On the other hand, the authors might be accused of creating a countermyth of their own.

But while Mr. Slaughter's close readings reveal elaborately mythological machinery, he also inadvertently reveals a countermyth.

In Ms. Greenwald's countermyth, the outsiders - a cross-dressed woman and an Asian man - are the enlightened ones, and the frontiersmen rapacious pillagers and barbarians.

Rather, Dark Side 's significance lies in the countermyth that Hersh constructs to displace Camelot--an anti-Camelot in which every public virtue conceals a private vice.

Myth and countermyth have all illuminated and obscured the historical reality of the city through the centuries, says Patrice Higonnet, a French-born Harvard professor who has devoted a whole lecture series to the subject this year at the College de France.