THROW THE BOOKS AT HIM.(Sam Waksal's Amazon.com Wish List)

Schuylkill, the correctional facility in Pennsylvania, is the kind of place that, according to attorneys who try to get their white-collar clients sent there, bears a beguiling resemblance to a college campus: it has sports facilities and a library and a deficit of searchlights and round-the-clock lockdowns. Ever since Sam Waksal, the founder of ImClone and friend of Martha Stewart, arrived there to begin serving a seven-year-and-three-month stint for insider trading, the place has become just that much more studious--at least, if Waksal has started working his way through the books that can be found on his Amazon.com Wish List.

According to the online bookseller (whose Wish List function allows an individual to inform friends, family, and other interested parties of the titles he or she would like to own), Waksal drew up, eight days before his incarceration, a reading list of fifty volumes, made up largely of works whose weightiness would put a MacArthur Fellow to shame. He plans to read not only "A History of the Modern World," by R. R. Palmer, Joel Colton, and Lloyd Kramer, but the history of the modern world: "Einstein: His Life and Times," by Phillip Frank; "Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist," by Adrian Desmond and James Moore; "The Revolt of the Masses," by Jose Ortega y Gasset; and "Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question," by Richard J. Bernstein. The ancient world is far from neglected. During Waksal's reading hours--the period between 8:30 p.m., when prisoners are required to repair to their shared cinder-block rooms, and 11:30 p.m., lights-out--he will have the opportunity to familiarize himself with "Alexander the Great," by Robin Lane Fox; Herodotus' "Histories"; "The Romans," edited by Andrea Giardina; and two versions of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides and by Donald Kagan, the Yale professor, which together total almost twelve hundred pages.

Amazon.com indicates that the books are to be shipped to Minersville, Pennsylvania, the town in which Schuylkill prison is situated, and to which Waksal was driven on July 23rd, when he told reporters, "I deeply regret the mistakes I've made that have brought me here today, and I'm ready to pay for those mistakes." Inside, he will at least have the consolations of philosophy. His book pile includes the selected letters of Friedrich Nietzsche; "On Tyranny," by Leo Strauss; and three books by Walter Benjamin, including Volumes III and IV of the selected writings, but not Volumes I and II--well-thumbed copies of which, perhaps, Waksal left behind at the SOHo loft where he kept his art collection and gave his celebrated parties.

Waksal has gone long in Judaica: "Studies in Medieval Jewish History and ...