Books: Couples

THE INTIMATE SEX LIVES OF FAMOUS PEOPLE by Irving, Amy and Sylvia Wallace and David Wallechinsky Delacorte; 618 pages; $14.95

Birds do it, and so do bees and even educated fleas. But human beings are the only ones who make money writing about it, and it is the Wallaces of course — father, daughter, mother and son—who have reduced the practice to its final and most lucrative essence: an encyclopedia of what our celebrated betters, lessers, do between the sheets. How was Napoleon in bed? Or Victor Hugo, Eva Perón or Virginia Woolf? Just ask the Wallaces. (The short answers: terrible,...