If there is a Barry Bonds in college today — and remember that when Mr. Bonds started using steroids, as the book recounts, the substances were not banned in professional baseball — then perhaps it is someone like Kaavya Viswanathan. That Harvard sophomore won admission to the university partly through the ministrations of a consulting outfit named IvyWise, which charges $10,000 to $30,000 for its services. Then she wrote a roman à clef about the process, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life."

Now, Miss Viswanathan has been accused of plagiarism, and, in an interview with The New York Times, has acknowledged an "unintentional and unconscious" pattern of appropriation from two other books. Of course, Barry Bonds has insisted that all he ever knowingly took were nutritional supplements.