Notable

HOW TO SURVIVE IN YOUR NATIVE LAND by James Herndon. 192 pages.

Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

"If you only work in order to change things, you will simply go nuts. I am an authority on it. The book is mostly about kites and dogs and lizards and salamanders and magic." That is James Herndon, reformed globetrotter turned public school teacher, describing his newest book and confronting in characteristic stance the lugubrious subject of U.S. public education. Everything Herndon observes takes place in the "Spanish Main" intermediate school in "Tierra Firma," a thinly disguised middle-class suburb of San Francisco, where Herndon has taught for years. He appears to have tried every kind of pedagogical method, from applying a full quota of "reading" workbooks in a backward class to running a mini-free school where kids could come and go as they pleased. The results, though touched by humor and humanity, are disheartening.

Basically Herndon is in desperate agreement with John Holt, George Dennison, Jonathan Kozol, Edgar Friedenburg, Charles Silberman & Co. that U.S. schools are too foolishly over-administered to successfully nurture either reading and writing or the ability to cope humanely with the complex choices of modern life. But unlike most apocalyptic critics, Herndon sees no easy solution. He proceeds, moreover, by meandering parable rather than polemic, and uses a ruefully genial tone of voice that might have come from Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut. As a result, he is just about the only education reformer alive whose writing could be (and should be) profitably and pleasurably read aloud at the family dinner table.

THE NATION KILLERS by Robert Conquest. 222 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

One of Britain's foremost students of Russian affairs here describes the deportation from their homelands in the Caucasus of the entire populations of eight small nations. The Soviet pretext during World War II was that all those people were traitorous. By Conquest's calculation, about 1.6 million were uprooted and sent to the East. Of these, he estimates, 600,000 died as a result of the move.

The deportees were transported in cattle trucks over enormous distances without food. Many trains carrying them across the vast, empty eastern provinces seem to have been turned back after the deaths of most people aboard. It became Soviet policy, moreover, to pretend that the broken and scattered nations had never existed. The Volga Germans, descendants of settlers welcomed by Catherine the Great, were dispossessed not only of national existence but of their history--as were seven Asiatic nations, including Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingushi, Karachai, Balkars, Meskhetians and the Crimean Tatars. In the great reshuffling of borders and renaming of regions to obliterate old names, even the houses of the Crimean Tatars, Conquest writes, "were demolished and their vines and orchards allowed to become wild and overgrown. The Tatars' cemeteries were plowed up and their ancestors' remains torn out of the ground."

Details of this attempt at multiple genocide have been surfacing slowly for 18 years and are here put together for the first time. The value of this bleak book is accurately stated in its last sentence: "The more widely the facts become known in the West . . . the more real our picture of the world will be."

THE MAN WHO DARED THE LIGHTNING by Thomas Fleming. 532 pages. Morrow. $12.50.

It is impossible not to be impressed all over again by a man of such extraordinary parts as Ben Franklin. The author fondly presents them all: the scientist who discovered the existence of electricity in the clouds (and was dumb lucky not to have been frazzled at the end of his kite string by a direct lightning bolt); the inventor of bifocals and lending libraries; the aphorist, wit and author of Poor Richard's Almanack. Of course, there is also Franklin as America's premier diplomat, first in England trying desperately to head off the impending war, and later in Paris, where he was seeking an alliance and financial support for the rebelling colonies.

What is unexpected and particularly touching in "the book is Fleming's account of Franklin's stormy relationship with his son. Though illegitimate, William Franklin was openly raised by his famous father. The two were deeply attached to one another but grew toward a conflict that came to a head during the Revolution. In 1762 William was named the King's governor in New Jersey, and when war came he stuck with the King, maneuvered against his father's efforts to promote independence, and ultimately fled to England. Deeply hurt, Benjamin insisted upon a hard line against all Loyalists in the final treaty.

The book's chief flaw is that Franklin is portrayed as all but flawless. Poor Richard would have known better. "A benevolent man," he once wrote, "should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance."

ALI & NINO by Kurban Said. 237 pages. Random House. $5.95.

Can a Moslem and a Georgian Christian find true happiness in Transcaucasia? Not very easily. Nino, a comely Christian, tells AH: "I love you and you love me. But I love woods and meadows, and you love hills and stones and sand." Stony Ali is fearless, while woodsy Nino is afraid, as she puts it, of "mice, crocodiles, exams and eunuchs." Ali has to learn to drink forbidden wine, to accept Nino without a veil, and to endure the outrage of other men complimenting her. Nino must learn to eat with three fingers instead of a fork, and permit a eunuch, a fixture in Moslem households, to inspect her teeth and shave her body hair.

Never mind. In this tender novel, love conquers--for a while. Delicate, civilized compromises slowly prove possible. But history ruthlessly intervenes. The Bolsheviks arrive at the end of the first World War and snuff out Ali and Nino's fragile romance. These two provide fond company for any reader. No doubt they did the same for the author, a Tartar who was first driven out of Transcaucasia by the Communists, then out of Vienna by the Nazis, and finally died in obscurity in Fascist Italy, leaving this one testament to love in a life of wearisome exile.

LIVING ON THE EARTH by Alicia Bay Laurel. 214 pages. Random House. $3.95.

" 'Bay Laurel' is not my parents' surname," writes the author, "but it is my favorite tree." Her real name is Alicia Kaufman and she is 21. At first glance the book resembles a series of dreamy doodles. Naked, smiling people dance through a collection of "celebrations, storm warnings, formulas, recipes, rumors & country dances" that might have been pretentious but are not. Based on experiences at a California commune, the book is really a guide to the pastoral life--at least in reasonably clement climates. The author is not averse to the occasional use of technology. The handiest place to set bread to rise, she notes, is inside a parked car. But the best way is nature's way. "Eggs you buy in supermarkets," she claims, "come from hens that live in shaded cages and are fed methedrine* so they lay more and eat less. Your eggs will come from happy fertile hens who dance freely in the sun. Like you."

The style is appealingly spare, perhaps because longhand is hard work. The more or less useful topics range from simple survival ("Most bees won't bother a calm human") to farming techniques. The author tells how to "un-straight" an Ivy League shirt, make a bamboo rattle and build a kayak. In the midst of it all is a recipe for relaxation: "Find a little bit of land somewhere and plant a carrot seed. Now sit down and watch it grow. When it is fully grown, pull it up and eat it."

* Like thyroxin and aspirin, methedrine has been tried experimentally to encourage egg laying, but the practice is not widespread.

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