The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 42

i i "i-iit'T'i i i i i 1 ri i'i i i i i 'ii ii i ii i i'ri'i i i i i hi rn i i im rrrn C2 THE OTTAWA CITIZEN SATURDAY, AUGUST 6, 1988 BdDQDElS Quisle readings A People in Arms, by Marie Ja-kober; New Star; 304 pages; paperback, $9.95 By Christopher Neal skepticism was the initial response to this historical fiction based on the Nica- raguan revolution. The San The VIP Strategy by Jim Clemmer and Art McNeil; Key Porter, $24.95: Two Canadian management consultants, advising how to improve corporate performance, point out that leadership and employee motivation are critical managerial roles. They describe the success of companies that developed leadership skills and outline pro-" grams for emulating them. It's all valid but the "strategy" is really just a good bit of slickly packaged commonsense. Second Son by Robert Ferro; CrownManda; $24.95: A powerful widower's business empire collapses on the same day he learns his younger son has AIDS.

Told from the perspective of the son, this novel of love and anguish poignantly details his feelings for his father, his family and a fellow AIDS victim who becomes his lover. The book has some uplifting visual images but it's not for everyone. Armada by Peter Padfield; McClelland and Stewart; $39.95: Several books on the Spanish Armada have appeared because July 31 was the 400th anniversary of the first English shots fired against Philip II of Spain's fleet Both writing and history in Armada are first-rate and illustrations are excellent With fresh objectivity, Elizabethan and Spanish commanders come alive their ships and weapons richly detailed. Yesterday by Chet Flippo; Doubleday, $26.95: This warts-and-weirdness biography of Paul McCartney is fascinating on the Apple breakup. But Beatles fans may prefer to learn Paul is circumsized," Linda's a slob, and money has gone to their heads, already softened by dope.

The portrayal of John, even before Yoko, is distasteful. Flippo concludes Paul is a born leader unable, on his own, to resist -mediocrity. Saturday Night Dead by Richard Rosen; Penguin; $22.95: TheJ bly the only writer to have recounted, from the point of view of two Somozist hostages, the spectacular August 1978 seizure by a handful of Sandinista commandos of hundreds of hostages in Managua's National Palace. The rich, arrogant Milan Valdez refuses to cower before his Sandinista captors, instead taunting them with insults, which they return with their own. Their arguments over peasants, the Americans, Communism and Cubans set the scene for the pitched battles that follow.

Their articulately expressed antipathy helps explain the war. Jakober's story moves along quickly through real events such as the bombardment of Managua, the retreat the battles for the cities and finally the Sandinistas' victorious arrival in the capital. Jakober shifts the narrations from Jadine Hall, the American cousin visiting her rich, complacent relations, the Valdez family in Managua, to Daniel, Valerian and Tomas, all Sandinista guerrillas. As the story moves from gar-' den parties in the Valdez home, to street fighting in the agricultural centre of Esteli, to rat-infested prison cells, Jadine who is working in a clinic evolves from callow griaga under her well-heeled relatives' wing to gain an understanding of the war that will always escape them. Jakober's prose has an immediacy that crackles.

It's a fast read, with earthy dialogue, quick changes of locale and vital, aggressive characters. All the same, my discomfort with the genre remains. To know something of Nicaragua's recent history and idiosyn-cracies, I would prefer Omar Ca-bezas' Fire from the Mountain. Like Jakober's book, it's fast-paced, earthy, rich in dialogue. But it not only seems true, it has the veracity only a witness can invoke.

(Christopher Neal is an Ottawa writer.) 4 i -i-'ti- dinistas' revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorial Somoza regime in 1979 seemed too recent to be fictionalized. Clavell, Costain, Stone, Vidal and Michener have licence to apply their imaginations to history: their subjects are typically remote in time or distance. But Marie Jakober, an Alberta writer who studied at St. Patrick's College in Ottawa, takes risks those authors did not Unable to rely on personal experience of Nicaragua during the revolutionary war years, she describes events many others witnesses have also chronicled, and well. To Jakober's credit, her account has the texture of truth.

She has a Marie Jakober St. Patrick's College graduate sensitive eye and ear and brings a variety of perspectives to the Nic-araguan war that many writers have missed because they are too close to the subject For example, Jakober is proba third mystery with ex-baseball player Harvey Blissberg as detec Ottawan's competitor for Hornblower Royal Yankee, by Victor Suthren; Musson; 189 pages; $25.95 By Peter Ward ook out Hornblower, Ram-age, Aubrey, Bolitho, and Drinkwater. Edward Alan 'Mainwaring is about to nominally caused when Spanish privateers lopped off the ear of a British merchant captain named Jenkins. Suthren's sea writing is technically taut as a well-handled jib sheet you can feel the hiss of the sea when his vessels are close-hauled and his historical contexts are on the money. In the tradition of fighting sail stories, Suthren's character make up in derring-do for what they lack in complexity.

This first book of the series has one fault: if you're a fan of such books, you'll devour it in a single reading. I did. Royal Yankee is Suthren's fourth sea book. His research on Canadian history at Louisbourg inspired him: his earner stories were keyed to French sailing heroes. After beginning the Mainwaring series, Suthren was working for Museums Canada on documents involving Fort Amherst, Prince Edward Island, when he discovered that his fiction character had a real historical namesake, Captain Edward Mainwaring of the King's Rangers.

Suthren's publishers are preparing to release the second book in the Mainwaring series, Golden Galleon. The third, Admiral of Fear, is being written here in Ot tawa. An outline has been done for the fourth, Captain Monsoon. In each story, Mainwaring faces his French arch foe, Roche-Bourbon, as the War of Jenkins's Ear expands into the broader conflict between the British and French. The pity is that Victor Suthren, with such a store of talent had his earner works rejected by at least four major Canadian publishers, before being picked up quickly by the British firm, Hod-der and Stoughton, which has made excellent arrangements with a New York company to distribute the book in the United States.

(Peter Ward is an Ottawa writer.) crack the exclusive club of fictional heroes from the age of fighting sail, thanks to the imagination and writing skills of Victor Suthren, director of the Canadian War Museum. Suthren's first Mainwaring book, Royal Yankee, involves swashbuckling against the Spaniards and French in the Caribbean during the 1738 war about trade, tive wittily portrays the aggressive egotists of late-night television. The network hires Blissberg to find who murdered a high powered '-comedy producer at a cast party. He uncovers show-business se1 crets including blackmail and fraud rooted in television's Golden Age. .4 Young Kate by Christopher Andersen; Fitzhenry and Whiteside; $27.95: Katherine Hepburn was lucky to be the daughter of suffragette Kit Houghton, of the Corning Houghtons, and Dr.

Tom Hep! burn, social hygiene pioneer. Visitors included Shaw, Emiline Pank-hurst, Emma Goldman and Sinclair Lewis (who patterned Arrows-: mith after Tom). The charming book shows how Hepburn got her strong, uncompromising character. Above Top Secret The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up, by Timothy Good; Macmillan; $24.95: British journalist Good makes an iron-clad case that there is an international government conspiracy to cover up reports of unidentified flying objects. Included are reports of UFOs monitoring NASA space shots, Cuban fighters being shot down by flying saucers, and extraordinary government steps to squelch UFO reports (to keep the public calm).

Important questions raised here should be answered. Fishing in the Tiber by Lance Morrow; Fitzhenry and Whiteside; $29.95: Lance Morrow's thought-provoking and illuminating essays have long been the best feature of Time magazine. In book form, covering the period from early Carter to the last days of Reagan, the essays create a profound picture of America. Give it to your children when they ask, "What was life like in the olden days?" The of the Hurricane: Creating Corporate Energy, by Art McNeil; Stoddart; $14.95: MacNeiL an accomplished player in the game of corporate success-building, presents serious strategies to help potential losers become leaders. Drawing from such luminaries as Churchill, Napoleon, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, McNeil tells how energetic leaders can build their own success.

Weapons of Winners: Strategies for Success in the Information Age, by Chris Gower-Rees; Stoddart; $14.95: In today's corporate world it is often assumed that machines and software will guaran-, tee success. Wrong! Gower-Rees demonstrates that all able compet-t itors have the same chance. Success goes to the firm that can best. marshall its "people-power." A finely-crafted work by an acknowl-; edged expert. The Agony of It All by Joy Davidson; McClelland and Stewarts $24.95: Davidson aims her self-help book at women who keep boredom at bay by creating, daily crises for themselves by fighting hubby, doing drugs or being chronically late.

This book is likelier to be, -read by their victims: friends, family, co-workers. Davidson is a PhD with great hair. All of English history in gargantuan novel Sarum: The Novel of England, by Edward Rutherfurd; Ivy; $7.95 Paperbacks fter this epic, is there there anything left for the historical nov-el? It's got feuds, treach handsome former lover to his former university roommate to a jealous, sexy starlet to a shamed talent agent, guilt seems to drip from every personality. The title, from an Al Jolson song, is apt. Elizabeth is willing to risk her life to expose her sister's killer.

A magnificent storyteller, Clark paints her subjects in brilliant culpable colors; her suspense-filled narrative holds our attention through well over 300 suspense-laden pages. Allan E. Levine taining thriller, "is like a little backyard. There are no secrets, only delays." Gough, whose Toronto screen-writing credits include Charlie Grant's War and The Marriage Bed, doesn't overdo the cliche" of Panama, the backyard of world intrigue. Nor does he bog down in the settings, which are as much Boston (with a side trip to Bermuda) as Latin America.

His characters live close to the edge Red Williams, conman bent on revenge for the killing of his woman, Jack, the jungle recluse who helps him, and Karen, the ex-TV reporter looking for action. Gough sends it her way, along with Timothy Shepherd, the kinky villain with presidential ambitions who collects television stations. In a genre which sometimes takes itself too seriously, Gough's touch is refreshingly light. Noel Taylor ery, violence, lessons in English history, and sex prehistoric, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Elizabethan, Victorian and modern. It spans 10,000 years.

The plot tells the story of a half-dozen families settled in the Salisbury (Stonehenge) area from the end of the last Ice Age to the present. The way these families interact is told at different prehistoric and historic periods bridged with explanatory passages about what's been going on in the real world. Don't be daunted by the length. It's easy to read all at once or at leisure. The bridging and the care author Rutherfurd has taken not to get too many characters involved at any one time make that possible.

Jim Robb National bestsellers Compiled by bookstores in Ottawa and across Canada. The first number after the title tells last week's rank, the second, the weeks listed. Fiction The Last White Man in Panama, by William Gough; Penguin; $4.95 Panama, says one of the characters in this immensely enter Memoirs of an Invisible Man, by H. F. Saint; Dell; $6.50 Nick Halloway, sexy intellectual and stockbroker, tries to seduce a delicious looking newspaperwoman on the train to Princeton, New Jersey.

Rebuffed, he has no second chance before nuclear explosion makes him invisible. As in all stories of this genre, such as the film, Starman, an ignoble government team tracks nifty Nick. Using his invisibility to get rich buying stocks, Nick manages to elude capture. He loves and lusts for a woman who, of course, cannot see him. Like the loveable hero of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male, he carries us from adventure to adventure to the book's inconclusive end.

This is a wonderful novel. Let's hope the film version starring Chevy Chase retains some of its brilliance. Allan E. Levine Winterhawk, by Craig Thomas; Collins; $5.95 Winterhawk is a longer, more self-involved Firefox. Gant, the incredible, again flies into Soviet territory to overcome impossible odds to save the world from the Soviet bogeyman.

Too often, descriptions of Gant's actions go on for pages without any dialogue. Climax follows climax for 600 pages, yet the pace of the action would make snails seem frenetic. The detail is excruciating. Great thrillers rivet the attention while making story and hero plausible. Winterhawk does not.

Gordon Brown 1. The Icarus Agenda, by Robert Ludlum (Random House). 1 22 2. Zoya, by Danielle Steel (Delacorte). 2 13 3.

Alaska, by James Michener (Random House). 4 7 4. Prelude to Foundation, by Isaac Asimov (Doubleday). 5 9 5. Rock Star, by Jackie Collins (General).

3 15 6. To Be the Best, by Barbara Taylor Bradford (Doubleday). 9 2 7. Treasures, by Clive Cussler (General). 6 17 8.

Tapestry, by Belva Plain (Delacorte). 7 12 9. People Like Us, by Dominick Dunne (Crown). 8 4 10. The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe (Collins).

10 28 Paperback bestsellers across Canada Ranked by booksellers in Ottawa and across Canada. Numbers in brackets show each book's rank last week. Fiction 1. Sarum, by Edward Rutherfurd (Ivy). (1) 2.

Savages, by Shirley Conran (Penguin). (3) J. Patriot Games, by Tom Clancy (Berkley). (2) 4. Weep No More, My Lady, by Mary Higgins Clark (Dell).

(7) 5. The Timothy Files, by Lawrence Sanders (Berkley). (4) 6. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams (Pan). (9) 7.

Pale Kings and Princes, by Robert B. Parker (Dell). (5) 8. Memoirs of an Invisible Man, by H. F.

Saint (Dell). (6) 9. Fallen Hearts, by V. C. Andrews (General).

(8) 10. Presumed Innocent, by Scott Turow (Warner). (10) Non-fiction 1. Stung, by Gary Ross (General). (2) 2.

Spycatcher, by Peter Wright (General). (3) $. Friends in High Places, by Claire Hoy (Bantam). (6) 4. The Light-Hearted Cookbook, by Anne Lindsay (Key Porter).

(1) 5. Flames Across the Border, by Pierre Berton (Penguin). (4) 6. The Great Depression of 1990, by Ravi Batra (Dell). (9) 7.

Love, Medicine and Miracles, by Bernie S. Slegel (Fitzhenry and Whiteside). (S) 8. Small Sacrifices, by Ann Rule (NAL). (7) 9.

The Spy Wore Red, by Aline, Countess of Romanones (Ballantine). (10) 10. The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom (General). (8) Copyright 1988: Toronto Star Syndicate Weep No More, My Lady, by Mary Higgins Clark; Dell; $6.50 A beautiful actress, Leila La-Salle, plunges to her death from a New York penthouse. Her younger sister, whom she rescued years before from a pedophilic stepfather, wants answers.

In a plot vaguely reminiscent of an Agatha Christie spellbinder, beautiful Elizabeth Lange repairs to a world-famous California beauty spa to find the killer among the guests. Almost everyone Elizabeth meets seems to have a motive for killing her sister. From Leila's Non-fiction 1. A Brief History of Time, by Stephen W. Hawking (Bantam).

1 17 2. The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump (Random House). 2 25, 3. The Duchess of Windsor, by Charles Higham (McGraw-Hill 5 32; Ryerson). 4.

Thriving on Chaos, by Tom Peters (Random House). 5 32 5. Talking Straight, by Lee Iacocca (Bantam). 3 9 6. A Natural History of Canada, by R.

D. Lawrence (Key Por- 7 2 ter). 7. Capote: A Biography, by Gerald Clarke (General). 4 7 8.

Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive, by Harvey 6 7 MacKay (Macmillan). 9. Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, by Arianna Stassinopoulos 10 2 Huff ington (Musson). 10. Moon Walk, by Michael Jackson (Doubleday).

9 15 Copyright 1988 Toronto Star Syndicate Tracking glasnost's swift trip from foreign term to English cliche Felcome, glasnost Welcome to the English language. "Although this word is identified in the etymology as a Russian word not yet qualifying as a borrowing, Words Harry Bruce viet anti-Semitism. Open, the post-summit discussions of compromise that yet may be realized, conducted by a whole new brand of Soviet official: young, smooth, and open." From major U.S. periodicals, the Companion trots out several other examples of the use of glasnost in its conventional sense, but the real proof that it's already an English word lies in its frequent appearance in contexts that have nothing at all to do with Soviet politics. Thus, a business reporter describes "the inadequate glasnost of Japanese markets, both financial and commercial." When a new president at Yale University surprised faculty by addressing them about future priorities, an English professor exulted, "It's glasnost at Yale.

In English, glasnost has become particularly handy for writers about culture. A film critic for the Financial Times of Britain writes, "And from the U.S.S.R. comes the now habitual glasnost armada whose like has been seen at most festivals this year consisting of a fleet of movies piloted into town by their own directors." In The New York Times, Bernard Holland says, "Miss Gubaidulina's reputation has been leaking slowly out of the Soviet Union, and there she was in Thursday's audience amid Friday's panels a glasnostic apparition, courtesy of her government" Glasnostic is not the only proof that glasnost already does what so many English words do: attract suffixes. Thus, a political reporter for The Washington Post sarcastically describes Mikhail Gorbachev aj "the great glasnostician, and an other suspicious Washington commentator invents a verb by advising wariness with respect to gla-snostified Russia. What next? Glasnosticized perhaps? Glasnosty, glasnostful and glasnostous? Will a remarkably free debate that lasts for days be a glasnosto-rama? Will historians of the Western world spe- cialize in glasoostology.

Glasnostologists will naturally ponder peres-troika; glasnost and perestroika go together like borsch and sour cream. Perestroika, which comes from the Russian pere- (re-) and stroi (arrangement), means "burea- cratic rebuilding, social reconstruction." The Companion explains that it's "a Russian word used in English contexts dealing with the pol-. icy of Gorbachev to reform the Russian economy, and in governmental affairs." Perestroika also suggests a new involvement of the Soviet people in the management of their society. Gorbachev himself has written, "The demo-, cratic process has promoted the entire perestroika, elevated its goals, and made our society understand its problems better. This process allowed us to take a wider view of economic issues, and put forward a program of radical economic reform." He wrote, too, of "social management which is based on renewed democratic principles." Let us pray the mood endures.

If the heel of repression descends again on the U.S.S.R- in decades to come, older Soviet citizens will look back on our time with wilfulness. They'll have only their glasnostal-gia to keep them warm. it exhibits several traits which suggest it is on the way to becoming an English word," the latest issue of The Barnhart Dictionary Companion explains. "Time seems to be the critical factor now." At $50 (US) for four issues per year, the Companion is the priciest magazine about words that I get but it's also the only one that updates general dictionaries and breaks news about terms that keep barging into the language. Do words barge in, or get sucked in? Maybe English is a gargantuan octopus among languages, ceaselessly snaring expressions and jamming them into its horny, beak-like jaws.

In any event the Companion, just since its founding in 1982, has given its readers nearly 4,000 new words, new meanings, and changes in usage. People who see glasnost as a fraud mounted by devious commies point out that in Russian, the meaning of the word includes a flavor of public relations. The Companion, however, says it simply comes from golos and and nost, the Russian terms for voice or rote, and ness, and means nothing more sinister than "political policy of the Soviet Union characterized by public disclosure, relaxation of government control, and tolerance of dissent resulting in the ability of the general public to discuss political and economic issues with candor and openness." When the Companion says glasnost is merely "on the way" to becoming an English word, it is being too timid. For a while there in 1987, you could scarcely open a magazine or newspaper, or turn on the television news, without having to ponder good old glasnost Not only is it already an English word, it is setting some sort of speed record in becoming a cliche The Companion's earliest example of glasnost in action dates back only to Oct 27, 1986, and yet the word is already insinuating itself into the foul ranks of such champions of the overused as awesome, upscale, downsize, interface, viable, substantive, and let's do lunch. That 1986 example was from The MacNeil-Leh-rer NewsHour, and it went like this: "Openness is Gorbachev's byword glasnost thanks to which we seem to be getting to know Gorbachev quite welL His anti-vodka campaign, his economic woes, his headaches with the Politburo, his attractive, learned wife.

Open, the Soviet poet Andrei Vozne-sensky is allowed to publish a poem critical of So.