The Anniston Star from Anniston, Alabama • Page 42

Pag9 4E March 21, 1993 lie (Anniston 5 tar 14 1 A Grisham TabUkaJg's'O "ONE ON ONE," by Tabitha King: Dutton, New York, 1991, $23. There's an achingly poignant school days love story niaaen oeneatn the overwhelming verbiage of Tabitha King's latest novel, but it's only too i 'CUent' sharp kid "THE CLIENT," by John Grisham: Double-day, New York, 1993, $23.50. Only 1 1 years old, Mark Sway is pretty mature for his age. He lives in a trailer park north of Memphis often short-circuited by repetition and sheer sensory overload. Set in the King family territory of small-town Maine, at Greenspark, not far from Castle Rock, "One On One" is the tale of a winning high school basketball season as lived throueh two kev nlavers inno with his mom, Dianne, and little cent, outsized Sam Styles, star of and uncomplicated by peer pressures, Sam ignores the rest of the crowd's jokes, and becomes her champion at school as well as her devoted lover after hours.

AND WHEN SERIOUS trouble comes, with terrifying violence and suddenness, it is only Sam and his family who have the love and grace to take care of Deanie when everyone else fails her. Never far from anybody's mind, of course, is basketball, the center of Greenspark's winning year, and it's described here game by game, play by play, through uncounted pages of the novel, with a single-mindedness that may well discourage any but the most devoted fans of the sport. But then, nothing is soft-pedaled in Mrs. King's teen-age saga, whether it be profanity, sex, or general adolescent misbehavior and raunchiness. HOWEVER, THE characters are well-drawn and touching the good Sam, too kind and trusting for his own good but eventually triumphant, and waspish, defiance-spitting Deanie, never pathetic even at her most trouble-beset, hiding beneath her eccentricity a deep core of strength.

With several previous novels to her credit, Mrs. King knows how to create and people a world, and the latest book is nothing if not vividly pictorial. But a general toning down and a heavy cutting of repetitious material would do "One On One" a world of good. BARBARA HODGE HALL I 1 understands his son's devotion to it, and a stepmother who cherishes hint just as she does her own baby daughter, Indy, the pet of them all. For Deanie, life at home is a nightmare.

Her alcoholic mother allows her abusive, live-in boyfriend to make the girl's existence hideous, and the child is provided with nothing, not even enough food or clothing. Unloved, defiant, resourceful Deanie thumbs her nose at the conventional world with a shaved head, super-punk facial chains, and a wardrobe of carefully contrived rags and tatters, a scarecrow accepted only on the basketball court, where her magic cannot be denied. Theirs is by no means love at first sight. ON SAM'S PART, it begins with his innate kindness. Admiring Deanie as a player and appreciating her courage, he starts picking her up in his truck along the snowy, highway on the way to school, packing extra food in his lunch sack so that the obviously hungry girl can have some sort of breakfast, and sticking up for her in the rough locker room talk.

At first, it's like trying to pet a fierce stray kitten, for Deanie is suspicious of kindness and too proud to accept his help. She has lived too long with fear and neglect to relax, and it is only gradually that she dares to believe he means her no harm. Eventually, love grows, and Sam and Deanie find their own warm, private circle of affection. Simple brother, Ricky. Ever since his parents divorced he helped run off his abusive father Mark has been the "man" of the house, looking after his brother and consulting with his rather feckless mother on family decisions.

Life jogs along normally until MM. Mark takes Ricky into his secret! place in the woods to smoke a Ups and downs in vet school "IF WISHES WERE HORSES," by Loretta Gage, D.V.M., and Nancy Gage: St. Martin's, New York, 1993, $19.95. When Loretta Gage finally entered the Colorado State University College of Veterin ary Medicine in 1985, she had already planned to write about her experiences in training. With this in mind, she took careful notes of her four busy years as a student, and with the help of her writer sister, ing, and even dangerous at times.

And the author spares us nothing this is not for the squeamish. Though she has carefully disguised the identity of faculty members and fellow students, they were obviously a mixed bag, and she has added these personalities, both the genuinely inspiring ones and the dregs, to the tale for emphasis. The first two years were mostly classwork lectures, labs, dissections, and memorization, memorization, memorization. But the third year finally brought the students into contact with animal patients, and this is what Loretta had been waiting for. AND THE BOOK THEN picks up as well, for it is now individual creatures and practicing vets who have the limelight, for story after story of emergencies, miraculous, hard-won cures, and occasional heartbreak.

Dr. Gage has her own problems with some of the ethics of veterinary medicine. Putting down animals for the convenience of their owners -wl (Nancy, put together this unusual and appealing memoir. Dr. Gage was late in starting her chosen career, tor like so many voune people of the troubled earlv cigarette one afternoon.

A car pulls Grisham up, and the boys become unwilling witnesses to the suicide of New Orleans mob lawyer, Jerome Clifford. In the course of trying to save him, Mark learns the exact location of the corpse of a U.S. senator who has been murdered by gangster Barry Muldanno the suicide's client. IT ISN'T LONG before the mob, the Memphis police department, the FBI, the media and a murderously ambitious U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Louisiana at New Orleans come to realize that the 11 -year-old holds the key to this high-profile murder case.

But if Mark tells the police everything, he and his family will live in danger for the rest of their lives. An avid watcher of television police dramas, Mark hires himself for one dollar a lawyer, Reggie Love. And thus begins "The Client," John Grisham's splendid and amusing new page-turner. Reggie Love, formerly Mrs. Regina Cardoni, is a Memphis society matron reincarnated after a particularly nasty divorce as a lawyer who specializes in children's welfare and needs.

The pair are well matched, the lawyer being as good at spotting legal loopholes and dodging subpoenas as the kid is at telling lies and wriggling out of tight spots. She also provides him with a strong mother figure as well as getting a second shot at loving and protecting a child, her own having been lost in the divorce. No matter how clever they are, however, the Feds prove an overwhelming force, and Mark and Reggie must take matters into their hands. IF PERHAPS LESS gripping than the darker and more formulaic "The Firm" (and this is a matter of taste), "The Client" is certainly brisker and shows author John Grisham in a lighter mood and more willing to experiment with his characters. "The "Client" boasts a gallery of memorable characters.

There's the Hon. J. Roy Foltrigg, the U.S. attorney who wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice Mark and his family for his own political ambitions; Harry Roosevelt, a black, 300-pound family court judge who hates people who take advantage of kids; Mama Love, Reggie's mother with a heart of pure lasagna; Slick Moeller, an effective but scummy police reporter for the local paper; and the wonderful Barry Muldanno himself, the very model of a successful modern thug. John Grisham, a lawyer and former state representative who lives Oxford, seems to have carved himself a permanent niche in the best-seller list with "A Time to Kill," "The Firm" and "The, Pelican Brief." "The Client" is another surefire hit.

RANDY HALL or because of the lack of funds fort 1 treatment breaks her heart, and there were also times when she found it hard to condone the destruction of animals for student I I training, as well. the Greenspark Academy Indians, King and Deanie Gauthier, the secretive, wounded genius of the Greenspark girls' team, whose cruel nickname, the Mutant, testifies to her bizarre appearance and behavior. To both of them, basketball is everything, the way of life that takes precedence over schoolwork, off-hour fun, and family, but there the similarity stops. FOR THERE COULD not be two more different young human beings. Big, bluff Sam, practical-minded rather than brilliant, is snug within a loving family, with a father who loves the game as much as Sam does and New offerings by UA Press New from the University of Alabama Press: "LETTERS FROM ALABAMA," by Philip Henry Gosse, with an introduction by Harvey H.

Jackson III: University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1993, $18.95, paper. Eventually to become one of England's most noted scholars and scientific illustrators, Philip Henry Gosse left home in 1838 for Alabama, having been told that educated people were in demand there. Seventeen years old and a natural history buff, the young Britisher was employed at Pleasant Hill in Dallas County for nearly a year as a teacher for some dozen children of local landowners. While there, he not only made close observations and sketches of frontier Alabama wildlife, an invaluable record in itself, but talked and listened to the local residents as well, watching them in their daily lives and coming to understand their needs, hopes and fears. These "letters," written to no one in particular (a familiar literary device of that period), appeared first in a magazine, but were eventually published as a book in 1859.

Out of print for more than a century, the work was resurrected by Professor Virginia Van der Veer Hamilton and reissued in 1983. The still-newer edition in hand has been prepared for the Library of Alabama Classics with her help, and given an unusually readable new introduction by Dr. Harvey H. Jackson III, professor and chair of the Department of History at Jacksonville State University. "THE ENORMOUS VOGUE OF THINGS MEXICAN: Cultural Relations between the United States and Mexico, 19320-1935," by Helen Delpar: University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1992, $38.95, cloth.

Though Mexico and the United States have been historically linked since the 1820's, Americans did not really become interested in Mexican culture until a century later. Between 1920 and 1935, however, there was a flowering of interest in our neighbor's art, music, literature and archeology, as books with Mexican themes appeared, Spanish language classes were offered in the schools, and a general exchange of intellectual ideas flourished across the border. Here, Helen Delpar, associate professor of history at the University of Alabama, provides the first full-length study of this phenomenon. There was a certain political and ideological factor here, she explains, for American liberals and leftists had reacted enthusiastically to the mexican Revolution of 1910. And there was a romantic appeal, as well, as Americans enjoyed the ethnic customs, artifacts and life style of this fellow-nation in the Western Hemisphere.

"THEY LIVE ON THE LAND: Life in an Open-Country Southern Community," by Paul W. Terry and Verner M. Sims: University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1993, $19.95, paper. Originally published in 1940, this new addition to the popular Library of Alabama Classics is a portrait of rural life in Gorgas, in the 1930s, an important contemporary sociological study at the time of its appearance, but one that was to become an anachronism in the wake of World War II. Its authors, both now deceased, members of the College of Education at the University of Alabama, were among the many social scientists writing in the South for New Deal-sponsored agencies during the Depression, and in this respect, as well, the volume is part of its time.

As a source of detailed, accurate information about a specific community at a particular point in history, however, "They Live on the Land" is a valuable case study that will serve as a permanent record. A full introduction by Clarence L. Mohr, associate professor of history at Tulane, evaluates and redefines this well-researched work. B.H.H. us, she round it difficult to settle L.

Gage down. After an interrupted course of study at the University of New Mexico and an unsuccessful marriage that finally ended in Alaska, she found herself 34 before she was accepted at veterinary college, determined to make a go of it but admittedly a bit doubtful she would ever graduate. "If Wishes Were Horses" is her year-by-year account of her medical education, an ingenuous, honest and very personal story that sometimes soars, and occasionally plods. A LIFELONG LOVER of animals, she is at her best when spinning yarns about her pets, like Bones, the stray cat who survived an encounter with a live wire, or special animal personalities at the teaching clinic the llama they fitted with an artificial leg, or the feisty little goat who adopted a crippled Swiss calf, soon three times his size, as a playmate. But much of the.

book is a rather straightforward account of her studies, a massive and terrifying overdose of technical know-how that made it impossible for a conscientious student like Loretta to cope simultaneously with any other facet of her life. The course work was not only demanding but often unpleasant, as well, malodorous, physically exhaust Though the book is inclined occasionally to become too technical for the casual layman, and the daily student grind is admittedly just a trifle monotonous, "If Wish-1 es Were Horses" does give an N. Gage excellent and reassuring picture of how a veterinarian is trained. And when Dr. Gage is recalling some of the better moments of her student days the joy of seeing a sick animal get well, the pleasure of mastering a new technique, and finally, her own emotional reaction to graduation, at last the book is pure pleasure.

B.H.H. Choice in late winter fiction Late winter fiction: "GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER," by Thomas King: Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1993, "JAPANESE BY SPRING," by Ishmael Reed: Atheneum, New York, 1993, $20. Here's yet another boisterous satiric novel from one of $21.95. As tricky as Coyote, the our best-known contemporary black -l Indian storyteller and mischief! writers, Berkeley faculty member Ishmael Reed. "Japanese by maker, Thomas King's second novel, "Green Grass, Running! I Water, combines a tale of modern Chappie Puttbutt, one of Jack Lon- II Blackfoot Indians from the small i don College's African-American Alberta town of Blossom with the mysteries of the old ways, as personified by the four age-old Indian men who have escaped yet again from a local mental hospital junior professors, and a consummate compromiser who tries to please by acting even more white and bigoted than his white, bigoted superiors.

This bid for acceDtance to head down the highway, living1 and tenure does not work, however, Reed and he is about to be replaced by a sassy radical feminist poet when the Japanese suddenly buy the college outright and it all becomes a new ball game. Puttbutt is made department head and high pooh-bah, and all his fantasies of revenge and justice seem about to come true. But, setting out to settle old scores, he only manages to get into additional trouble, even becoming involved somehow in a plot to assassinate the Japanese emperor. More hilarious than preachy, "Japanese by Spring" is a farcical romp through the pitfalls of political correctness, with many a telling putdown of the system that prevails. Reed, who lives in Oakland, is the author of more than 20 books, including eight novels, and is also the founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, which encourages multicultural writing.

Gore to do intro The murder shelf The ways some people kill: "WINTER RULES," by Barry Cork: Scribners, New York, 1993, $20. Career and hobby (police inspector and successful novelist) permit Angus Straun to indulge his curiosity and his love of golf and exotic sports cars. But little of this prepares him for his new (and inescapable) duties, providing security for Augustus Aligar, ruler of a new African nation who shares Straun's love of golf. Keeping Aligar alive is difficult enough, but Straun also finds his own survival shaky until he unravels a nasty plot. "JEMIMA SHORE AT THE SUNNY GRAVE and Other Stories," by Antonia Fraser: Bantam, New York, 1993, $19.95.

In between her heftier works (she's just published the well-received "The Wives of Henry biographer Antonia Fraser knocks out murder mysteries featuring trouble-prone Jemima Shore. Here, in a handful of short pieces starring the irrepressible Jemima, is a treat for Fraser fans, a fine introduction for newcomers. "BEWARE OF THE DOG," by E.X. Ferrars: DoubledayPerfect Crime, New York, 1993, $17. Most of the time Virginia Freer does quite well, thank you, without estranged husband Felix.

She's moved back to the home left her by her mother in Allingford, supporting herself as a physiotherapist. But occasionally murder raises its ugly head in the village and Felix, liar, con man and petty crook, proves essential. When elderly Helen Lovelace dies her heirs, grandnephew and grandniece, arrive and shortly thereafter murder strikes. "THE HANGING VALLEY," by Peter Robinson: Scribners, New York, 1992, $20. Clues are few for Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks when, two weeks after he disappeared, the hiker's body is found in a valley outside the village of Swainshead.

But as Banks patiently, thoughtfully pieces together the clues, old mysteries and old deaths in Swainshead resurface and Banks, after a trip to Canada for an interview, finds the village knew the stranger far better than anyone would admit. C.H. Best Sellers out their tribal legends. The young- King er Indians are no reservation derelicts but busy, educated Native Americans: Alberta Frank, a university professor; two of her lovers, lawyer Charlie Looking Bear and his cousin, salesman Lionel Red Dog; Lionel's sister Latisha, who runs the tourist trap Dead Dog Cafe; and their uncle Eli Stands Alone, a university professor determined to save the Indian land from a new dam. Weaving in and out of all these lives, the tale is by turns hilarious, mysterious and unexpected, spiced by the surreal journey of ancient Hawkeye, Robinson Crusoe, Ishmael and The Lone Ranger as they try to put their traditional world together again.

California-born Thomas King, also the author of the prize-winning "Medicine River," taught native studies in Alberta, Canada, for 10 years, but currently holds the chair of native studies at the University of Minnesota. "THE COLLECTED STORIES," by John McGahern: Knopf, New York, 1993, $24. A resident of County Leitrim, Ireland, John McGahern is a writer of international reputation, the author of five novels, including "High Ground," and three previous short story collections. The book at hand brings all his short stories together in one volume, 34 fine works set in the Ireland he knows so well, but dealing with the universal things of life love, family, age, desperation, dreams dreamed and unfulfilled. The product of more than 30 years of writing, these tales are spare, powerful, direct, and often lyrical, touching real lives and believable people, taking drama from the ordinary things of daily existence.

Individually, they are memorable; brought together as a whole, they are superb. (Compiled by The New York Times) FICTION 1. THE CLIENT Grisham 2. THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY Waller 3. THE TALISMANS OF SHANNARA Brooks 4.

THE CHILDREN OF MEN James 5. NOVEMBER OF THE HEART Spencer 6. ALONG CAME A SPIDER Patterson 7. DEGREE OF GUILT Patterson 8. GRIFFIN SABINE Bantock ALL THE PRETTY HORSES McCarthy 0.

EINSTEIN'S DREAMS Ughtman NON-FICTION 1. HEALING AND THE MIND Moyers 2 THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE Umbauoh 3. WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES Estes 4. OFFICIAL AND CONFIDENTIAL Summers 5. BANKRUPTCY 1995 Fkjgie with Swanson 6.

THE SILENT PASSAGE Sheehy New York Times News Service NEW YORK Vice President Al Gore has agreed to write the introduction for a new edition of Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (Houghton Mifflin), the classic book on the environment that was first published in 1962 and that Gore has said strongly influenced his own interest in environmental issues. Gore's "Earth in the Balartce" (Houghton Mifflin in hardcover, NALPIume paperback), a study of ways to save the environment, was a hard-cover best seller for weeks and has been a paperback best seller for 1 1 weeks. It will be No. 6 on this Sunday's paperback non-fiction list..