Summer Reading

Memoirs, novels and comic nonfiction to enliven vacation hours

WAR WITHIN AND WITHOUT

by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

471 pages; $14.95

These entries from 1939 to 1944 express more than mere temperament; they reveal a whole epoch. The fifth volume of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's confidential writings starts with the dawn of war in Europe, "like the morning after a death," and continues to another death, that of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery. "I am sad," she notes, "that he never forgave us for our stand."

Their stand was contra American intervention in the war, and it is remarkable that the author makes no attempt to cosmetize her own bewildered views or the hard-line isolationism of her husband. As the diaries proceed from tragedy toward peace, Charles Lindbergh falls from legend to scapegrace, a favorite target of the Roosevelt Administration. The derision was painful and somewhat undeserved. In her convincing presentation, Charles' speeches against intervention no longer seem hysterical screeds, but misguided attempts to warn the country of its own weak defenses. And his harsh, almost mystical withdrawal from public life is sensitively shown as an extension of that first flight, "alone seeing his destination, alone having faith that he can reach it, with people on the sidelines shouting, 'Flying Fool!'"

With stubborn integrity, the Lindberghs first hold to their beliefs, then gradually join the main currents of American thought. A brilliant procession of notables streams through the pages. Here are the internationalists and the noninterventionists: Founding Father Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, certain that England is finished; William Randolph Hearst, "that gray and lifeless mask"; W.H. Auden, "loose from the world and alone, suspended in space." What remains just out of sight is the relentless dilation of every Lindbergh move, the echoes of the kidnaping and murder of the couple's first child, and the inability of the great, silent pilot to make himself understood--except to his wife. In the end, War Within and Without is less history than love story, a testimonial to loyalty and forbearance. Anne concludes: "I write lightly but I do not feel lightly." Nor can any reader, following the progress of two vulnerable souls a world ago.

PARKINSON: THE LAW

by C. Northcote Parkinson

Houghton Mifflin; 207pages; $8.95

Twenty-one years have passed since Britain's redoubtable historian C. Northcote Parkinson discovered the Law: "Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." During this time, Parkinson has not been idle. He postulated a Second Law: "Expenditure rises to meet income." He elucidated a Law of Triviality, which holds that the time spent on any item of an official agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved.

Now Parkinson, who has confined his studies to corporations and government agencies, turns his talents to a broader field--humanity itself. After careful study of his previously discovered laws, he has reached the conclusion that Parkinson's Law is merely one aspect of a more general Law. "Action," declares Parkinson, "expands to fill the void created by human failure."

This observation is both more entertaining and more disturbing than his earlier ones. For as Parkinson formulates new laws, nations East and West grow increasingly unable to negotiate. The action that rushes in to fill this void could be one that has occurred many times before. It goes by the name of war.

GREEN MONDAY

by Michael M. Thomas

Wyndham; 414 pages; $12.95

The Wall Street of Michael Thomas' first novel knows all about bears and bulls. It is soon to learn about camels. The Kingdom, a Middle Eastern country easily confused with Saudi Arabia, has a problem: too much money and not enough closet space. What should it do with the endless trunkloads of dollars it exchanges for limitless barrels of oil? After all, the Kingdom feels the pinch of inflation too: every time it raises the price of crude, its dollars depreciate. Everyone is caught in a viscous circle--until the entrance of David Harrison, American freelance financial adviser, connoisseur of paintings, wine, well-bound books and unfettered women. Petrodollars, he reasons coldly, can rig almost anything, including the stock market. His plan is simple. Surreptitiously insert billions of those dollars into the U.S. stock market and then cut the price of oil to $10 per bbl. The Dow Jones average will go through the top of the World Trade Center, and the Kingdom will be an overnight hero to the hard-pressed West. The scheme works on paper --at least the clothbound kind.

Novelist Thomas, 44, a former staff member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and now a private business consultant, delivers a heady blend of financial expertise, jet-set elegance, cultural sophistication, romance, intrigue, karate chops and plastic explosives. Harrison himself is a rare combination: part Bernard Baruch, part Scaramouche.

SMILE PLEASE

by Jean Rhys

Harper & Row; 151 pages; $10.95

When Jean Rhys died last year at 89, she was at work on only her ninth book, an autobiography. But despite her small oeuvre, Rhys' literary reputation was secured by her haunting tales of women living at the edge, unprotected by family or money. Because the lives of her heroines often mirrored her own, she wanted to set the record straight. The first half of Smile Please is an exquisite memoir of young Jean's school days in Dominica, the West Indies, with its brilliant forests and its harsh contrasts in black and white. The second section details Rhys' life in England. She arrived at that other, far more dismal island when she was 16 and attended school for a year, until her father's death forced her to quit. For the next two years she toured, incongruously, as a chorus girl in musical comedies. A decade later she married and moved to Paris. There, except for a few brief pages, the book ends, barely a third of the way through her life.

Rhys did not consider these later chapters to be finished. But even in draft, her work is instructive: because sudden death prevented Rhys' customarily polished revisions, the pain of her adult experiences is conveyed with an extraordinary freshness. A typical vignette: at 20, preparing to spend a lonely Christmas Day, she receives a tree hung with presents, the gift from an ex-lover. Her response is immediate: she lugs the tree to the street, hails a cab and tells the driver to take her to a children's hospital. "The next thing I remember clearly is being back in my room. The tree was gone and there was a full, unopened bottle of gin on the table." On such occasions--and the book contains many--her memory could lapse. Yet even when it did, her prose style never fell below the highest standard.

THE GOLDEN TURKEY AWARDS

by Harry and Michael Medved

Perigee; 223 pages; $6.95

Living well may be the best revenge, but ridicule is not so bad. Take this lively roast of some 200 films: in place of the Oscar, Harry and Michael Medved award their own Golden Turkey, a statuette worthy of such fowl efforts as The Green Slime, Godzilla's Revenge, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and Teenagers from Outer Space. Their categories alone are worth the price of admission: The Most Badly Bumbled Bee Movie of All Time (The Swarm); The Worst Performance by a Novelist (Norman Mailer in Wild 90); The Worst Credit Line (The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor); The Worst Vegetable Movie of All Time (a nominee is Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but it is edged out by the classic Attack of the Mushroom People). The Medveds are arbitrary scholars: their Most Ludicrous Racial Impersonation in Hollywood History inexplicably omits the Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu movies, and, with a cast of thousands, including Victor Mature, John Agar and Sonny Tufts, they name Richard Burton as The Worst Actor of All Time. Still, the authors are generous enough to admit that they may be mistaken, and that even with two sets of hands they cannot pluck every turkey. Thus in the back of the book they offer a suggestion box for readers who have their own ideas about, say, The Pigeon That Took Rome, or the collected works of Vera Hruba Ralston. The envelope, please. . .

MURDER IN THE WHITE HOUSE

by Margaret Truman

Arbor House; 235 pages; $9.95

Margaret Truman, whose vocal talents were once angrily defended by her father when he was President, has turned with greater success to authorship. In her first novel (following Women of Courage and Harry S. Truman), a thriller about the murder of a Secretary of State in the Lincoln Sitting Room, she writes not only with intimate knowledge of the White House and its inhabitants but also with a natural flak for the genre.

As it turns out, Secretary Lansard Blaine, a brilliant diplomat who was up for a Nobel Peace Prize, was a compulsive lover of complaisant young women. He was also in the pay of numerous foreign corporations bent on influencing U.S. foreign trade policy. The investigation into his murder is entrusted by President Robert Lang Webster to one of his aides, Ron Fairbanks. The sleuth is given authority to question even the President himself if necessary. Fairbanks, it happens, has an affair of the heart with the President's daughter Lynne. He also has a consuming hatred for the Haldermanic White House Chief of Staff, Fritz Gimbel, who may or may not have murdered the Secretary. The plot builds up to a superb denouement. One wonders if all is fiction. For example, President Webster's description of Congress: "A collection of minor-league dipsomaniacs and fugitives from dementia praecox. "Echoes of Harry?

THE SENDING

by Geoffrey Household;

Atlantic-Little, Brown; 186 pages; $10.95

It is 40 years since Geoffrey Household wrote his classic suspense novel Rogue Male, with its sporting narrator stalking Adolf Hitler in Germany--and being counterstalked by Nazis in Dorset.

Rogue Male is still selling. And so are many of the 27 other books that Household, now 79, has turned out since. They are set all over the world, and told by a variety of narrators. But some of the best, like The Sending, unwind in the mind of a Somerset Englishman. There the old white magic continues to cast its spell.

The Sending is a suspense fantasy that makes charming, provocative and believable the adventures of Alfgif Hollaston, an ex-colonial officer turned landscape painter. Alfgif finds himself beset by a nameless fear. He traces the source to supernatural broadcasts from "the Purpose," which may be the devil, or simply a pantheistic deity. Alfgif gets a lot of help from a winsome polecat named Meg, a pet who rides in his coat pocket and turns out to be the kind of "familiar" (a supernatural spirit-animal form) familiar to witchcraft. He learns that he has modest occult powers himself and eventually converses with one of "the Purpose's" top executives, a gentleman, polite enough but obviously not an Englishman. When this personage inquires as to the source of Alfgif's powers, the reply comes: "No power at all beyond the concentration of the master craftsman."

That is Household's power too. In his hands all Alfgif's odd doings somehow seem simple and natural and rare as a June day in Somerset.

THE ORIGIN

by Irving Stone

Doubleday; 744 pages; $14.95

Having lived mainly a life of the mind, Charles Darwin is a difficult subject for popular biography. After five years aboard H.M.S. Beagle, he married Josiah Wedgwood's daughter, moved to the country and spent his days in study, writing, fathering children and improving his homestead. He never had money worries, did not drink, gamble or chase women. All he did was change mankind's image of itself. It was hardly a rush to judgment. For 17 years he had labored on his book in the study of a country house at Down, despite fits of nausea, depression, flatulence and fatigue. And no wonder. What he had to say challenged the cherished beliefs of many of his scientific peers, his church and his own beloved wife.

Irving Stone (Lust for Life, The Agony and the Ecstasy) steers a safe and steady course through Darwin's life. Cannily, he sticks to the intellectual shallows and piles up the domestic details. It is a stolid, readable job in which the author at tempts to dramatize the excitement of scientific discovery with fictionalized dia logue and lines like "He felt he was on to something . . . important." That he was, but somehow Irving's Origin of Charles does not seem up to Darwin's Origin of Species.

LAUGHING IN THE HILLS

by Bill Barich

Viking; 228 pages; $10.95

The cross-country journey in search of enlightenment is a nonfiction standard. It would take a work of striking originality to break from the pack of aging hippies and victims of mid-life's critical list. This is the work. Nearing 40, with a mother dying of cancer and a marriage "childless and knee-deep in ruin," Bill Barich attempted an "escape into orderliness." He was to find an idea of order at New York and California race tracks, where winners and losers are clearly labeled and bloodlines still count. If Laughing in the Hills were only about horses, it could still be entered as best of breed, for Barich often seems to enter the souls of touts, breeders and even the animals themselves. But the book is far more. Like its predecessors, A Fan's Notes, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, this unique adventure amalgamates wit, reportage and philosophy.

A great many funny things happen on the way to the track, among them memories of a time in Florence when the touchstones of art seemed as close as the walls. The magic returns in unlikely spots--when, for example, horses "recede into space like the figures reflected in the background bulbs and mirrors of Flemish paintings," or the moralistic voice of Savonarola echoes between sessions at the $2 window. Barich reports that during his six-week betting binge he never lost more than $128--or made more than $192. In fact, he gained far more. He wrote an enchanted book and found a soul-sustaining insight: "What was any renaissance but a sudden bias in favor of hope?" Readers can only be biased in favor of more from this gifted centaur.

SOLO

by Jack Higgins

Stein & Day; 249 pages; $11.95

Jack Higgins (The Eagle Has Landed) is a pseudonym of Harry Patterson (The Valhalla Exchange). Both names have become synonyms for popular thrillers, and Solo will not do the Higgins/Patterson reputation any harm. The trouble this time starts with a handsome Greek named John Mikali, who is not only a veteran of the French Foreign Legion but a world-famous pianist as well. Grieving over the death of his grandfather at the hands of the Greek junta, Mikali efficiently assassinates the colonel responsible and discovers that he has a genuine aptitude for this kind of work. He also has a terrific cover; very few classical musicians are international hit men on the side.

Once he establishes this premise, Higgins keeps things moving. Of course, Mikali will run afoul of the one man capable of discovering his double life. Of course, these adversaries will stage their final showdown on the occasion of Mikali's greatest triumph, a concert in London's Albert Hall. The plot, as formally predictable as a minuet, diverts without disturbing. Higgins' prose is simple to the point of sketchiness. Sentences lack verbs--a lot of sentences. Cliches nudge the brain along well-worn paths: "That sixth sense that had kept him alive for so long now, scenting danger like some jungle animal. . ." Yet if it is impossible to believe any of this, it is hard not to enjoy it. And reading Solo is less strenuous than watching seagulls. A lot of seagulls.

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