The New York Times
June 6, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Books for Vacation Reading
SECTION: Section 7; Page 34; Column 3; Book Review Desk
LENGTH: 10420 words
Art, Music & Popular Culture
THE ART OF CELEBRATION: Twentieth-Century Painting, Literature, Sculpture, Photography, and Jazz. By Alfred Appel Jr. (Knopf, $35.) Modern times aren't all Eliot and Kafka, the author cheerfully argues; there's also Matisse, Astaire, Chaplin, Teddy Wilson and a whole raft of dedicated life affirmers.
ATGET'S SEVEN ALBUMS. By Molly Nesbit. (Yale University, $55.) A scholar finds political commitment and self-conscious intentions in the work of the Paris photographer who has been interpreted as a primitive.
BLACK AND BLUE: The Life and Lyrics of Andy Razaf. By Barry Singer. Foreword by Bobby Short. (Schirmer, $28.) An important, atmospheric biography of the lyricist who wrote "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Stompin' at the Savoy."
CHAUTAUQUA SUMMER: Adventures of a Late-Twentieth-Century Vaudevillian. By Rebecca Chace. (Harcourt Brace, $21.95.) An amusing, intimate account of a season with the Flying Karamazov Brothers on their annual vaudeville circuit.
CHRISTEN KOBKE. By Sanford Schwartz. (Timken, $35.) Mr. Schwartz's portrait, the first English book-length study of the Danish painter known for his small, quiet landscapes, is conversational, affectionate and discerning.
THE COLLECTED WRITINGS OF ROBERT MOTHERWELL. Edited by Stephanie Terenzio. (Oxford University, $39.95.) Essays, observations and pronouncements by the most articulate member of the New York School of painters, illuminating the ambitions and the ethos of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
CORNELL CAPA: Photographs. Edited by Cornell Capa and Richard Whelan. (Bulfinch/Little, Brown, $60.) Pictures that certify Mr. Capa's statement of his aims: to show "human beings, their lives, their habitats, their behavior and their relationships."
CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch. By Maud Lavin. (Yale University, $40.) An account of the work of the avant-garde artist that illuminates new definitions of femininity and sexual roles in Weimar Germany.
DANCING: The Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement. By Gerald Jonas. (Abrams in association with Thirteen/WNET, $45.) A lavishly produced cross-cultural history of dance worldwide, companion volume to a public television series.
DESIGN, FORM, AND CHAOS. By Paul Rand. (Yale University, $45.) In this collection of essays by the pre-eminent statesman of graphic design, Mr. Rand compares his own beautiful forms with the duds of the day.
THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. By Saul Steinberg. (Knopf, $50.) The first book-length collection in 14 years by a great and greatly intelligent artist, who came to this country in 1942 and whose vision of America has lately become tougher, grittier, darker.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: COLLECTED WRITINGS. Volume 1: 1894-1930. Volume 2: 1930-1932. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer. (Rizzoli, cloth, $60 each; paper, $40 each.) The start of a projected six-volume edition of the architect's literary output; the collection's star so far is the 1932 version of "An Autobiography."
MAGRITTE: The Silence of the World. By David Sylvester. (Menil Foundation/Abrams, $75.) This authoritative, deliberate, insightful overview of Magritte's life and art, by an English art historian, is beautifully illustrated as well.
THE MAN IN THE BOWLER HAT: His History and Iconography. By Fred Miller Robinson. (University of North Carolina, $24.95.) An ironic look at the cheerless trademark of modernism -- as worn by Oscar Wilde, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy and Magritte's anonymous men.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930). By Elizabeth Hawes. (Knopf, $30.) The author asks what makes Manhattan so different, so European, so un-American, and decides that it is vertical, high-rise living.
PUSH COMES TO SHOVE: An Autobiography. By Twyla Tharp. (Linda Grey/Bantam, $24.50.) A mix of the dead serious with deadpan farce, suffering with glory, much like her own dances.
THE QUEEN'S THROAT: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire. By Wayne Koestenbaum. (Poseidon, $22.) A dazzling, high-spirited anatomy of the "opera queen," the homosexual fan for whom opera is a passion and an obsession.
THE THEATRICAL NOTEBOOKS OF SAMUEL BECKETT. General editor, James Knowlson. Volume 2: ENDGAME. Edited by S. E. Gontarski. Volume 3: KRAPP'S LAST TAPE. Edited by James Knowlson. (Grove Press, $75 each.) Beckett's deliberative method and concern for structure come through vividly in these working notebooks. We're still waiting for "Godot," the first volume of the series.
TO GIVE THEM LIGHT: The Legacy of Roman Vishniac. Edited by Marion Wiesel. (Simon & Schuster, $45.) The sting of the nearly 140 black-and-white photographs of Eastern European Jews in this book, which Vishniac took secretly between 1936 and 1938 to warn the world of the Jews' future doom, is that they are so understated -- portraits of ordinary lives that would soon be no more.
TRAGIC MUSE: Rachel of the Comedie-Francaise. By Rachel M. Brownstein. (Knopf, $30.) A discerning, insightful analysis of the life of the Alsatian waif Rachel Felix, who dominated French theater and much of French society in the mid-19th century.
WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT? An Autobiography. By Michael Caine. (Turtle Bay, $24.) From the charity wing of a London hospital to "Alfie" and Prince Andrew's wedding, Mr. Caine presents, in his own words, his fun-loving, robustly philistine self.
Biography & Autobiography
ALWAYS RUNNING. La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. By Luis J. Rodriguez. (Curbstone, $19.95.) A chilling, unblinking testimony of the poet's life in the 1960's, when he was running with gangs in East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley.
ANNA: A Daughter's Life. By William Loizeaux. (Arcade, $19.95.) This memorial to the author's daughter, who died in infancy, tracks the process of becoming a parent and of bereavement with an honesty that has no fear of pathos or embarrassment.
ANTHONY TROLLOPE. By Victoria Glendinning. (Knopf, $30.) A smart and winning biography, stuffed with details that come from knowing all Trollope's work and taking the Victorians seriously.
CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE: A Life. By Joseph Brent. (Indiana University, $35.) A biography of a great American thinker that not only renders the thought but explains the disastrous life.
CURRICULUM VITAE: Autobiography. By Muriel Spark. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95.) The straight facts of a life sufficiently courageous but quite unlike, thank goodness, the eccentric, elegant, mystifying, desperate world of her novels.
DANIEL BOONE: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer. By John Mack Faragher. (Holt, $27.50.) A fine biography, based on the best eyewitness accounts and voluminous secondary material, of the man who led the first white settlers into Kentucky in 1775.
THE DEVIL AT LARGE: Erica Jong on Henry Miller. By Erica Jong. (Turtle Bay, $23.) Too short for a biography, not intimate enough for a memoir, this is Ms. Jong's grab bag of jottings about the man who, at the age of 82, saw a resemblance between his own "Tropic of Cancer" and her "Fear of Flying."
DIDEROT: A Critical Biography. By P. N. Furbank. (Knopf, $30.) Twenty years after Arthur M. Wilson's classic biography, Mr. Furbank takes up Diderot's life again and shows us, engagingly, why of all the 18th-century demigods he is the most humane and modern.
DREAM MAKERS, DREAM BREAKERS: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall. By Carl T. Rowan. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) A syndicated columnist's ahistorical account of the Supreme Court Justice who died this year at the age of 84.
ELIZABETH BISHOP: Life and the Memory of It. By Brett C. Millier. (University of California, $28.) A lucid and sympathetic, if at times scolding, work about the unhappy, troubled, proper woman who was once called "a poet's poet's poet."
FDR. Into the Storm 1937-1940: A History. By Kenneth S. Davis. (Random House, $35.) Mr. Davis's fourth and penultimate volume on Franklin D. Roosevelt casts him as a weak leader in his second Presidential term; the encyclopedic documentation is unmatched.
GERALD BRENAN. The Interior Castle: A Biography. By Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy. (Norton, $35.) An idiosyncratic life of the English writer remembered for his vivid books about Spain and his sexual entanglement with the Bloomsbury Group's Dora Carrington.
IL DUCE'S OTHER WOMAN. By Philip V. Cannistraro and Brian R. Sullivan. (Morrow, $25.) Margherita Sarfatti, rich, beautiful, Jewish and a member of many elites, took up with Mussolini for 19 years, even writing books about how wonderful he was. The authors' research on this self-made victim is deep and original.
KING OF THE CATS: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. By Wil Haygood. (Peter Davison/Houghton Mifflin, $24.95.) A balanced and broad biography that has a sure feel for its flamboyant subject, who turned his power in a Harlem pulpit into political clout unfettered by loyalties.
LINCOLN: An Illustrated Biography. By Philip B. Kunhardt Jr., Philip B. Kunhardt 3d and Peter W. Kunhardt. (Knopf, $50.) Powerful images, mostly from the authors' family's archives, dominate this companion volume to ABC's Lincoln documentary.
LOITERING WITH INTENT: The Child. By Peter O'Toole. (Hyperion, $21.95.) The erratic memoir of a boy who escaped from the stench of a Yorkshire industrial slum into the stuffiness of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.
THE MAN WHO WASN'T MAIGRET: A Portrait of Georges Simenon. By Patrick Marnham. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) A thoughtful, convincing account of a man whose diligence -- 76 Maigret books, 117 other "serious" novels and more than 200 others -- makes his claim to have made love to 10,000 women seem plausible. After his mother died, he stopped writing. Odd.
MARLENE DIETRICH. By Maria Riva. (Knopf, $27.50.) Dietrich's only child tells all in a book that startles by its sharpness of remembrance while confirming and completing much that was already known about the disciplined, hard-working movie star.
THE PASSION OF MICHEL FOUCAULT. By James Miller. (Simon & Schuster, $27.50.) Neither a biography nor a survey but a narrative analysis of Foucault's quest to transcend the constructed realities of life through extreme sexual experiences.
REMEMBERING DENNY. By Calvin Trillin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19.) Though in the end Roger (Denny) Hansen remains elusive, Mr. Trillin's protest against the unfulfilled promise of an all-American guy who became an isolated crank and then took his own life is provocative.
A TASTE OF POWER: A Black Woman's Story. By Elaine Brown. (Pantheon, $25.) In 1974, Ms. Brown was appointed leader of the Black Panther Party; hence this chilling, entertaining account of a woman in a movement rich in nihilism, sexism and misogyny.
THIS I CANNOT FORGET: The Memoirs of Nikolai Bukharin's Widow. By Anna Larina. (Norton, $24.95.) After her husband's execution by Stalin in 1938, Ms. Larina survived more than 20 years in the gulag to write this lyrical memoir of a love that inspired her and of the doings of Bolshevism's inner circles.
THIS LITTLE LIGHT OF MINE: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. By Kay Mills. (Dutton, $24.) A full and riveting biography of the woman whose life, from 1962 until her death in 1977, was inseparable from the Mississippi civil rights movement.
Business & Economics
BEATING THE STREET: The Best-Selling Author of "One Up on Wall Street" Shows You How to Pick Winning Stocks and Develop a Strategy for Mutual Funds. By Peter Lynch with John Rothchild. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A homespun strategy for investing from the former manager of the Magellan Fund: find a business that's booming and buy its stock.
FOR GOD, COUNTRY AND COCA-COLA: The Unauthorized History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It. By Mark Pendergrast. (Scribners, $27.50.) Everything knowable about the potation of the 20th century.
MURDOCH. By William Shawcross. (Simon & Schuster, $27.50.) A sprightly life of the media-bestriding colossus Rupert Murdoch, portrayed as an undemonized capitalist more dedicated to making money than to ruling the world through journalism.
POST-CAPITALIST SOCIETY. By Peter F. Drucker. (Harper Business/HarperCollins, $25.) Like a star professor, Mr. Drucker lectures sweepingly about the transition from the Age of Capitalism to the Age of the Knowledge Society, from the decline of the megastate to the rise of organizations.
S&L HELL: The People and the Politics Behind the $1 Trillion Savings and Loan Scandal. By Kathleen Day. (Norton, $24.95.) Ms. Day, who covered the affair for The Washington Post, analyzes the fiasco she says could cost $13 billion a year in interest forever.
UNDUE INFLUENCE: The Epic Battle for the Johnson & Johnson Fortune. By David Margolick. (Morrow, $23.) Mr. Margolick, a Times reporter, skillfully explicates the fabulous litigation between the wife and the offspring of a man who left $402 million.
Children's Books
FOR THE LIFE OF LAETITIA. By Merle Hodge. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.) To attend secondary school, Laetitia must leave her loving extended family in rural Trinidad and board in town with her abusive father and his new wife and family. The taut, lyrical novel captures the social and personal stress she experiences as she comes of age. (Ages 12 and up)
FREEDOM'S CHILDREN: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories. By Ellen Levine. (Putnam, $16.95.) This wonderful account of the civil rights movement is told episodically and chronologically through the experiences of 30 black Americans who were children or teen-agers in that period. (Ages 12 and up)
I'LL SEE YOU IN MY DREAMS. By Mavis Jukes. Illustrated by Stacey Schuett. (Knopf, $15.) This storybook about a little girl who goes to visit her dying uncle provides lasting and evocative metaphors for saying goodbye, combining transcendent, elegiac prose and dreamy, painterly illustrations. (Ages 7 to 11)
THE MYSTERY OF THE CUPBOARD. By Lynne Reid Banks. (Morrow, $13.95.) The fourth novel about Omri, the appealing British schoolboy, his family, his friends and the small plastic creatures that come to life in the cupboard, contains the story of Omri's splendid great-great-aunt, Jessica Charlotte Driscoll, an extraordinary character. (Ages 10 and up)
THE TREE IN THE WOOD. Adapted and illustrated by Christopher Manson. (North/South Books, $14.95.) There's a sense of completion when you reach the end of a circular song and know you can begin again. Beautiful hand-colored woodcuts are as peaceful as the song: "And the green grass grew all around, all around, and the green grass grew all around." (Ages 5 to 8)
Crime
BUCKET NUT. By Liza Cody. (Perfect Crime/ Doubleday, $18.50.) An Amazonian who keeps watch, with two attack dogs, over a London junkyard is displeased when she is set up as a murder instrument in a gang war.
DON'T ASK. By Donald E. Westlake. (Mysterious Press/Warner, $18.95.) Mr. Westlake's eighth novel featuring John Dortmunder is one of his best, with plenty of Runyonesque New York low life and a lighthearted, psychology-free plot revolving around the rival attempts of Tsergovia and Votskojek, two Eastern European countries, to gain admittance to the United Nations.
PAPER DOLL. By Robert B. Parker. (Putnam, $19.95.) In this tight, poignant story, Spenser goes to South Carolina to stir up the old ghosts of an upper-crust WASP woman bludgeoned to death in Boston.
THE SHAMAN'S KNIFE. By Scott Young. (Viking, $20.) An austerely evocative story in which Inspector Matteesie Kitologitak, an Eskimo detective working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, is torn between ancient customs and modern laws when an admired shaman is suspected in a homicide.
32 CADILLACS. By Joe Gores. (Mysterious Press/Warner, $18.95.) In this fall-down funny caper, the King of the Gypsies wants to be buried in a pink Eldorado, Cadillacs disappear all over the San Franciso Bay area, and the repo firm D.K.A. is hot on the trail.
THE WAY THROUGH THE WOODS. By Colin Dexter. (Crown, $20.) The winner of Britain's 1992 Gold Dagger Award, this is Mr. Dexter's best Morse mystery yet. The prickly detective, ready to plunge into Jane Austen and billiards, gets distracted by some cryptic verses about a missing Swede.
Fiction
ARC D'X. By Steve Erickson. (Poseidon, $20.) Part of this serious, fantastical novel is set in Jeffersonian time, the other half in a modern America with streets named Desolate and Unrequited.
ARE YOU MINE? By Abby Frucht. (Grove, $19.95.) Ms. Frucht's witty and sensual third novel explores sexuality and its consequences, humanizing even a political issue like abortion.
THE BEST INTENTIONS. By Ingmar Bergman. (Arcade, $22.95.) The Swedish director playfully calls this book about his parents a novel. Whatever it is, it's lush and devastating at once.
BONE. By Fae Myenne Ng. (Hyperion, $19.95.) A sophisticated first novel about youth in San Francisco's Chinatown, about leaving it and about the unbearable disloyalty of "assimilation."
A BOWL OF CHERRIES. By Shena Mackay. (Moyer Bell, $16.95.) An adroit novel that incisively but compassionately deploys a dysfunctional family with familiar problems -- isolation, failed hopes, mutual deceit -- in comic configurations.
THE BOY WITHOUT A FLAG: Tales of the South Bronx. By Abraham Rodriguez Jr. (Milkweed Editions, paper, $11.) A first book of fiction, in which brutality is controlled by sophistication.
BUFFALO SOLDIERS. By Robert O'Connor. (Knopf, $22.) Mr. O'Connor's first novel successfully involves us with a self-absorbed nihilist, a drug-peddling Army clerk of impoverished moral sensibility but acute esthetic intelligence.
THE BUNGALOW. By Lynn Freed. (Poseidon, $21.) The glorious South African landscape, the hermetic lives of white middle-class South Africans, tea at 4, the cataclysm yet to come.
CHARMS FOR THE EASY LIFE. By Kaye Gibbons. (Putnam, $19.95.) Like all Ms. Gibbons's fiction, this novel concerns itself with strong women: a bookish narrator, her mother, her grandmother, all of them prevailing through fierce survival instincts and folk wisdom handed down from prior generations.
CHIMNEY ROCK. By Charlie Smith. (Holt, $22.50.) Mr. Smith's novel appropriates the language and vision of Southern Gothic to the dwellers in a nasty, dusty Hollywood through a narrator who represents a complete absence of ethical consciousness.
CLEOPATRA'S SISTER. By Penelope Lively. (HarperCollins, $20.) Ms. Lively's charming and intellectually resonant novel concerns an English couple whom fate, or Fate, conspires to place on a plane bound for just the wrong North African destination.
THE COLLECTED STORIES. By John McGahern. (Knopf, $24.) These stories, by a master of the clean, powerful description that conveys the immaterial significance in material things, offer a vision in which love is not an end but a means of gaining the world.
THE COLLECTED STORIES. By William Trevor. (Viking, $35.) A lifetime's worth of short fiction whose author enters into the lives of his characters with an intensity that uncovers new layers of yearning and pain in themes that have been endlessly explored.
CRY ME A RIVER. By T. R. Pearson. (Holt, $22.) A crime story, narrated by a cop and loser whose comrade's death brings us, eventually, into contact with a gallery of driven figures.
THE CZAR'S MADMAN. By Jaan Kross. (Pantheon, $31.50.) First published in 1978, this witty, disciplined novel from Estonia, translated into English by Anselm Hollo, a Finnish poet, is cast as a diary kept by a peasant's son.
DR. HAGGARD'S DISEASE. By Patrick McGrath. (Poseidon, $20.) In the (appropriate) guise of a Gothic horror tale, Mr. McGrath produces a myth of the creator sacrificed to his creation in the person of a surgeon who sees his onetime lover in her son.
EINSTEIN'S DREAMS. By Alan Lightman. (Pantheon, $17.) Spare, poetic fantasies about what Einstein might have dreamed when he was still a 26-year-old patent clerk in Switzerland.
THE EMPTY LOT. By Mary Gray Hughes. (Another Chicago Press, cloth, $22.50; paper, $10.95.) This absorbing novel concerns a ruthlessly ambitious divorcing couple who struggle over the house that stands in for the ordered values they seem to have forgotten.
EXPOSURE. By Kathryn Harrison. (Random House, $20.) This almost didactic novel yields a thoughtful discussion of the artist's effect on the world, through the story of the breakdown of a famous photographer's daughter, her father's favorite model.
FABLES OF THE IRISH INTELLIGENTSIA. By Nina FitzPatrick. (Penguin, paper, $9.) Thirteen bright, vigorous stories, featuring mostly poets, priests and academics, set in Ireland or wherever the Irish are. There is lots of drinking and even more talk.
FAMILY NIGHT. By Maria Flook. (Pantheon, $21.) Ms. Flook's astute first novel examines the erotic undercurrents in an extended family of bright, twerpy people who are reaching their 30's but are basically career teen-agers at heart.
FEARLESS. By Rafael Yglesias. (Warner, $18.95.) In this smooth, almost slick, novel about an airplane crash and its harrowing aftermath, the survivors do not merely survive; they live on in the reader's mind.
FLOOD! A Novel in Pictures. By Eric Drooker. (Four Walls Eight Windows, $15.95.) A vision of alienation in a New York peopled by the blighted and despairing, told virtually without words.
FOR LOVE. By Sue Miller. (HarperCollins, $23.) A vivid, fine-grained, realistic and honest novel whose characters are mainly over 40 and in love for far from the first time.
THE FOURTEEN SISTERS OF EMILIO MONTEZ O'BRIEN. By Oscar Hijuelos. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) A capacious, marvelously complicated novel that is Mr. Hijuelos's paean to femininity and to family life as it is actually lived.
FRAUD. By Anita Brookner. (Random House, $21.) A novel that explores relationships between aged parents and adult children, returning repeatedly to ask: when does love become destructive?
THE FURIES. By Janet Hobhouse. (Doubleday, $22.50.) Hobhouse's fourth and last novel is mesmerizing and haunting, an autobiographical novel that shows she was still searching for answers about her life, her choices, her family when she died in 1991.
GUEST OF A SINNER. By James Wilcox. (HarperCollins, $20.) Mr. Wilcox's sixth novel is a precise satirical urban comedy about a bunch of nobodies bumping around Manhattan.
THE HEATHER BLAZING. By Colm Toibin. (Viking, $20.) A novel that explores the Irish national psyche, concentrated in the forces that collide and are reconciled within a single family.
HELLO DOWN THERE. By Michael Parker. (Scribners, $20.) This serious, memorable novel shows a deep affection for its chief characters: a man who is hooked on morphine and jazz and the high-school student he falls in love with.
I KILLED HEMINGWAY. By William McCranor Henderson. (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, $18.95.) A 93-year-old eccentric claims to have murdered Hemingway (the rat published the old man's work as his own!) in this complex, amusing, palpably symbolic novel, concerned with issues from Oedipal to spiritual.
IN A COUNTRY OF MOTHERS. By A. M. Homes. (Knopf, $22.) A surprising New York love story, tuned to the insults of urban life, about the relationship between a young woman frightened by emotional attachments and her psychotherapist, who believes her patient may be her daughter.
THE INFINITE PLAN. By Isabel Allende. (HarperCollins, $23.) Ambitious and large, Ms. Allende's novel follows the disastrous life of a preacher's son and doubles as a cameo history of the United States, running from World War II to the 1990's.
INSHALLAH. By Oriana Fallaci. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.) Ms. Fallaci renders the confused universe of political factions in Beirut strangely rational in this muscular novel whose title means "God willing."
THE INVENTION OF TRUTH. By Marta Morazzoni. (Knopf, $18.) An absorbing novella about artists and lookers at art; it concerns John Ruskin and 300 women working on the Bayeux Tapestry.
THE ISLAND: Three Tales. By Gustaw Herling. (Viking, $20.) These stories by a Polish writer are unified by a common theme -- the persistence of life in the face of pain, humiliation and extremes of solitude -- and told with a humane, compassionate detachment.
JAPANESE BY SPRING. By Ishmael Reed. (Atheneum, $20.) A funny, explosive novel about political jockeying in the university; it spares no one who has ever sought power or had an opinion.
JESUS' SON: Stories. By Denis Johnson. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19.) The universe of Mr. Johnson's fifth book of fiction is governed by addiction, malevolence, faith and uncertainty, rendered with ferocious imagery and a menacing sense of humor.
JUDGE ON TRIAL. By Ivan Klima. (Knopf, $25.) Mr. Klima's novel describes the crisis of conscience of a jurist in Czechoslovakia as the sureties of his personal life and the Marxist state crumble.
LEMPRIERE'S DICTIONARY. By Lawrence Norfolk. (Harmony, $22.) Not a dictionary but a first novel, droll, ferocious and intricate, set in the late 18th century, treating of a young man whose life is sidetracked by Ovidian myths and other irruptions.
LET THE DOG DRIVE. By David Bowman. (New York University, $19.95.) Fresh, fun and smart, this novel is told in the voice of an 18-year-old intellectual always on the lookout for new obsessions.
THE LOOP. By Joe Coomer. (Faber & Faber, $21.95.) A deadpan novel whose tender protagonist, significantly, has the job of clearing road kill and debris from the beltway circling a city.
LOVE ENTER. By Paul Kafka. (Houghton Mifflin, $19.95.) In this clever epistolary novel, a subintern in a maternity ward chronicles his Paris interlude of four years before -- his love affair with two women in love with each other -- by entering a series of letters into the hospital's computer.
LOVING DAUGHTERS. By Olga Masters. (Norton, $21.95.) First published in Australia in 1984, this subtly passionate novel concerns a humanly imperfect rural family on whom the outside intrudes in the form of a handsome, single English clergyman.
THE MAN IN THE TOWER. By Michael Kruger. (Braziller, $19.95.) A mordant, funny novel about a reclusive German painter who lives in the south of France and broods on many things.
THE MAN WHO DREAMT OF LOBSTERS. By Michael Collins. (Random House, $19.) Stories by an Irish-born writer that happen not in the Ireland of myth but in a squalid third-world country.
THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY. By Roberto Calasso. (Knopf, $25.) Greek mythology retold for the 90's, conspicuously lacking in the Victorian innocence and decorum that inform the versions most of us are familiar with.
MARTIN AND JOHN. By Dale Peck. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $21.) A daring, honest, dark debut novel about a gay hustler who travels from Kansas to New York and back to care for his lover, who is dying with AIDS.
MONDO BARBIE. Edited by Lucinda Ebersole and Richard Peabody. (St. Martin's, paper, $12.95.) A clever anthology of fiction and poetry inspired by the doll that is the all-American totemic bimbo.
A MOTHER'S LOVE. By Mary Morris. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $17.50.) A haunting, disturbing tale of the fear and loneliness of a New York mother who decides to go it alone.
MUSTANG SALLY. By Edward Allen. (Norton, $19.95.) Mr. Allen's regrettably accurate second novel is the first of the college campus satires to take on political correctness.
MYSTERY RIDE. By Robert Boswell. (Knopf, $22.) An irresistible novel about a family (she given to causes, he ineffectual, their daughter a rotten kid) who try to puzzle out their own history.
THE NORTH CHINA LOVER. By Marguerite Duras. (New Press, $19.95.) Set in Vietnam, this novel about a French girl obsessed with a Chinese man, though it began as notes toward a script for the movie "The Lover" (adapted from Ms. Duras's earlier novel), produces a strange feeling of immensity.
NOW YOU KNOW. By Michael Frayn. (Viking, $21.) Mr. Frayn's eighth novel explores a profound ethical territory -- the borderlands between public and private life -- in a manic comedy whose protagonist, an English politico, trips over his principles.
OPERATION SHYLOCK: A Confession. By Philip Roth. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A character named Philip Roth confronts another character named Philip Roth, and at least one of them is full of impermissible thoughts in this deeply serious, farcical novel.
THE ORACLE AT STONELEIGH COURT: Stories. By Peter Taylor. (Knopf, $22.) Mr. Taylor's latest superb collection (a novella, 10 stories, 3 plays) explores the ghostly influences from the past that can decide much of our destinies before we are born.
PARTICLES AND LUCK. By Louis B. Jones. (Pantheon, $22.) In Mr. Jones's second novel, a young physicist spends 24 hours learning the difference between reality as described in theoretical journals and reality as people live it day to day.
POOR THINGS: Episodes From the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer. By Alasdair Gray. (Harcourt Brace, $21.95.) The experimentally minded Scottish artist-novelist's heroine is a female suicide, reanimated by a wizard surgeon and given her unborn daughter's brain.
THE PORCUPINE. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $17.) A short, edgy, gloomy political novel in which a well-meaning Eastern European prosecutor learns that the fall of the old system has brought not energy and purpose but an ironically bourgeois alienation.
A PORTRAIT OF MY DESIRE. By MacDonald Harris. (Simon & Schuster, $20.) This nicely evasive writer gives us the sense that there is more to his story about a selfish, cowardly widower than we know.
PROOFS: And Three Parables. By George Steiner. (Granta/Penguin, paper, $10.) "Proofs," to which the "Parables" are appendages, is Mr. Steiner's arresting novella of the collapse of Communism among some of its last adherents.
RAMEAU'S NIECE. By Cathleen Schine. (Ticknor & Fields, $19.95.) This inventive comic novel, a literary hybrid, is both an essentially 18th-century moral tale and a parody of post-modern form.
REBEL POWERS, by Richard Bausch. (Seymour Lawrence/ Houghton Mifflin, $21.95.) The narrator of this novel, a thoughtful man trying to proceed honestly, examines his family, imperiled by the clash of old verities and threatening new ideas.
THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE. By T. Coraghessan Boyle. (Viking, $22.50.) There are major characters but no heroes in this antiromance of 1907 in Battle Creek, Mich., where Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the Edison of clean living, presides over pilgrims who hope to escape the ills and smells that flesh is heir to.
SACRED COUNTRY. By Rose Tremain. (Atheneum, $21.) A large novel, Ms. Tremain's sixth, in which three generations of Britons try to sort out who they are and how they might be happy.
SAVING ST. GERM. By Carol Muske Dukes. (Viking, $21.) A truly original novel in which a stubborn, puttering biochemist who forgets she has a body, a job, a family, is finally jolted out of her blessed state.
THE SECRET OF CARTWHEELS. By Patricia Henley. (Graywolf, paper, $11.) The author's second collection of short stories presents brave and life-worn characters, unsettled, cast loose; but when they are brave enough, they manage to land on their feet.
SHADOW PLAY. By Charles Baxter. (Norton, $21.95.) Mr. Baxter's confident second novel concerns primarily Wyatt Palmer, a bright boy who grows up into a dull job and an atmosphere of compromise in a town where evil is both profound and boring.
SHAMAN. By Noah Gordon. (Dutton, $23.) This intricate historical novel follows an impious doctor, making his way from Boston to the territories of Illinois and the battlefields of the Civil War.
THE SHIPPING NEWS. By E. Annie Proulx. (Scribners, $20.) In Ms. Proulx's third book of fiction, a man mourns his adulterous wife in Newfoundland, where he works on a newspaper whose boss magically senses what will most annoy his employees.
SOLITUDE. By Victor Catala (Caterina Albert i Paradis). (Readers International, cloth, $19.95; paper, $11.95.) Guaranteed a long obscurity by its first publication in Catalan under a pseudo nym in 1905, this overtly feminist novel sets a lowland peasant girl against a threatening mountain landscape and society.
THE STORIES AND RECOLLECTIONS OF UMBERTO SABA. By Umberto Saba. (Sheep Meadow Press, $22.50.) Melancholy short stories and sketches of Jewish life in Trieste by an Italian writer, much esteemed in his own country, who died in 1957.
A SUITABLE BOY. By Vikram Seth. (HarperCollins, $30.) A multitude of characters and events throng the 1,349 pages of this vast novel that strives to re-create the life of post-British India.
SWIMMING IN THE VOLCANO. By Bob Shacochis. (Scribners, $22.) This novel by a short-story veteran, full of huge, informative digressions, is more about the fictional Caribbean island of St. Catherine than about the plot or characters who happen to be there.
ULVERTON. By Adam Thorpe. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.) This promising first novel deals with English history through linked tales in voices from the Cromwellian to the modern documentary.
UNTIL YOUR HEART STOPS. By T. M. McNally. (Villard, $20.) A harrowing first novel of suburban Arizona, in which violence, from personal through cosmic, is visited on nearly everyone; though not especially wicked, they all seem to deserve it.
VAN GOGH'S ROOM AT ARLES: Three Novellas. By Stanley Elkin. (Hyperion, $22.95.) A subtle, complicated, sometimes astonishing collection; in the title story, a provincial American teacher is overwhelmed by his encounter with formidable world-class academics while living in the painter's very bedroom.
VERTIGO PARK: And Other Tall Tales. By Mark O'Donnell. (Knopf, $18.) Expertly paced mock essays, playlets, yarns, poems and even cartoons by a lively, fertile humorist.
THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. By Jeffrey Eugenides. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.) An evocative, disarming novel with unlikely premises: five suburban sisters take turns at suicide, and a gang of curious boys grow into their 30's trying to figure out why.
WHAT REMAINS AND OTHER STORIES. By Christa Wolf. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.) These eight fiction pieces by the former East Germany's most discussed author contain insights that are sometimes blocked by a puritan, didactic tone.
WOMAN OF THE INNER SEA. By Thomas Keneally. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.) A picaresque, often hilarious novel about a wealthy woman's search for love following a family tragedy; it ponders how individuals achieve spiritual wholeness.
A WORLD FOR JULIUS. By Alfredo Bryce Echenique. (University of Texas, cloth, $45; paper, $19.95.) This masterpiece of Latin American fiction, finally in English 23 years after its publication in Spanish, concerns the amoral, insulated superrich in Lima, Peru, of the 1940's and 50's.
WRITTEN ON THE BODY. By Jeanette Winterson. (Knopf, $20.) This ambitious work is both a love story and a meditation on the body as our literal embodiment, the part of us that really loves.
History
BALKAN GHOSTS: A Journey Through History. By Robert D. Kaplan. (St. Martin's, $22.95.) A reporter's gallery of heroes and villains, past and present, who made Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and the former Yugoslavia the sweethearts they are.
CHANCELLORSVILLE 1863: The Souls of the Brave. By Ernest B. Furgurson. (Knopf, $25.) An account of Lee's victory in the only great Civil War battle in which the day was carried by mobility and maneuver instead of the attrition of men by metal.
THE CREATION OF FEMINIST CONSCIOUSNESS: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy. By Gerda Lerner. (Oxford University, $27.50.) A rough-hewn history of how the exclusion of women from history has left them "adrift in an eternal present."
DECISION IN THE WEST: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864. By Albert Castel. Maps by Laura Kriegstrom Poracsky. (University Press of Kansas, $29.95.) A stunning, daunting challenge to the legend that William Tecumseh Sherman was a brilliant commander.
FIREWORKS AT DUSK: Paris in the Thirties. By Olivier Bernier. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) Mr. Bernier's eighth book is a lively, thorough chronicle of the momentous decade that saw the Third Republic, the Third Reich, World War II, Picasso, Gide, Ernst, Miro, Celine, Renoir.
THE GOLDEN THIRTEEN: Recollections of the First Black Naval Officers. Edited by Paul Stillwell. (Naval Institute Press, $21.95.) From interviews with eight of the first 13 black American naval officers and three of the white officers who trained them, Mr. Stillwell has created a moving oral history. Gen. Colin L. Powell contributes the foreword.
HEISENBERG'S WAR: The Secret History of the German Bomb. By Thomas Powers. (Knopf, $27.50.) Did the Nobel laureate deliberately retard Germany's progress toward an atomic bomb? Mr. Powers, in this thorough, exciting book, argues that he did.
A HISTORY OF FOOD. By Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat. (Blackwell, $39.95.) An opinionated, omnivorous French journalist and sociologist examines the stuffing of humanity, from prehistory to now and from France to the antipodes, in 800 pages.
THE NEW DEALERS: Power Brokers in the Age of Roosevelt. By Jordan A. Schwarz. (Knopf, $27.50.) Through a series of biographical profiles, the author drives home his arresting message -- that the New Deal was state capitalism, a system to modernize the underdeveloped West and South.
THE PATH TO GENOCIDE: Essays on Launching the Final Solution. By Christopher R. Browning. (Cambridge University, cloth, $39.95; paper, $10.95.) A magisterial, rigorously meditated study of how Nazi Germany instituted the industrialized murder of millions of men, women and children.
PROTECTING SOLDIERS AND MOTHERS: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. By Theda Skocpol. (Belknap/Harvard University, $34.95.) This history of the welfare state is a sensitive examination of the occasions when parsimony and individualism were not the main determinants of American policy.
TITANIC: An Illustrated History. By Don Lynch. Paintings by Ken Marschall. (Madison Press/Hyperion, $60.) A recap of a familiar but irresistible story; Mr. Marschall's splendid paintings suggest that he might have been there, loaded with Kodachrome.
TO THE GATES OF RICHMOND: The Peninsula Campaign. By Stephen W. Sears. (Ticknor & Fields, $24.95.) How George B. McClellan, the general whom nobody loves, lost the largest single campaign of the Civil War because he was unwilling to fight.
Medicine & Psychology
A DANCING MATRIX: Voyages Along the Viral Frontier. By Robin Marantz Henig. (Knopf, $23.) A highly readable account of how adept viruses are at finding new pathways to new human populations.
FIRST, DO NO HARM. By Lisa Belkin. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A reporter for The New York Times conveys a series of wrenching medical and ethical decisions and the people who make them.
FREUD, JUNG, AND HALL THE KING-MAKER: The Historic Expedition to America (1909). By Saul Rosenzweig. (Rana House/Hogrefe & Huber, $27.50.) Freud, 53, got an honorary degree from Clark University. What an occasion! Mr. Rosenzweig re-creates it.
GENDER PLAY: Girls and Boys in School. By Barrie Thorne. (Rutgers University, cloth, $35; paper, $12.95.) A sociologist finds that the fun and games of childhood are rehearsals for the domination and subservience of adulthood.
GENIE: An Abused Child's Flight From Silence. By Russ Rymer. (HarperCollins, $20.) Raised speechless and in isolation for her first 13 years, Genie inspired heroic efforts to rehabilitate her and to study important principles of language -- mostly in vain.
NOBODY NOWHERE: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic. By Donna Williams. (Times Books/Random House, $21.) That Ms. Williams is able to decode the closed vernacular of autism -- the rocking, the headshaking and the scrunching up of toes -- is a testament to how remarkable her journey has been.
ON KISSING, TICKLING, AND BEING BORED: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. By Adam Phillips. (Harvard University, $19.95.) A children's psychotherapist writes poetically about the dangers of vigilance and the pleasures of carelessness.
THE PEOPLE IN THE PLAYGROUND. By Iona Opie. (Oxford University, $23.) The Rabelaisian humor and poetic language of English children at play, presented by a woman who has watched them for 40 years.
YOU MUST BE DREAMING. By Barbara Noel with Kathryn Watterson. (Poseidon, $21.) The courageous, first-person account of the moral awakening of a woman who was drugged and raped by an old, world-renowned psychiatrist, and then, against all advice, sued him for malpractice.
Poetry
THE FATHER. By Sharon Olds. (Knopf, $20.) For years Sharon Olds has highlighted sex and death in her poetry, and here these concerns come together in powerful, sometimes breathless, scrupulously honest poems about her father dying of cancer. These poems examine grief with surprising delicacy and in startling depth.
GILGAMESH: A New Rendering in English Verse. By David Ferry. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, cloth, $15; paper, $10.) Only a handful of poets could come close to the subtlety and intelligence of the verse in this translation of the Babylonian epic, which is so masterly that it belongs as much to David Ferry as to its original poet. The intensity of this story of love, loyalty and the search for eternal life makes it a very modern, and profoundly moving, experience.
NEW & SELECTED POEMS. By Stephen Berg. (Copper Canyon, cloth, $21; paper, $12.) A hard spareness marks the poetry of Stephen Berg and the world he has presented in work over the 20 years covered in this volume; and the world of literature and the mind becomes a refuge. The light he throws on life may be too sharply focused for some readers; he makes us remember what we need to, but might forget.
NEW AND SELECTED POEMS. By Mary Oliver. (Beacon, $20.) Poems from 30 years that astonish by their consistent tone. Mary Oliver's concerns are public, her poetry sustaining; she so completely controls the rhythm and pacing of her lines that her poems teach us how to read them. This volume received the 1992 National Book Award.
TRAVELS. By W. S. Merwin. (Knopf, $20.) Sturdily written, wonderfully entertaining verse tales of an assortment of displaced characters make this a book rich in incident and irony. Few contemporary poets can tell stories as well as these are told, in a blend of romantic rhetoric and plain-spoken imagery that transports them into the realm of legend.
Politics & Current Affairs
ACROSS THE WIRE: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border. By Luis Alberto Urrea. (Anchor/Doubleday, paper, $9.) Not for the fainthearted, this book of linked vignettes presents a tough, subjective view of the suffering, the trash heaps and the slums of Tijuana.
AT THE HIGHEST LEVELS: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War. By Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) A useful and readable account of events of great magnitude by two keen observers who enjoyed unusual access.
BOILING POINT: Republicans, Democrats, and the Decline of Middle-Class Prosperity. By Kevin Phillips. (Random House, $23.) A thorough and acerbic analysis of how the American middle class, over the last 20 years, has been losing its cash and its access to services, education, advancement and baseball tickets.
CONDUCT UNBECOMING: Lesbians and Gays in the U.S. Military, Vietnam to the Persian Gulf. By Randy Shilts. (St. Martin's, $27.95.) A landmark history that explores the ferocity and tenacity of those who have carried out -- with physical and psychological intimidation -- the purges against lesbians and gay men in the military.
CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM. By Edward W. Said. (Knopf, $25.) Mr. Said argues for the centrality of imperialism to European high culture, especially when it hides itself in the periphery.
THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND THE END OF THE MODERN AGE. By John Lukacs. (Ticknor & Fields, $21.95.) For one thing, Mr. Lukacs says, it was a short century, beginning in 1914 and ending with the fall of Communism. Now, he argues provocatively, the world will be ruled by intransigent nationalism.
THE GULF CONFLICT 1990-1991: Diplomacy and War in the New World Order. By Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh. (Princeton University, $29.95.) The fullest history yet of George Bush's famous victory, by two accomplished military scholars.
HATE ON TRIAL: The Case Against America's Most Dangerous Neo-Nazi. By Morris Dees and Steve Fiffer. (Villard, $21.) Mr. Dees, the trial lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, tells, with great moral power, how he successfully sued Tom Metzger, a white supremacist, for inciting the murder of an Ethiopian student in Oregon.
HIGH NOON IN SOUTHERN AFRICA: Making Peace in a Rough Neighborhood. By Chester A. Crocker. (Norton, $29.95.) A history and defense of his conduct by Ronald Reagan's top diplomat for African affairs, highly circumstantial and highly instructive for those who agree with his policies and those who don't.
INSIDE GORBACHEV'S KREMLIN: The Memoirs of Yegor Ligachev. (Pantheon, $27.50.) The recollections of a tough, honest Bolshevik who was instrumental in bringing Mikhail S. Gorbachev to power but could not follow where Mr. Gorbachev wanted to go.
LEAVING TOWN ALIVE: Confessions of an Arts Warrior. By John Frohnmayer. (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95.) The political naif who was the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts licks his wounds after his none-too-brilliant battles over the likes of Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe.
LIFE'S DOMINION: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom. By Ronald Dworkin. (Knopf, $23.) Mr. Dworkin contends that the relevant choices cannot depend on anyone's "right to live" (or to die), but must proceed from the idea that life is sacred, and that therefore the state must not interfere.
MARTYR'S DAY: Chronicle of a Small War. By Michael Kelly. (Random House, $23.) A personal account of extremely vivid experiences during and after the Persian Gulf war, by a journalist who later became a correspondent for The New York Times.
PANDAEMONIUM: Ethnicity in International Politics. By Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (Oxford University, $19.95.) Senator Moynihan, one of ethnicity's prime explorers, argues that modern politics has culpably slighted the subject and that national self-determination has proved a perilous principle.
PREPARING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. By Paul Kennedy. (Random House, $25.) The author of "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" undertakes to examine the probable consequences of the world's present conduct. No nation will be unscathed, he argues; many will be miserable; ours will decline more than some but less than the most unfortunate.
RACE MATTERS. By Cornel West. (Beacon, $15.) What will turn our racial climate more benign? Mr. West, an optimist but a wise one, thinks good will, hard work and intelligence may yet help.
THE SEVENTH MILLION: The Israelis and the Holocaust. By Tom Segev. (Hill & Wang, $27.50.) A frank and devastating chronicle, by a columnist for an Israeli newspaper, of the uses and abuses of the Holocaust by political leaders in Palestine and Israel.
A SINGLE TEAR: A Family's Persecution, Love, and Endurance in Communist China. By Wu Ningkun in collaboration with Li Yikai. (Atlantic Monthly, $21.) In this poignant memoir the teacher Wu Ningkun, persecuted as a counterrevolutionary for 22 years in Maoist China, tries to answer the question: "Have I suffered and survived in vain?"
SLEEPING ON A WIRE: Conversations With Palestinians in Israel. By David Grossman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) An Israeli journalist explores, with great force, the anguish of Israel's largest minority, an anonymous population of a million Arabs, who since the founding of Israel have lived in suspended animation -- rejected, detested, suspected by the state they live in.
THE SPIRIT OF COMMUNITY: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda. By Amitai Etzioni. (Crown, $22.) A thoughtful commentary about and a promotion of communitarianism, the ideology that aims to address the moral crises of our day and restore civic responsibility to society.
TALES OUT OF SCHOOL: Joseph Fernandez's Crusade to Rescue American Education. By Joseph A. Fernandez with John Underwood. (Little, Brown, $24.95.) The school-reform wars as observed by a chief combatant, the tough, intelligent, nimble and occasionally abrasive man who has been ousted as New York City's Schools Chancellor.
TURMOIL AND TRIUMPH: My Years as Secretary of State. By George P. Shultz. (Robert Stewart/ Scribners, $30.) Mr. Shultz defends the incremental procedures that led to good relations between President Ronald Reagan and the former Evil Empire.
TURNING POINT: A Candidate, a State, and a Nation Come of Age. By Jimmy Carter. (Times Books/ Random House, $22.) A thoughtful reappraisal of Mr. Carter's first campaign, in 1962, when he was defeated in his bid for a seat in the Georgia State Senate, challenged the returns and ultimately won.
TWIN PILLARS TO DESERT STORM: America's Flawed Vision in the Middle East From Nixon to Bush. By Howard Teicher and Gayle Radley Teicher. (Morrow, $23.) A member of the National Security Council staff until 1987 and his wife vent their anger over the shortsightedness of America's twin objectives in the Middle East -- to block Soviet influence and to keep the oil coming.
UNDER A NEW SKY: A Reunion With Russia. By Olga Andreyev Carlisle. (Ticknor & Fields, $21.95.) A detailed, insightful account of Russian intellectuals and trends since 1960 by the daughter and granddaughter of pre-Revolutionary literary figures.
UNDER FIRE: The NRA and the Battle for Gun Control. By Osha Gray Davidson. (Holt, $25.) In this informative report about the National Rifle Association's history and lobbying activities, Mr. Davidson argues that the organization has been weakened by its uncompromising stance that American democracy depends on unfettered access to guns.
THE WORST OF TIMES. By Patricia G. Miller. (Aaron Asher/HarperCollins, $22.) Ms. Miller, a lawyer specializing in matrimonial law, interviewed some 50 people with firsthand experience for this memoir of abortion before Roe v. Wade.
Religion & Philosophy
THE ANCHOR BIBLE DICTIONARY. David Noel Freedman, editor in chief. (Six volumes, Doubleday, $360.) This monumental (7,035 pages) and truly ecumenical work brings together the efforts of nearly 1,000 contributors in entries, some of them at essay length, on innumerable major and minor biblical topics.
THE CHURCH AND THE LEFT. By Adam Michnik. (University of Chicago, $24.95.) Published in Polish in 1977, Mr. Michnik's essay argues that the secular opposition to Communism must reconsider the reflexive anticlericalism of the left.
DAKOTA: A Spiritual Geography. By Kathleen Norris. (Ticknor & Fields, $19.95.) A deeply moving book that is itself an act of devotion by a poet who is a married Protestant and also a lay member of a Benedictine community on the Great Plains.
ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY: Fear of the Modern World. By Fatima Mernissi. (Addison-Wesley, $24.95.) With insightful flashes and no apologies, this Muslim woman argues for democracy in the Muslim world and looks at the growing fundamentalist movements there.
LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children. By Jason Berry. (Doubleday, $22.50.) In his detailed investigation, Mr. Berry finds cases of child molestation by Catholic clergy members from New York to Honolulu, uncovers a pattern in the pedophilia and suggests that the church's sexual ethic is partly to blame.
METAPHYSICS AS A GUIDE TO MORALS. By Iris Murdoch. (Allen Lane/Penguin, $35.) Echoing her novels, Ms. Murdoch teaches us to be wary when approaching any philosophy, including her own Platonic view that our moral sense depends on our imperfect apprehension of perfection.
MY FATHER'S GURU: A Journey Through Spirituality and Disillusion. By Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. (Addison-Wesley, $20.) Before he grew up and overthrew Freud, Mr. Masson lived a childhood of total immersion in his family's infatuation with a spiritual guide his father brought home from India.
THE NEW COLD WAR? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State. By Mark Juergensmeyer. (University of California, $25.) This dispassionate comparative study of violent religious movements centers on a question: are we about to witness a geopolitical battle between zealots and Western secular societies?
OUTERCOURSE: The Be-Dazzling Voyage. By Mary Daly. (HarperSanFrancisco, $24.) More radical cheek from the philosopher, theologian, mythologist, explorer, pirate, warrior, witch, fairy and leprechaun who gave us "Gyn/Ecology."
RIGHTEOUS DISCONTENT: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. By Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham. (Harvard University, $34.95.) A sophisticated and inspirational study of the time when black women, in the interest of survival and resistance, made the Baptist church their institutional base.
SHAME AND NECESSITY, by Bernard Williams. (Centennial/University of California, $25.) A clever, agile professor of philosophy argues that the Homeric Greeks may have been wiser than the great thinkers of Athens and possibly even wiser than we.
THE TIBETAN BOOK OF LIVING AND DYING. By Sogyal Rinpoche. (HarperSanFrancisco, $22.) Tibetan Buddhism, an ancient, complex and mystical religion, gracefully expounded by a native Tibetan authority (the Dalai Lama contributes a preface).
UPON THIS ROCK: The Miracles of a Black Church. By Samuel G. Freedman. (HarperCollins, $22.50.) A report on a year spent with St. Paul Community Baptist Church in a black section of Brooklyn and with its wise and sophisticated pastor, who has made the church a locus of organization, rescue and healing.
WRITING WOMEN'S WORLDS: Bedouin Stories. By Lila Abu-Lughod. (University of California, $30.) In this richly textured ethnography, an anthropologist recounts the conversations, stories, jokes and songs of Muslim Arab women living in the Western Desert of Egypt; she writes to challenge our understanding of Muslim life, and our very notion of culture.
Science
ASSEMBLING CALIFORNIA. By John McPhee. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $21.) The last of four volumes on American geology and the practitioners of plate tectonics explores the construction of California out of traveling rocks from all over the world in the last 100 million years, as well as its probable dissolution.
COMPLEXITY: Life at the Edge of Chaos. By Roger Lewin. (Macmillan, $22.) A vivid account of the eccentric characters who are blazing fresh paths through biology, physics and mathematics to create a new interdisciplinary science.
COMPLEXITY: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. By M. Mitchell Waldrop. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) Mr. Waldrop relays the exhilaration of the scientists and enthusiasts at the Santa Fe Institute as they found a new field.
DREAMS OF A FINAL THEORY. By Steven Weinberg. (Pantheon, $25.) Finding austere inspiration in the possibility that the universe may one day be reduced to bare mathematical formulas, a Nobel laureate and uncompromising reductionist argues boldly that we should plunge wholeheartedly into that future.
FUZZY LOGIC. By Daniel McNeill and Paul Freiberger. (Simon & Schuster, $22.) How computer scientists generated programs that can handle propositions like "40 percent true," and why such programs are often more useful than plain old true/false logic.
GENIUS IN THE SHADOWS. A Biography of Leo Szilard: The Man Behind the Bomb. By William Lanouette with Bela Silard. (Robert Stewart/Scribners, $35.) A delightful, anecdote-rich biography of the Hungarian physicist who knew everybody and everything but got no credit because his best friends could barely stand him.
THE GOD PARTICLE: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question? By Leon Lederman with Dick Teresi. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95.) A Nobel laureate with a gift for folksiness looks at the search for a unified theory of nature and for the particle that could play a part in determining the properties of the fundamental forces.
NATURE'S MIND: The Biological Roots of Thinking, Emotions, Sexuality, Language and Intelligence. By Michael S. Gazzaniga. (Basic Books, $25.) In a bold, absorbing challenge to the tabula rasa theory of mind, Mr. Gazzaniga, a neurobiologist, asserts that drug addicts, alcoholics, depressives, musical geniuses and philosophers are not made but born.
SCIENCE IN RUSSIA AND THE SOVIET UNION: A Short History. By Loren R. Graham. (Cambridge University, $29.95.) This informative history shows that science in Russia -- whether before, during or after Communist rule -- has never been the independent enterprise it was in Western Europe.
Science Fiction
A DEEPER SEA. By Alexander Jablokov. (Avonova/Morrow, $22.) In this untidy, provocative tale, an obsessive scientist teaches dolphins to talk by torturing them, thereby raising ethical questions that come to vex the entire solar system.
THE DESTINY MAKERS. By George Turner. (Avonova/Morrow, $20.) The Australian novelist dispassionately homes in on a tough issue: In a world of runaway population growth, who decides which babies don't get born?
DEUS X. By Norman Spinrad. (Spectra/ Bantam, $3.99.) A witty short novel that asks whether an electronic replica of a human being has a soul, and, if so, whether it can be saved with the help of the first female Pope.
DREAM OF GLASS. By Jean Mark Gawron. (Harcourt Brace, $21.95.) A complex and engrossing philosophical novel that explores, with great energy and flashes of poetry, the future of freedom in a world dominated by computers and the people who control them.
THE HARVEST. By Robert Charles Wilson. (Spectra/Bantam, cloth, $23; paper, $12.) An intelligently conceived, fully realized novel about an assortment of malcontents who reject an offer to give up their humanity and become immortal.
NIGHTSIDE THE LONG SUN. By Gene Wolfe. (Tor/Tom Doherty, $21.95.) To inaugurate a new multivolume series, the indefatigable Mr. Wolfe introduces a young priest who, in trying to rescue his chapel and school from bankruptcy, stumbles on some disturbing truths about his world and his gods.
Spies & Thrillers
BRIDES OF BLOOD. By Joseph Koenig. (Grove, $19.95.) What makes this crackling, shocking police procedural about a murdered prostitute wildly different is its setting -- the hate-filled streets and prisons of present-day Iran.
HARD DRIVE. By David Pogue. (Diamond/Berkley, paper, $4.99.) A company in Silicon Valley, on the verge of unveiling a computer that takes dictation, is foiled by a virus, and Armageddon begins.
THE JOURNEYMAN TAILOR. By Gerald Seymour. (Edward Burlingame/HarperCollins, $20.) An Irish terrorist and a woman who is a British secret service agent tangle in this morally complex, captivating novel.
POINT OF IMPACT. By Stephen Hunter. (Bantam, $21.95.) This superbly written page turner, about a sniper-turned-hunter who has been framed, teaches us, among other things, the details of shooting at a target half a mile away.
PRAETORIAN. By Thomas Gifford. (Bantam, $22.50.) Not quite an espionage tale, not quite a war story, this complicated novel, set in the days when Rommel was taking over North Africa, explores human relationships through the eyes of a wartime journalist.
Travel, Nature & Adventure
AT THE HAND OF MAN: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife. By Raymond Bonner. (Knopf, $24.) Mr. Bonner inspects nearly every relevant argument about conservation in Africa and finds that there will be none, without support by intelligent exploitation.
THE AYE-AYE AND I: A Rescue Mission in Madagascar. By Gerald Durrell. (Arcade, $22.95.) Mr. Durrell's 24th book, written in support of grave efforts to save a rare mammal and its environment, is a sharply detailed romp in an enchanted landscape of unique flora and fauna.
THE CRYSTAL DESERT: Summers in Antarctica. By David G. Campbell. (Houghton Mifflin, $21.95.) Mr. Campbell, a biologist, spent three seasons in the Antarctic and returned with eerily clear perceptions of that sere and uninhabitable place.
THE FATE OF THE ELEPHANT. By Douglas H. Chadwick. (Sierra Club, $25.) A wildlife biologist presents an elephant-centric view of the world -- from Tanzania to Malaysia -- and a splendidly fun and morally sensible introduction to elephant-human conflicts everywhere.
GOING BACK TO BISBEE. By Richard Shelton. (University of Arizona, cloth, $35; paper, $15.95.) A memorable ride through time and experience from booming Tucson to struggling Bisbee, Ariz., with fascinating sidetracks into botany, history and biology.
THE LAST PANDA. By George B. Schaller. (University of Chicago, $24.95.) A distinguished biologist's group portrait of "the most endearing creatures I have ever seen" and a catalogue of human bungling that may guarantee the extinction of the wild panda.
NATURAL OPIUM: Some Travelers' Tales. By Diane Johnson. (Knopf, $21.) The distinguished essayist meditates frugally and perceptively on the psychological strangeness of travel, from the plains of Tanzania to the slopes of Mormon Utah.
ROAD SCHOLAR: Coast to Coast Late in the Century. By Andrei Codrescu. (Hyperion, $19.95.) Mr. Codrescu, a poet better known as an essayist on National Public Radio, mounts a red '68 Caddy for a journey in essay writing, a countertrave logue that visits lots of spots important in the less orthodox history of America.
True Crime
DEATH BENEFIT: A Lawyer Uncovers a Twenty-Year Pattern of Seduction, Arson, and Murder. By David Heilbroner. (Harmony/Crown, $20.) How a straight-arrow lawyer ran to earth, despite the apathy of insurance companies and law enforcement agencies, the appal ling psychopath who killed a client's daughter.
EVERYTHING SHE EVER WANTED: A True Story of Obsessive Love, Murder, and Betrayal. By Ann Rule. (Simon & Schuster, $23.) A harrowing look at a modern-day Southern psychopath who knew how to bat her eyelashes and annihilate a family.
THE MISBEGOTTEN SON. A Serial Killer and His Victims: The True Story of Arthur J. Shawcross. By Jack Olsen. (Delacorte, $21.95.) A veteran true-crime writer's fascinating and forceful account of a life devoted to torture, mutilation and homicide.
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COUNTRY: UNITED STATES (79%); GERMANY (53%);
STATE: NEW YORK, USA (79%);
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COMPANY: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS (54%); YALE UNIVERSITY (57%); YALE UNIVERSITY (57%);
ORGANIZATION: YALE UNIVERSITY (57%); YALE UNIVERSITY (57%);
GEOGRAPHIC: UNITED STATES (79%); GERMANY (53%); NEW YORK, USA (79%); PARIS, FRANCE (55%);
SUBJECT: BOOKS AND LITERATURE BOOK REVIEWS (92%); PHOTOGRAPHY (90%); PAINTING (90%); SCULPTURE (90%); JAZZ & BLUES (90%); ART & ARTISTS (89%); ARTISTS & PERFORMERS (89%); MUSIC (79%); SONG WRITING (78%); HISTORY (78%); PHOTOGRAPHY SERVICES (78%); PUBLIC BROADCASTING (78%); LITERATURE (78%); PROFILES & BIOGRAPHIES (74%); BIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE (73%); PUBLIC TELEVISION (50%); TELEVISION PROGRAMMING (50%); TELEVISION INDUSTRY (50%);
PERSON: ROBERT WALTRIP 'BOBBY' SHORT (57%); ROBERT BURNS MOTHERWELL (55%);
LOAD-DATE: June 6, 1993
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
TYPE: Review; List
Copyright 1993 The New York Times Company
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He interrupted her. Close at hand is a stable where two beautiful ponies are kept. They are snowy white, and are consecrated to the goddess Ku-wanon, the deity of mercy, who is the presiding genius of the temple. They are in the care of a young girl, and it is considered a pious duty to feed them. Pease and beans are for sale outside, and many devotees contribute a few cash for the benefit of the sacred animals. If the poor beasts should eat a quarter of what is offered to them, or, rather, of what is paid for, they would soon die of overfeeding. It is shrewdly suspected that the grain is sold many times over, in consequence of a collusion between the dealers and the keeper of the horses. At all events, the health of the animals is regarded, and it would never do to give them all that is presented. On their return from the garden they stopped at a place where eggs are hatched by artificial heat. They are placed over brick ovens or furnaces, where a gentle heat is kept up, and a man is constantly on watch to see that the fire neither burns too rapidly nor too slowly. A great heat would kill the vitality of the egg by baking it, while if the temperature falls below a certain point, the hatching process does not go on. When the little chicks appear, they are placed under the care of an artificial mother, which consists of a bed of soft down and feathers, with a cover three or four inches above it. This cover has strips of down hanging from it, and touching the bed below, and the chickens nestle there quite safe from outside cold. The Chinese have practised this artificial hatching and rearing for thousands of years, and relieved the hens of a great deal of the monotony of life. He would not have it in the scabbard, and when I laid it naked in his hand he kissed the hilt. Charlotte sent Gholson for Ned Ferry. Glancing from the window, I noticed that for some better convenience our scouts had left the grove, and the prisoners had been marched in and huddled close to the veranda-steps, under their heavy marching-guard of Louisianians. One of the blue-coats called up to me softly: "Dying--really?" He turned to his fellows--"Boys, Captain's dying." Assuming an air of having forgotten all about Dick¡¯s rhyme, he went to his place in the seat behind Jeff and the instant his safety belt was snapped Jeff signaled to a farmer who had come over to investigate and satisfy himself that the airplane had legitimate business there; the farmer kicked the stones used as chocks from under the landing tires and Jeff opened up the throttle. ¡°Yes,¡± Dick supplemented Larry¡¯s new point. ¡°Another thing, Sandy, that doesn¡¯t explain why he¡¯d take three boys and fly a ship he could never use on water¡ªwith an amphibian right here.¡± Should you leave me too, O my faithless ladie? And years of remorse and despair been your fate, That night was a purging. From thenceforward Reuben was to press on straight to his goal, with no more slackenings or diversions. "Is that you, Robin?" said a soft voice; and a female face was seen peeping half way down the stairs. HoMElãñÔóÂÜÀ³ó
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