As a chemistry student in graduate school, E. L. Konigsburg twice blew up the laboratory sink, "losing my eyebrows and bangs in the flash." She claims it was her fault that "the University of Pittsburgh moved their Graduate School of Chemistry the year after I left." Since then, Konigsburg has regrown her eyebrows and written twelve excellent, sometimes annoying, but always interesting children's books. "I shall probably not return to the lab," she says, "but all those years in chemistry were not wasted; I learned useful things: to use the materials at hand, to have a point of view, to distill. And I obviously learned how to handle messy sinks--move."

These useful things are the essence of Konigsburg's writing. Her books have grown out of the material closest to hand, the events of her own life. Her writing is a witty distillation of complex experience, and she always...