Briefly noted.(four books)(Brief Article)

Oaxaca Journal, by Oliver Sacks (National Geographic; $20). The eminent neurologist is also a fern lover, and this book is his record of a ten-day "fern foray" in southern Mexico. It is light and fastmoving, unburdened by library research but filled with erudition. Some of his fellow-foragers are professional pteridologists; others are amateurs, and there is a certain romance in the sight of smitten fern hunters crawling through the Mexican dust exclaiming in Latin. Among the botanical and anthropological observations, one catches glimpses of Sacks's inner life: his preoccupation with dualities, his nearly Victorian sense of modesty, his fascination with the world around him. He could be speaking of himself when he comments on a colleague peering through a hand lens at a small mountain flower: "Is it the artist or the scientist in him which is aroused by the Lobelia? Both, clearly, and they are utterly fused."

Resistance and Betrayal, by Patrick Marnham (Random House; $25.95). In 1943, the Gestapo captured Jean Moulin, de Gaulle's chief envoy in France, at a Resistance meeting in Lyons. He was tortured, and he died in captivity. After the war, he became an icon of Resistance courage -- in the words of Andre Malraux, "the face of France." But Marnham's intricate and suspenseful reconstruction suggests that the resemblance was not entirely flattering. Moulin -- a shrewd civil servant, sometime Freemason, fellow-traveller, and arms smuggler -- embodied several of the political crosscurrents of interwar France, and his betrayal was probably the result of complex power struggles within the Resistance itself. Perhaps tellingly, the coffin placed with great ceremony in the Pantheon in 1964 did not contain Moulin, whose body was never found: "Lacking a body they reburied a ghost, and a patriotic legend was born."

Leopards in the Temple, by Morris Dickstein (Harvard; $15.95). In this sharply sketched ...