Samplings for the Summer Reader

RETURN JOURNEY by R.F. DELDERFIELD 318 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

R.F. Delderfield is to the novel what Upstairs, Downstairs is to television. The man is a good read, and for the kind of good-read addict who hates himself the next morning, Delderfield can be justified as literature too. "A modern Trollope, a latter-day Galsworthy!" the critics cry, while his stories slip down as smoothly as soap opera.

Return Journey was published in England in 1967 but is now being offered to American fans for the first time. It shows Delderfield up to his old virtues, dealing with people up to old vices. In an English seaside resort more than 30 years ago, "Pip" Stuart, a young photographer, seems about to marry the ironmonger's daughter and settle down to a lifetime of prams with now and then a pint at the corner pub. But a West Country Emma Bovary puts Pip's still-life future out of focus. Bored to a frenzy by small-town domesticity, Lorna, a doctor's wife, passes on to Pip the 20th century's most communicable disease: restlessness. With her red sports car, and golden hair, Lorna comes close to parodying a jazz-age flapper. Still, while the lowerbrow in the schizoid Delderfield reader may thrill to such blood-stirring experiences as skinny dips and off-coast storms, his higherbrowed self can find plenty of social realism. Delderfield makes his reader see--and even smell--boarding-houses with names like Resthaven and Shangri-La.

The story is told in flashback as Pip, now in his 50s, returns to a home town circled by trailers and transformed by "the telly and the transistor, the small car and the tourist agencies." The author's moral: They don't make small towns the way they used to. Delderfield died in 1972. But as long as his books flourish, nobody will be able to say that about the novel.

THE DOGS OF WAR by FREDERICK FORSYTH 408 pages. Viking. $7.95.

With each successive story, Novelist Frederick Forsyth (Day of the Jackal, Odessa File) grows richer and more book clubbable. He also finds it harder and harder to get his action to explode without leading up to it with an interminable train of exposition--in this case short lectures on every conceivable subject from the state of the world's platinum market to exactly how a consignment of German Schmeissers for an African coup d'etat should be welded into oil drums--the better to foil the customs with, my dear. Forsyth's fact-filled thriller about a bad moneyman in London and how he uses a white mercenary to topple an African dictator and get the local platinum concession does not really get going until about page 384. The last 24 pages are almost worth waiting for, though, and the far-flung film sure to result will no doubt be galvanizing.

IMPEACHMENT: A HANDBOOK by CHARLES L BLACK JR. 90 pages. Yale University Press. $5.95. $1.95 paperback.

In impeachment, says the author, the civil trial standard of "preponderance of the evidence" should not be enough to remove a President. On the other hand, strictly applying the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard of proof necessary for conviction in criminal cases could mean limping along with a President who the Senate and nation are convinced is guilty though not convicted. Black, a Yale law professor, suggests the test should be "overwhelming preponderance of the evidence."

His timely volume clearly and lucidly covers everything from what constitutes "high crimes and misdemeanors" to the scope of Executive privilege. It would be natural to wonder if the author is pro-or anti-Nixon. The measure of his book's achievement is that it tells the reader not what to think but what to think about.

HENRY AND OTHER HEROES by EZRA BOWEN 246 pages. Little, Brown. $6.95.

The author is a sports nut now edging toward 50. He grew up in fashionable Merion, Pa., member of a distinguished, divided and furiously competitive clan. His mother, Historian Catherine Drinker Bowen (Yankee from Olympus), apparently never lost at any sport. Bowen dreamed of becoming a triple-threat back at Princeton but became a pedestrian first baseman at Amherst, then an editor in New York. Years passed. Sports stars grew younger. Bowen grew older. Came the day when he could no longer take comfort even from the presence on the sporting scene of elderly prizefighters like Archie Moore, or the ageless prowess of Stan Musial.

This slender and often charming autobiography, in short, is about growing up, and the author admits that Peter Pan had absolutely the right idea about the whole painful subject. There are moments when Bowen cannot seem to decide whether to remember the past as Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield. No matter. He spares us any anguished memories about teen-age sex. He is full of sentiment but no self-pity. His quotes and anecdotes are often sharp and funny. "If thee marries for money," his Quaker stepfather once admonished him, "thee surely will earn it." Most important, Bowen writes about small boys, his own children included, with affection and dignity. His wife, he admits, recently complained that while he had passed 40, he had passed it going in the wrong direction because he never played with anyone who was more than twelve years old. "All of which may have been quite true," says Bowen. "I mean, who else will have a catch with you?"

MOUNTAIN SPIRITS: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James' Ulster Plantation to America 's Appalachians and the Moonshine Life by JOSEPH EARL DABNEY 242 pages. Scribners. $8.95.

"Whiskey and freedom gang the-gither," declared Robert Burns--a poet and drinking man who turned out many a verse against Scotland's "Act of Excyse." Usquebaugh distillers in Scotland and Ulster generally felt the way Burns did. In the early 1700s most of them migrated to the American colonies, bringing their whisky-making tools and techniques with them. By 1750, moonshine was a necessity of life on the frontier, and brewing corn whisky was a major industry. From fusty books and firsthand interviews with oldtimers, with many facts and much affection, Joseph Dabney has put together a splendid and often hilarious history.

A "bootleg bonnet" is a black felt hat used to strain the fresh brew into a barrel. The term "100 proof was originally known as "gunpowder proof because the British found that whisky with about 50% alcohol, when mixed with gunpowder, would burn with a steady blue flame. Moonshining is not a thing of the past, either. As late as 1972, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms destroyed more than 2,000 illicit stills, and admits it barely scratched the surface of the trade.

As to what "white lightning" really tastes like, opinions differ. Irvin S. Cobb compared a swig to swallowing a lighted kerosene lamp. A North Carolina moonshiner says simply: "Hits a blamed ugly drink." And then there is Colonel Leland DeVore, whose throat involuntarily contracts whenever he thinks of moonshine: "I hear, as if from far away, the gagging whisper of a long-lost friend whose favorite saying was 'Vile stuff--I wish I had a barrel of it!' "

THE MEMORY BOOK by HARRY LORAYNE and JERRY LUCAS 237 pages. Stein & Day. $7.95.

This book is a recipe for madness. Common sense and ancient wisdom agree that the secret of a happy and productive inner life is to forget as much as possible--forget time's winged chariot, forget that your child needs orthodontia, forget that you have forgotten your mother's birthday, forget that the drink you hold as you watch the evening news (which itself must be forgotten) will demolish a billion brain cells.

Harry Lorayne, a mentalist and magician, and Jerry Lucas, the 6-ft. 8-in. basketball player and mnemonist who just retired from the New York Knicks, have devised a pernicious never-fail system for remembering everything--from the names, faces and phone numbers of everyone in a TV audience of 400 people to, in Lucas' case, the essential contents of an issue of TIME.

Reading the book suggests that the system may work as advertised. The basketball player and what's-his-name unseal the reader's memory with a Tinker Toy assortment of mnemonic links and pegs. Assume, they say, that you want to memorize a random list of ten words: airplane, tree, envelope, earring, bucket, thing, basketball, salami, star, nose. Form a series of visual incongruities--a tree riding in an airplane, say, and then another picture of envelopes growing on trees, and another one in which millions of earrings fly out of the envelopes, and so on. The more grotesque and childish the mental picture, the stronger and more indelible the link.

Only in one area does the book seem misguided. "The French phrase rien de grave is idiomatic for. . . 'It's nothing serious.' Associate 'Ran the grave' to 'It's nothing' in some ridiculous way and you've memorized it." Yes, you have, and in a flawless Kankakee accent.

A RANDOM WALK IN SCIENCE Compiled by R.L. WEBER 206 pages. Illustrated. Crane, Russak. $12.50.

By culling the Journal of Irreproducible Results and the Journal of Jocular Physics as well as more sober publications, R.L. Weber, an associate professor of physics at Penn State, has turned up more than 100 examples of the scientific mind at play. Against considerable odds, the result is a collection of short pieces that are funny and reassuring. If the future cloners and behavioral conditioners of society have a sense of humor, all may yet be well.

One of the best is the classic Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Gown, in which a structural engineer confronts "the problem of designing a dress which appears as if it would fall at any moment and yet actually stays up with some small factor of safety." The solution lies in understanding the principle of the cantilever beam.

Equally good as satires of scientific logic are an essay that postulates the existence of the Infinite Zipper and another that proves heaven is actually hotter than hell. The reasoning goes like this: heaven, which the Bible says receives 49 times as much radiation from the sun as the earth does (Isaiah 30:26), would therefore have a temperature of 525DEG C. Hell, where the main topographical feature is a lake of molten brimstone (Revelation 21:8), could have a temperature of no more, no less, than 444.6DEG C. Above that temperature, the brimstone would vaporize; much below it, the lake would harden.

And so forth.

STRINGER by WARD JUST 199 pages. Atlantic-Little, Brown. $5.95.

A certain vagueness about the title character raises the suspicion that this tough novel about an American guerrilla-warfare expert who cracks up in an Asian jungle may be a parable of the American Viet Nam disaster. Indeed, it might be entitled The Gray Badge of Pragmatism.

The hero, a 35-year-old civilian technician named Stringer, is attached by the terms of a lucrative contract to a special Army unit. His task: to plant sensing devices near an enemy supply trail so that "smart" bombs can home in on military convoys. He knows how to survive in the bush and is not afraid of spiders or the Viet Cong. But his motivation is uncertain, and this earns him the contempt of his partner, a hard-case Regular Army major named Price.

Price senses that Stringer is a member of nothing. He has no use for military form; the possibilities of the civilian world seem to him narrowing spirals of delusion. Although he appears humane and sensitive, his compass swings powerfully toward chaos and war.

Despite danger and disease, Stringer carries on, planting sensors and calling in air strikes. Sick from rotten water, he hallucinates a slippery dialogue with an imaginary captor. The jungle becomes his world and his home. When Army helicopters come to rescue him, he shoots them down.

Novelist Just finesses most of the moral and artistic questions that could be asked about his book and his character's situation. The reader will find himself wavering between conflicting assessments: the story is really a disturbing piece of surrealism or it is a neat con job. The compromise view--that the book is a bit of both--leaves Ward Just (author of The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert, an excellent collection of several stories published last year) as one of several promising American writers now creeping up on the big novel.

BREAKHEART PASS by ALISTAIR MACLEAN 178 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

Here it is again--that sinister, faintly claustrophobic ship of fools venturing on wintry wastes, those corpses that start mysteriously appearing, the urbane and ruthless government agent who is everything that E. Howard Hunt once hoped to be. This time, though, Alistair MacLean operates, not from some place like Bear Island or Ice Station Zebra, but in the American West (circa 1875).

What we have is a troop train carrying relief and medical supplies to a snowy Nevada cavalry fort supposedly afflicted by an outbreak of cholera. As the train chugs onward through the mountains, bodies proliferate like Ten Little Indians, telegraph wires go dead, troop cars are uncoupled and plunge spectacularly into ravines. As always in MacLean, alarming quantities of wine and whisky are consumed.

Never mind that it often seems a parody of Zane Grey. MacLean's tale gleefully highballs along at a brisk, cinematic clip. Funny touches are provided by the English understatements of MacLean's Pinkerton-man hero. He is the sort of chap who, on examining an arrow embedded in the heroine's shoulder, might mutter, "Mmmm, Apache, I shouldn't wonder."

A CRY OF ANGELS by JEFF FIELDS 383 pages. Atheneum. $8.95.

This first novel works the boundary between the Old and the New South, keeping a steady, contemptuous eye on the treachery of progress.

Earl, a raggedy 14-year-old orphan, lives in his great-aunt's tumble-down boardinghouse in the black section of Quarrytown, Ga. It is, in effect, a nursing home; the boarders are all geriatrics cases. Earl's best friends are Em Jo-john, a giant, anarchic Indian who works occasionally as handyman, and Tio, a black grocery clerk with the practical native genius of Ben Franklin.

All that may sound icky and derivative. But ten or 20 pages along, the author seizes the reader with a Southern gift for storytelling and never lets go. Fields relates how Jayell Crooms marries the snotty "brass cracker" Gwen from Atlanta, how the sinister Doc Bobo, Georgia's answer to Papa Doc Duvalier, proceeds toward his doom. Rich and full of color, character and moral drama, A Cry of Angels is an authentic cry of American innocence uttered just as the bulldozers knock down Tom Sawyer's whitewashed picket fence.

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