"Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds" (Crown), by Jim Sterba

The usual hot-button issues such as taxes and zoning are beginning to take a back seat in some communities to disputes that include deer, beavers, feral cats and bears.

Wildlife-related controversies have been springing up in towns throughout the country, pitting neighbor against neighbor, animal-rights activists against biologists and in some cases, even prompting death threats.

In "Nature Wars," Jim Sterba lays out battle lines that emerged after populations of species that declined to near-extinction by the end of the 19th century came roaring back as the nation's forests regenerated and city dwellers moved to the suburbs and exurbs. Farmland reverted to woods and subdivisions, while the ensuing sprawl created hospitable habitat for all sorts of wild creatures.

"It is very likely that more people live in closer proximity to more wild animals and birds in the eastern United States today than anywhere on the planet at any time in history," writes Sterba, a longtime reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The nation's white-tailed deer population, which sank as low as 350,000 more than a century ago in the face of uncontrolled hunting, rebounded to an estimated 25 million to 40 million by the 1990s. What had been considered an elegant creature became "long-legged rats" linked by researchers to more than 1 million motor vehicle collisions annually and blamed for $850 million in damage to farm crops and forests. They are also carriers of tick-borne Lyme disease, which the author contracted three times in 11 years.

Controlling the size of the deer population poses a monumental problem. Young people prefer computer games and television to hunting, while generations reared on Disney's "Bambi" bristle at the idea that sharpshooters should be hired to thin the herd.

If hunters are fewer in number, trappers are even harder to find. That's been a bonanza for beavers, blamed for the most costly damage by any species. But even as the industrious rodents triggered complaints throughout Massachusetts about damage to structures, trees and water supplies, the state's voters banned the use of an effective trap that kills instantly but that critics depicted as cruel.

Canada geese no longer migrate; instead, they befoul golf courses and soccer fields in their year-round turf, and can be responsible for hundreds of deaths if they are sucked into the engines of a jetliner. Wild turkeys have gone from novelty to nuisance, attacking pedestrians and flying into car windshields. And bears have advanced into populated areas, drawn by easy-to-obtain food.

The author takes issue with the boom in wild bird feeders, seeing it as a manipulation of nature that spreads disease and benefits neither the birds nor the environment. But he reserves his sharpest critiques for activists on behalf of feral cats, numbering up to 100 million and blamed for killing up to 1 billion birds in North America. Those who think the feral animals should be killed, rather than trapped, neutered and released, have been subject to death threats, according to Sterba.

This book is sure to initiate discussion about an issue that seems likely to move closer to the forefront in the years ahead. Sterba's views certainly won't win support in all quarters, but he articulates them forcefully, and he presents solid evidence to back them up.

There she is tapped for a mission with the code name Sweet Tooth to secretly funnel money to up-and-coming writers and intellectuals thought to hold a dim view of the Soviet Union.

Her qualifications are her "rather gorgeous" looks and reputation as a voracious reader — "rather well up on modern writing — literature, novels, that sort of thing," her boss says.

But almost immediately she jeopardizes her career by falling in love with Tom Haley, the writer she's meant to covertly enlist in MI5's epic battle against communism.

McEwan bases the espionage plot on actual events during the Cold War, when the CIA surreptitiously funded various cultural enterprises to bolster support for the West.

His spy craft is compelling, his love story less so. Serena has the emotional maturity of a teenager and the politics of her parents' generation. She fancies herself a character out of Jane Austen in a world that's moved on to Borges, Barth and Pynchon.

"I craved a form of naive realism," she declares. "I wasn't impressed by those writers who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind the poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions."

Her oft-repeated literary opinions — "I was a simple sort of reader," she says later on — suggest that one of her primary roles is as a foil for Tom, who has more sophisticated taste. And indeed, the novel is packed with the postmodern tricks Serena professes to hate.

McEwan embeds narratives within narratives (bequeathing one of his own abandoned novels to Tom), undermines his narrator and injects real-life people and events into his fictional world.

Whether you like the book or not may depend on your view of literature — do you agree with Serena or with McEwan's alter ego Tom? "I liked life as I knew it recreated on the page," she says. "He said it wasn't possible to recreate life on the page without tricks."