DISCOVERIES

He has enemies, mostly centipedes (“Ultimate horror story: The centipede prick.”). And damn the war on drugs. Cats are beautiful. It is possible to love them. For the rest, it takes a bit of heroin--what this 83-year-old junkie calls “God’s Own Medicine,” or “G.O.M.,” to get around the enemies. Dec. 2, 1996: “Enemy [sic] have two notable weaknesses: 1. No sense of humor. They simply don’t get it. 2. They totally lack understanding of magic, and being totally oriented toward control, what they don’t understand is a menace, to be destroyed by any means.” He has a family tree of old junkies: “Look at Herbert Huncke, 81; DeQuincy, 74; George Crabbe, English poet, 78; and yours truly (82) and still kicking.” Looks more like raging paranoia than restless creativity, doesn’t it? All his life, until his death in the summer of 1997, he was shaking it up, not doing it for money. This journal makes it seem as though Burroughs, the great agitator, was allowed to die with a measure of peace. His last entry, Wednesday, July 30: “Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner and Calico [his cats]. Pure love. . . . Love? What is It? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”

A PLAGUE OF FROGS; The Horrifying True Story By William Souder; Hyperion: 304 pp., $23.95

In 1995, a group of Minnesota schoolchildren on a nature hike discovered an unusual number of deformed frogs. In the following months, calls came pouring in to the local Natural Resources office--frogs with six legs, frogs with no legs, frogs with tumors and various other deformities. Frogs are considered by many observers to be a sentinel or indicator species because of their sensitivity to environmental stresses. Their skin is permeable; they inhabit both land and water and they undergo physiological transformations in their development that are cyclical, seasonal and predictable. William Souder, who covered the story for the Washington Post, follows the quavering tentativeness of the scientists who try to uncover the cause of the deformities; the EPA bureaucrats who suffocate under their stifling and cumbersome process and frightened Minnesota homeowners who aren’t sure whether allowing their children to swim in their own lake will deform them as well. It takes several years for scientists to confirm what those first schoolchildren intuited: Some chemical in the water caused the deformities. All the frustrations that made “A Civil Action” such a good story are here; the possibilities are equally terrifying (sterility, reproductive failure, developmental abnormalities) and the failures of our oversight mechanisms even more absurd.

TALES OF SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS And Other Stories By Ambrose Bierce; Penguin: 274 pp., $12.95

In 1861 at age 19, Ambrose Bierce enlisted as a private in the Indiana 9th Brigade. He became a lieutenant and a cartographer and then, after the war, a columnist at the San Francisco Examiner. He wrote several books and in 1913 went to Mexico to join Pancho Villa’s army, never to be heard from again. Almost all of his stories, of soldiers or civilians, are punctuated by violence. Victims suffer from gunshot wounds and from the mangled morals of war--the spoils of courage. Bierce’s writing is stilted and uneven, and sometimes the why, why, why--the insanity of war--buzzing behind his stories would be better off spoken than guarded by faulty characters, but many of the stories are unforgettable and ring clear as tableaux or vignettes: The little boy who runs into the forest to play and finds himself surrounded by bleeding men, retreating troops; the man who shoots his own father as his father’s pre-war advice to do his duty rings in his head and many others.

THE FARFARERS; Before the Norse By Farley Mowat; Steerforth Press: 378 pp., $16 paper

Here is an opportunity to follow the trajectory of the primal adventure. In 1965, Farley Mowat, Canadian, wanderer, soldier, environmentalist (author of “A Whale for the Killing,” “Born Naked,” “Woman in the Mist,” and some 30 other books), published a book called “Westviking: The Ancient Norse in Greenland and America.” While he was writing that book, he began to suspect that the “Norse were not, after all, the first Europeans to cross the Western Ocean.” In this book, he pursues, in a blend of scholarship and foggy-lensed reconstructive history, a possible scenario in which the Albans, a British tribe, were the first to sail to Asia Minor, Iceland, Greenland, Labrador and finally to Newfoundland. Mowat writes the heretofore unwritten history of the Albans, from their buildings to their hunting methods; their eating habits and their wanderlust.