Ding, ding! In this corner! Weighing in at 288 pages! Miss Barbra Streisand's new book, My Passion for Desiqn (Viking)! The star's own sumptuous furniture, homes, art, and gardens—all as far from "Second Hand Rose" as Flatbush Avenue is from the Champs-Elysees! And in this corner! Also at 288 pages, Miss Carolyne Roehm's A Passion (or Interiors (Clarkson Potter)! Three homes decorated by the designer who says, "I am to plates what Imelda Marcos was to shoes"! Ladies—get your dukes up!

Streisand comes out punching clean: her true love is American architecture and design from the 18th century to the 20th. This Passion features many photographs Streisand herself took of rooms she has decorated. The effect? Imagine if Avedon had obsessed over sconces. But aesthetic rigor does not preclude that one item Streisandologists crave most: photographs of Barbra's closets. Rafts of gauzy and lace-bedecked garden-party frocks, some in a color many would call "melba," but I'm thinking Barbra says coeur de peche.

And here's Roehm with a roundhouse: a neoclassicist, she describes her aesthetic as "feminine but tailored, not gooey." Not gooey, indeed: a handsome wood-and-marble bathroom in her Manhattan apartment "brings out my Winston Churchill side."

Ladies, ladies! Break it up! Passion versus Passion is a draw. The only thing that's down for the count here is the ordinary.