Lying and Deception in Everyday Life edited by Michael Lewis and Carolyn Saarni New York:  Guilford Press, 1993,  x + 221 pp., $27.95 The Varnished Truth: Truth Telling and Deceiving in Ordinary Life by David Nyberg Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1993,  x + 244 pp., $22.50 Patient or Pretender: Inside the Strange World of Factitious Disorders by Marc C. Feldman and Charles V. Ford with Toni Reinhold New York:  John Wiley, 1994,  xi + 228 pp., $19.95

The average American tells 200 lies a day.

In 1978, Harvard University's ethics professor, Sisella Bok, wife of then-President Derek Bok and the daughter of the famous sociologists Alma and Gunnar Myrdal, wrote a provocative, widely read and distributed book entitled Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life. In this small volume, all kinds of lies: black, white, and shades of gray, rationalized for the personal and public good, are considered and discussed. Bok questions our allowing deception to be our lot and views lies in our culture as a deadly virus. She concludes:

These practices are not immutable. In an imperfect world, they cannot be wiped out altogether, but surely they can be reduced and counteracted. I hope to have shown how often the justifications they invoke are insubstantial, and how they can disguise and fuel all other wrongs. Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily surrendered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity. (p. 249)

Two of the three books to be reviewed here take issue with Bok's judgment about the value of lies. These authors see lies not only as ubiquitous in everyday life, among humans and animals, but as adaptive.

Michael Lewis and Carolyn Saarni, researchers in child development, have edited a book that attempts to deconstruct this notion of lying as bad. Deception is ubiquitous and habitual,