From the Publisher

By Elizabeth Valk Long

LET'S ADMIT IT: JOURNALISTS CAN'T STOP WRITING. They are obsessed with the idea that they have something significant to tell the world. Often what they have to say may be less than earthshaking. At other times, they can knock your hat off. My hat is off to four TIME staff members whose obsessions have produced new books that you will be hearing about in the next few weeks.

From Robert Hughes, TIME's tireless art critic, comes Culture of Complaint (Oxford University Press), a lacerating study of the decline in American values that will surely raise amens among many people, as well as hackles among others. The book is an expanded version of a three-part lecture series that Hughes gave early last year at the New York Public Library and subsequently summarized in a TIME cover story, "The Fraying of America" ((Feb. 3, 1992)). Among his complaints: the distortion of the ideals of multiculturalism, the erosion of the English language by partisans of the Politically Correct, the decline of education, the damage to politics and the culture in general wrought by extremists on both the left and the right. And that's only Lecture 1.

The B.C.C.I. affair, about which you have read much in these pages, is now given full exposure in a riveting book, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of B.C.C.I. (Random House), by investigative reporter Jonathan Beaty and senior editor S.C. Gwynne, who were among the first journalists to seize on the serpentine elements of this global scandal. After writing nearly a score of penetrating TIME articles, Beaty and Gwynne took a six-month leave of absence and, working from 750 lbs. of documents and notes, transformed a forbiddingly complex news story into a dramatic account of one of the most alarming criminal conspiracies of modern times.

Among other arcana, much less susceptible to understanding than the B.C.C.I. scandal, is the question that plagues cosmologists: How did the universe grow into its present form? Did it all start with the Big Bang, or the Great Void? The Great Attractor, or the Great Wall? Science writer Michael D. Lemonick follows this adventure of discovery in The Light at the Edge of the Universe (Villard), which will be published next month. While the answers still elude cosmologists, Lemonick's chronicle draws us compellingly into these mysteries. Together with his colleagues, he demonstrates how responsible journalism can create a Big Bang of its own.