skimming, skipping, forgetting and glancing at covers.

Bayard’s hero in this enterprise is the librarian in Robert Musil’s “Man Without Qualities” (a book I seem to recall having read halfway through, and Bayard claims to have skimmed), custodian of millions of volumes in the country of Kakania. He explains to a general seeking cultural literacy his own scheme for mastery of this vast, nearly infinite realm: “If you want to know how I know about every book here, I can tell you! Because I never read any of them.” If he were to get caught up in the particulars of a few books, the librarian implies, he would lose sight of the bigger picture, which is the relation of the books to one another — the system we call cultural literacy, which forms our collective library. “As cultivated people know,” Bayard tells us, “culture is above all a matter of orientation. Being cultivated is a matter of not having read any book in particular, but of being able to find your bearings within books as a system, which requires you to know that they form a system and to be able to locate each element in relation to the others.”

Musil’s librarian is a purist, but a perusal of the reviews in this and other publications would probably yield, if only we had the proper instruments, many less extreme examples of literate nonreading. Book reviewers generally imply that they have read the entire oeuvre of the author under discussion, as well as those of his peers, and I have no doubt they will continue to do so. You’d think Nicholson Baker’s “U and I” (a short book I read in its entirety), in which the younger novelist writes a kind of critique of John Updike based on his admittedly fragmentary and incomplete reading, would have cured us of the omniscient stance in book reviewing. But I don’t see many phrases like “From what I’ve read about ‘Moby-Dick …” or “the part of ‘Finnegans Wake’ that I tried to read …” in the review pages. Bayard, though, regards such disclaimers as understood. He doesn’t blame us for fudging, and he doesn’t want us to blame ourselves.

He proposes, and employs, a new set of scholarly abbreviations to go along with op. cit. and ibid.: UB: book unknown to me; SB: book I have skimmed; HB: book I have heard about; and FB: book I have forgotten.

For Bayard, who is well served by Jeffrey Mehlman’s fluid and elegant translation, skimming and sampling are two of the most common forms of reading behavior, particularly with regard to Proust. Paul Valéry, in his funerary tribute in La Nouvelle Revue Française, makes a virtue out of his admittedly sketchy knowledge of Proust by claiming: “The interest of the book lies in each fragment. We can open the book wherever we choose.” Bayard defends skimming as a mode of reading. “The fertility of this mode of discovery markedly unsettles the difference between reading and nonreading, or even the idea of reading at all. … It appears that most often, at least for the books that are central to our particular culture, our behavior inhabits some intermediate territory, to the point that it becomes difficult to judge whether we have read them or not.”

Lest the reader, or the nonreader, think that Bayard underestimates the power of reading, he proposes that we are all essentially literary constructs, defined by our own inner libraries: the books we’ve read, skimmed and heard about. “We are the sum of these accumulated books,” he writes. (And make no mistake about it, this prof is far more literate and widely read than he pretends to be.)

After anatomizing the different types of nonreading, Bayard addresses the social implications in a section called “Literary Confrontations.” I commend his advice for meeting an author and being forced to say something about his or her new book: “Praise it without going into detail.”

The funniest section in the book describes the encounter between the anthropologist Laura Bohannan and an African tribe, the Tiv, whom she has been living among. She tries to read “Hamlet” to them in the hopes of demonstrating the universality of the story, but the way in which the tribe rejects those parts of the tale that don’t square with their own cultural traditions — they don’t believe in ghosts, for instance — renders the attempt ludicrous.

Bayard proposes the term “inner book” to designate “the set of mythic representations, be they collective or individual, that come between the reader and any new piece of writing, shaping his reading without his realizing it.” This notion coincides with Stanley Fish’s concept of “interpretive communities” of readers, although Bayard’s own inner book may be more indebted to home-team text destabilizers like Derrida and Lacan. Indeed, Bayard sounds more French in the later pages as he employs phrases like “consensual space” and dissolves the boundaries and false oppositions between reader and writer and book into one big sloppy pool of écriture.

To what end? Bayard finally reveals his diabolical intent: he claims that talking about books you haven’t read is “an authentic creative activity.” As a teacher of literature, he seems to believe that his ultimate goal is to encourage creativity. “All education,” he writes, “should strive to help those receiving it to gain enough freedom in relation to works of art to themselves become writers and artists.”

It’s a charming but ultimately terrifying prospect — a world full of writers and artists. In Bayard’s nonreading utopia the printing press would never have been invented, let alone penicillin or the MacBook.

I seriously doubt that pretending to have read this book will boost your creativity. On the other hand, reading it may remind you why you love reading.

The sexual aspects of the story are fascinating because they’re presented so matter-of-factly. Tamar’s second husband practices coitus interruptus in order not to impregnate her. Tamar dresses like a harlot in order to seduce her father-in-law. Judah solicits a prostitute. These are all things that one would imagine should be kept private, not immortalized in a Divine work, right? I mean, what’s the good moral lesson here? Why should all this bad behavior be canonized when it could just as easily have been left out or glossed over in the narrative?

The wikipedia page on Tamar does a nice job of presenting a lot of the various theories that critics and commentators have come up with, and I think many of them are very convincing, and likely quite accurate. But I have my own interpretation.

Sexual impropriety can certainly cause all kinds of problems. Making poor relationship choices is the kind of thing that’s very likely to kick you in the ass somewhere down the road. Making bad choices about who you sleep with, and why, could have serious ramifications on the rest of your life. But these poor choices can also teach you important lessons that you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. And perhaps most importantly, a person who sleeps around, or is otherwise promiscuous, may be completely competent in other areas. Judah, though obviously not the king of healthy and trusting relationships, is a good leader and an example for his brothers. King David, another guy with questionable sexual habits, is generally considered to one of the wisest men in Jewish history. His son, King Solomon, also considered a pretty smart cookie, is known for having hundreds of wives, and hundreds of concubines, and though the rabbis aren’t happy about that choice, they are pretty happy about the Temple he built, which he was able to do despite what one imagines was a fairly significant sexual distraction.

Today, especially in America, we have this sadly puritanical view of sex and sex scandals. We are appalled that our political leaders are at all sexually deviant, and we demand to know the details, to have them splashed on the front page of newspapers, and discussed ad nauseum on talk shows and blogs of every kind. I’ll be the first to say that I think much of the behavior we hear about is reprehensible, but it simply doesn’t concern me if Larry Craig wants to have sex in a bathroom stall with another man, or if Bill Clinton wants a blowjob. What I care about is health care, and human rights, and education. And if Craig can get it on in a public bathroom and then come out and balance the budget, then I support him (sadly, balancing a budget seems to be far beyond Sen. Craig’s capabilities, but go with me, just for the sake of argument). And if Clinton can get a blowjob and then negotiate the end to terrorism in Northern Ireland, then I say get the man a few more girls like Monica and send him off to Jerusalem.

At the end of the day, I don’t care what happens in anyone else’s bedroom as long as it’s consensual, and no one ends up hurt. And what’s more, I think that learning from the mistakes we make with our lovers is an important part of figuring out how to be good people. I love that the Bible includes stories of people fucking up, and then fixing whatever it is that they’ve done wrong. I wish American politics could take a page from that book.

Books are for pantywaists. Or at least that’s how ”Stephen Colbert,” the excitable commentator played to rock-star perfection by Stephen Colbert, viewed them before he became a published author. Now comes the flip-flop, as Mr. Colbert brings the gale-force power of his promotional talents to the hawking of ”I Am America (And So Can You!),” a booklike object with his face plastered on its cover. Books are still for pantywaists, but now they’re for souvenir-seeking denizens of what is modestly called the Colbert Nation.

The fans are primed because the energy level of Mr. Colbert’s television show is soaring. ”The Colbert Report” — with a title that’s eponymous, the way Mr. Colbert prefers everything — currently beams with irrational exuberance. The show is sharp and innovative in ways that could have followed it to the coffee table, but that hasn’t happened. The full-monty Colbert television brilliance doesn’t quite make it to the page.

”I Am America (And So Can You!)” certainly has its moments. (”You Can’t Hurry Love — but you can certainly take the shortcut. Instead of paging through Match.com, try flipping through the family photo album.”) They expand upon the Colbert persona, that of a self-loving loudmouth perched on the famous fine line between stupid and clever. The book is divided into chapters on big topics (”The Family,” ”Religion,” ”The Media,” ”Race”) and stresses the exclusive Colbert pedigree of its thoughts on each of them. ”You won’t find these opinions in any textbook,” he says, ”unless it happens to be one I’ve defaced.”

”America (the Book),” the ”Daily Show” spinoff that is the prototype for ”I Am America,” was also the collective effort of television staff writers trying to replicate their on-the-air style. But it was neither inspired by nor tethered to a single stellar character. That gave it room to maneuver through a wide range of subjects, as well as a gleeful, anything-goes spirit of adventure. The narrower ”I Am America” sticks to ravings suitable for a mock Colbert memoir and further limits its range by avoiding explicit talk of government or politics — though it culminates in a reprint of Mr. Colbert’s blistering political speech delivered at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

”I Am America” describes ”heroes” as ”people who did not skip ahead” to that speech ”but read the book from start to finish as intended.” Heroism aside, to experience the speech in print is to understand what ”I Am America” is missing.

Mr. Colbert and his staff write for a particular character with impeccable, deadpan delivery, and there is no book-worthy equivalent of what happens when the real McCoy gets near a microphone. The printed speech falls surprisingly flat. Neither this chapter nor the rest of ”I Am America” is helped by little red annotations in the margins, though these, too, mimic a tactic that happens to be funny on TV.

Still, the sharp-elbowed Mr. Colbert will deservedly work his way toward the top of best-seller lists, no matter what he has to do to current competitors like Alan Greenspan, Ann Coulter, Oprah Winfrey, Eric Clapton or Mother Teresa. His book may not replicate a winning formula, but it’s certainly a valentine to his proven success. Its tone is typically dictatorial (this, to him, means a person whose book is dictated), as when it warns readers that ”no image of me should ever be removed from this book for any purpose, including, but not exclusively: book reports, decorating walls, or placing in your wallet to imply our friendship.” Not for nothing does this book’s reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man feature Colbert eyeglasses and enlarged testicles as bonus features.

Among the funnier sections is the ”Higher Education” chapter. It includes what purports to be Mr. Colbert’s college application essay, featuring ripe malapropisms, overuse of a thesaurus (”the apex, pinnacle, acme, vertex, and zenith of my life’s experience”) and the lying claim that his great-great-uncle’s name is on a building at Dartmouth. There are also fake course selections with student annotations, among them ”Ethnic Stereotypes and the Humor of Cruelty” (”A professor will tell you a bunch of hilarious jokes, and you’re not allowed to laugh”) and ”Dance for Men.” (”Go ahead. Break your mother’s heart.”) Heterosexuality that protests too much is a big part of the official Colbert attitude.

A glossary on science is another high point. (On cloning: ”No free labor source is worth all of this trouble.”) And it well suits Mr. Colbert’s opposition to all forms of progress. (The smallpox vaccine ”may have saved a few thousand lives, but it also destroyed the magic amulet industry.”)

The ”Sex and Dating” chapter also heavily emphasizes science, since Mr. Colbert is in some ways the Tom Lehrer of his day. Mr. Lehrer’s sharp satire and erudite academic stunts, like his classic musical rendition of the Periodic Table, are forerunners of Mr. Colbert’s subversive whiz-kid humor. ”I often think back fondly on the memories I haven’t repressed,” the book says in this sneaky spirit.

When it refers to the American family as ”a Mom married to a Pop and raising 2.3 rambunctious scamps” or to a cat named Professor Snugglepuss, ”I Am America” gets lazy. The same goes for a sophomoric crack about why books are scary: ”You can’t spell ‘Book’ without ‘Boo!”’ And this book is capable of better witticism than: ”Now I’m not the smartest knife in the spoon.” But it doesn’t take the smartest knife in the spoon to understand the point of this undertaking. If ”I Am America (And So Can You!)” had nothing but its title, its Colbert cover portrait and 230 blank pages instead of printed ones, it would make a cherished keepsake just the same.