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By Charles Martin. Yale. 197 pp. $30

immersion. Moreover, both the early Christians and the Es- senes expected the Messiah to appear imminently. One scroll, "The Messiah of Heaven and Earth," clearly alludes to the idea of bodily resurrection.
So much from the scrolls seems dear, but a number of questions they raise have no ready an- swers: Was John the Baptist a member of the com- munity that wrote the scrolls? Was Jesus, in fact, an Essene? Is the "Temple Scroll" the lost sixth book of the Torah? Taken together,...

. Helena Cronin. Cambridge. 490 pp. $39.95
Despite its imposing simplicity and awesome explanatory power, the theory of natural selection has never achieved the status of a universally ac- cepted scientific law. As recent surveys reveal, an astonishingly large proportion of people in the oth- erwise rational West do not believe in evolution. Belief, however, is not the only issue: The idea of design-without-a-designer has had to struggle for survival against not only those who dislike its im-plications...

hat a shock it has public facilities threaten the continuation been to Americans of basic community services such as fire to discover that protection, public transportation, water steel and concrete supplies, secure prisons, and flood protec- are not forever, that tion." But it took a series of surprises and the proud bridges disasters to drive home the point. In 1984, a built during the New Deal and the inter- bridge collapse on Interstate 95 in Connect- states laid out in the comfortable...