The Year's Best

NONFICTION

FRIENDLY FIRE by C.D.B. Bryan. Angry, anguished Iowa parents battle military bureaucracy to learn the truth about their soldier-son's accidental death in Viet Nam. A very different kind of war book.

SIMPLE JUSTICE by Richard Kluger. A dramatic and illuminating social, legal and political history of the most important law case of our time--Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which resulted in the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools.

SCOUNDREL TIME by Lillian Hellman. After years of silence, the formidable author vents her fury about her costly encounters with the Mc-Carthyism of the early '50s.

WORLD OF OUR FATHERS by Irving Howe. The finest, most comprehensive book about the Jewish-American experience ever written--or ever likely to be written.

THE WOMAN WARRIOR by Maxine Hong Kingston. A brilliant employment of fictional techniques to describe the cultural shocks of growing up as a Chinese American in California.

FICTION

THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The author of the masterly One Hundred Years of Solitude (1970) imagines a mythic despot in a fictitious South American country and creates a Kafkaesque saga with a Latin beat.

1876 by Gore Vidal. A witty poison-pen card to the U.S. on its Bicentennial, this travelogue through America in midpassage concentrates on the crimes, high and low, of robber barons and burglar-politicians.

THE FAMILY ARSENAL by Paul Theroux. Shades of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene hover about this tale of inept terrorists trying to play house in London.

OCTOBER LIGHT by John Gardner. In his best novel yet, the prolific Gardner sets a spoof of pulp fiction inside a philosophical monologue on good and evil--all touched off by the family squabbles of two cranky old Vermonters.

SPEEDBOAT by Renata Adler. This sequence of polished vignettes ticks off a range of contemporary neuroses, especially those plaguing people in their 30s--the generation that was too young to cheer the System and too old to blow it up.

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