The Tampa Tribune from Tampa, Florida • 106

6-Commentary The Tampa Tribune-Times, Sunday, July 25, 1993 Suffer The Children NON-FICTION 1. WOMEN WHO RUN WITH THE WOLVES. By Clarissa Pinkola Estes. (Ballantine, $20.) A Jungian analyst reinterprets myths and folk tales to enable women to understand their psyches. 2.

DAYS OF GRACE. By Arthur Ashe and Arnold Rampersad. (Knopf, $24.) The memoirs of the late tennis star. 3. THE FIFTIES.

By David Halberstam. (Villard, $27.50.) A journalist's social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 1950s. 4. THE WAY THINGS OUGHT TO BE. By Rush Limbaugh.

Anecdotes and opinions offered by the radio talk show host. 5. REENGINEERING THE CORPORATION. By Michael Hammer and James Champy. (Harper Business, $25.) A manifesto for business innovation.

6. EMBRACED BY THE LIGHT. By Betty J. Eadie with Curtis Taylor. (Gold Leaf Press, $14.95.) The experiences of a woman who came close to death but survived.

7. CARE OF THE SOUL. By Thomas Moore. (HarperCollins, $20.) A psychotherapist's discussion of spirituality and everyday life. 8.

LISTENING TO PROZAC. By Peter D. Kramer. (Viking, A psychiatrist discusses mood-changing medications and their effects on a person's self. 9.

MAMA MAKES UP HER MIND. By Bailey White. (Addison-Wesley, $17.95.) Life in a tiny Georgia town; by a first-grade teacher and radio commentator. 10. HEALING AND THE MIND.

By Bill Moyers. (Doubleday, $25.) Conversations with physicians, scientists, therapists, and patients about the relationship of sickness to thought and emotion. But that's not all. "For a period of time during the '70's, Paul and Shirley Eberle were the most prolific publishers of child pornography in the United States," says Sgt. Toby Tyler, a San Bernadino deputy sheriff who is a nationally recognized expert on child sexual abuse and child pornography.

ACCORDING to an undercover vice detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, the Eberles' own children were often featured in their hard-core publications. The Eberles themselves are pictured nude on one magazine cover, each copulating with a life-size blow-up doll. Their numerous underground publications included "Finger" a defunct magazine that is still regularly seized in caches of kiddie porn. Scattered among articles -bearing titles like "Sexpot at Five," "Little Lolitas," "My First Rape" and "New Adventures in Incest" are photographs and drawings of children involved in sodomy, oral copulation and other activities beyond the imagination of mainstream America. Interestingly, many of the acts depicted are similar to ones described by the child witnesses in the McMartin case which the Eberles claim were too "bizarre" or "physically impossible" to be believed.

In this new and enlightening perspective, it is unremarkable that the Eberles would characterize as "wholesome" a young man who routinely reported to work at his mother's day care center wearing shorts and no underwear, a circumstance that was visibly obvious to a parade of witnesses who took the stand. Under normal circumstances, a book as transparently biased and factually bankrupt as "The Abuse of Innocence" would merit little more attention or review than a history of the Holocaust penned by David Duke. But there is a difference: We know who David Duke is. Very few people know who the Eberles really are. And even fewer are conversant enough on the facts of the case to recognize the extent to which it has been revised.

The McMartin case was not "proven to be fiction" as the Eberles claim. And two hung juries do not a witch hunt make. But there is a danger that an unsuspecting public may actually believe the Eberles' strident and unsubstantiated assertion that "there are thousands of people in jails and prisons for molestations that never occurred." The Eberles begin their tale with a quote from Adolf Hitler: "The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than to a small one." Ironically, the book itself is the grandest of all deceptions, from the title, which promises to tell the story of a trial, to the jacket copy, which promises to allow readers to reach their own conclusions, to the identity of the authors, who would seem to have a vested interest in curtailing the prosecution of crimes against children. This historic case deserves better. JAN HOLLINGSWORTH Jan is the author of "Unspeakable Acts," the story of a landmark Miami child abuse case.

THE ABUSE OF INNOCENCE: The McMartin Preschool Trial. By Paul and Shirley Eberle. Prometheus Books. 416 Pages. $24.95.

Bathed in the hot, white glare of television lights, defendant Betty Raidor looks "like a gentle, kindly grandmother in bright sunlight." Babette Spitler is "angelic." And Peggy Ann Buckey possesses "a kind of clear-eyed natural innocence and wholesomeness that cannot be faked." According to authors Paul and Shirley Eberle, all seven defendants in the McMartin preschool case the longest running criminal proceeding in history are equally "gentle, kindly and benign." Even Raymond Buckey, the focus of most of the charges, is "the wholesome, all-American young man" with "an extremely deep, crisp, masculine voice" not the type of man who would molest children, the Eberles assure us, repeatedly. In contrast, the prosecutorsare "harsh," "angry," "shrill" and "corrupt." The parents of the alleged victims are anonymous, placard-waving hysterics, routinely referred to as "the hard-faced mob." sobbed, but not very convincingly," say the Eberles.) AND THE children well, the children are clearly not the abused innocents alluded to in the title, despite the cover illustration of a sad little boy. From the Eberles' perspective, the children seem to be having a pretty good time. And so the stage is set for the authors to unfurl their thesis that the historic McMartin case was nothing more and nothing less than a sinister conspiracy fueled by greed and mass hysteria. The unknowledgeable reader will likely agree.

It has been almost a decade since the arrest of seven teachers at the prestigious California preschool captured the nation's attention, inspiring parental angst over the once sacrosanct institution of day care. Since that time, the McMartin case has become a national symbol of the frustrating complexities inherent in the prosecution of crimes against children. The Eberles have reduced those complexities to the simplest and most fashionable of terms: witch hunt. "The Abuse of Innocence" is a sweeping indictment of law enforcement, social services, the justice system, government and the media. It is also a case study in manipulation, a confusing tapestry woven of distortion, inaccuracy and omission.

We are told, for instance, that the case began with a phone call by a "deranged" mother who accused Ray Buckey of sodomizing her 2-year-old son. We are not told that the phone call was made after the child had been taken to a hospital emergency room with a bloody diaper. We are told that therapists at Children's Institute International (CII) brainwashed hundreds of children into believing that they were abused. We are not told of the children interviewed by other individuals and agencies who corroborated the testimony of the CII children most notably that of a child who had moved to Hawaii several months before the "lynch mob hysteria" descended upon Manhattan Beach, Calif. Fiction 1 THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY.

By Robert James Waller. (Warner, $14.95.) A photographer and a lonely farmer's wife in Iowa. 2. THE CLIENT. By John Grisham.

(Doubleday, $23.50.) A deadly secret, revealed by a lawyer just before he commits suicide, presents serious problems for an 1 1 -year-old boy. 3. THE NIGHT MANAGER. By John le Carre. (Knopf, $24.) A Zurich hotelman's life in the world of arms dealers, dope smugglers and international terrorists 4.

LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE. By Laura Esquivel. (Doubleday, $17.50.) Frustration, love, hope and recipes sampled by a woman coming of age on a Mexican ranch. 5. PLEADING GUILTY.

By Scott Turbw. (Farrar, Straus Giroux, $24.) A lawyer in pursuit of his firm's missing partner and a multimillion-dollar fund. 6. CRUEL AND UNUSUAL. By Patricia D.

Cornwell. (Scribners, $21.) Dr. Kay Scarpetta investigates mysteries involving a man executed for murder. 7. PIGS IN HEAVEN.

By Barbara Kingsolver. (HarperCollins, $22.) The stresses and strains that befall a mother and her adopted Cherokee daughter. 8. THE SCORPIO ILLUSION. By Robert Ludlum.

(Bantam, $23.95.) A former naval officer tracks down a terrorist conspiracy headed by a vengeful woman. 9. HONOR AMONG THIEVES. By Jeffrey Archer. (HarperCollins $23) Saddam Hussein plots to steal and destroy the Declaration of Independence.

1 0. AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. By Susan Isaacs. (HarperCollins, $23.) The plight of a woman whose estranged husband is found murdered in her house. HEMINGWAY'S KEY WEST.

By Stuart B. Wlclver. Pineapple Press. 128 Pages. $10.95.

Thousands of people gathered in Key West this past week to celebrate thelemingway Days Festival. It is difficult to say how old Papa would have regarded the festivities, with Hemingway look-alike contests, a short-story writing com- petition, a lit erary confer-i ence, arm wrestling and even a road race. Hemingway relshed both privacy and notoriety. Bi4 it is hard to believe the writer who immor Ernest Hemingway talized the running of the bulls at Pamplona would be amused by joggers huffing through the streets of Key West, his name emblazoned on their T-shirts. Still, it all goes to show how Hemingway, who lived in Key West from 1928 to 1939, has become a powerful commodity to the city.

In this breezy, entertaining account of Hemingway's life in the Keys, Mclver looks behind th billboard Papa to the dedicated writer who came to Key West on the advice of writer John Dos Passos, who thought the tropical, isolated city was just the place for "Ole Hem to dry out his bones." Hemingway liked what he saw: a vibrant, working-class town with a Latin ambience and wonderful fishing. While the late James McLendon's "Papa: Hemingway in Key West" remains the definitive work on Hemingway's Key West years, Mclver delightfully conveys Key West in the '30s, recalling Hemingway's adventures, his friendships with fishermen, bar owners and artists, 'his trips to Havana and Bimini, and his experiences during the killer hurricane of 1935. With many photographs and a "two-hour walking tour," Mclver's book will please anyone interested in Hemingway or Key West. THE FOLKLORE OF BIRDS. By Laura C.

Martin. Globe Pequot Press. 240 Pages. $24.95. FLORIDA'S FAMILY ALBUM, A HISTORY FOR ALL AGES.

By Cora Cheney and Ben Partridge. (San Marcos Press, $14.95.) The history of Florida for all ages from prehistory to Hufricane Andrew. RAGE. By Gilbert Moore. (Carroll Grf, $10.95.) An account of the circumstances surrounding the 1968 murder trial of Black Panther Huey P.

Newton. IT'S RAINING FROGS AND FISHES. By Jerry Dennis. (Harper Perennial, $10.) Satisfy the child within with this seasonal report of the natural theatrics of (he sky. MEETING EVIL.

By Thomas Berger. (Little, Brown, $9.95.) A grudging gesture of politeness to help a stranger with a stalled car leads a suburban husband into an unwilling crime spree. THE FOUNDING FATHER. Sy Richard tt I toiMir.MWiifMiiM ignored, it appears that characters have been created and scenes staged to further the Eberle agenda. For instance, there is a rotating cast of anonymous commentators who drop in on the proceedings from time to time to offer unattributed and unsubstantiated "insights" into motives and malfeasance in this and other child abuse cases.

Many of the views expressed by this cast of pseudo-Deep Throats are strikingly similar to those expressed by the Eberles themselves in their previous book, "The Politics of Child Abuse," a 1986 diatribe that calls for the dismantling of the nation's child protection system. But what of the Eberles' agenda? We are told that they are objective "journalists" who have written "numerous magazine and newspaper articles." But we are not told the true nature of these endeavors, which is widely known to California law enforcement. The Eberles currently publish the "L.A. Star," a weekly soft-core porn tabloid that features a curious mix of bondage, fetishes, exotic paraphernalia, a column by Shirley Eberle on "orgy etiquette," full-page advertisements for "The Politics of Child Abuse" and regular features on "the witch hunt for child molesters." Physicians found that three-quarters of the children bore physical evidence that corroborated their stories. We are told this is meaningless.

IN FACT, the authors tell us nothing that might lend a shred of substance to a case that they claim was "a mass hallucination" created by the media. Considering how much the Eberles have failed to tell us, it is ironic that they should assail "the overdressed young reporters" for lopsided" reportage. Apparently what the Eberles object to is the fact that the media covered the state's case at all. According to the Eberles, the state had no case; therefore they simply do not have to present it. In one typical instance, the Eberles present 15 pages of a defense witness's criticism of how the children were interviewed and offer one paragraph paraphrasing the prosecution's cross-examination.

We are also led to believe that the court testimony is quoted verbatim. Yet testimony has been altered, and pages that are presented as solid blocks of uninterrupted testimony contain numerous gaps that are not marked by ellipses or any other indication of omission. Not only are events taken out of context and inconvenient facts Accompanied by illustrations, each entry reveals the legends associated with various birds. The Taos Indians, for instance, consider the nighthawk a great hunter, and one of their legends tells of the bird, which eats insects, returning from a hunt carrying a deer. The Taos collect the nighthawk's feathers for prayer sticks.

In France, the shriek of an owl reveals to a pregnant woman that she will have a girl. A SOUTHERN COLLECTION. By Estill Curtis Pennington. University of Georgia Press. 246 Pages.

$24.95. A large-format volume that presents a collection of paintings from the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Ga. The paintings depict a wide variety of Southern scenes and landscapes, including George Higgins' vivid rendering of a tree-lined "Palm Grove, Alfred Hutty's impressionistic view of urban Charleston, "Hanging and William Petrie's amusing "Dog Thief." AQUARIUMS: Windows to Nature. Leighton Taylor. Foreword by Dr.

Sylvia Earle. Prentice Hall. 127 Pages. $35. Leighton Taylor is a renowned wildlife consultant who counts among his clients the Nature Company and the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans.

He is working on the Florida Aquarium being constructed in Tampa. The former director of the Waikiki Aquarium explains the popularity of aquariums, which attract more than 30 million visitors each year, explains how they function and how they help educate people, and lists the top aquariums around the nation. Many photographs. THE GREAT BEAR ALMANAC. By Gary Brown.

Lyons and Burford. 320 Pages. $30. Virtually everything that is known about the eight species of bears is covered by Brown, who served in the National Park Service for 31 years as a ranger and bear-management specialist. He covers evolution, identification, populations, natural history and behavior.

He also covers how the bear has figured in many myths and addresses the outlook for the bear as humans encroach on its environment. Many photographs. Whalen. (Regnery Gateway, $15.) The book that broke the spell of Camelot in its biography of Joseph P. Kennedy.

TEN DAYS TO DESTINY. By John Costello. (Quill, $13.) History reads like suspense thriller when the author -takes the reader to 1940 and tells the secret story of the Hess peace initiative. THE WILD WEST. Photographs by David Levinthal.

(Smithsonian, $15.95.) Big Western photographs by one of the first photographer- to use staged dolls and toys to create a scene. THE MEN'S CLUB. By Leonard Michaels. (Mercury House, $10.) Love stories based on lost connections. THE BAREFOOT HIKER.

By Richard Frazine. (Ten Speed Press, $7.95.) Throw away your boots and sneakers and learn the art of hiking barefoot from a 20-year hiking vetetW Jazz finally gets its due Tom Varner, a one-of-a-kind exponent of jazz French horn. Landmark albums are recognized as such: "The steady mid-tempos and plaintive voicings on 'So What' and 'All Blues' establish further the weightless, haunting qualities of the music," the authors write in a five-star review of Davis' "Kind of "The greatest jazz album of the modern period?" the two suggest in a discourse on Coltrane's similarly accoladed "A Love Sonny Rollins is said to play with "brilliant invention" on "Saxophone Colossus." Cook and Morton, as lyrical as they are with their praise, can be downright nasty with the pithy put-downs, calling GRP label keyboardist David Benoit's work "uniformly insubstantial" and dismissing much-admired electric bassist John Patitucci's albums as records marked by "clever playing and flawless technique" that "bespeak an Icy indifference to conceptual substance or melodic warmth." Electric jazz, though, isn't categorically cas-' tigated. And neither free jazz nor temporary composition is given short shrift. "The Penguin Guide to Jazz," from phonist Greg Abate to pianist Axel Zwingenber-ger, Is a handy, eminently readable work that should prove indespensible to listeners, musicians and critics alike.

PHILIP BOOTH Philip Booth is the pop music critic of The Tampa Tribune. this thick tome. "Fans and collectors have never been provided with the kind of detailed summary and evaluation of what exactly is available by both major and minor figures," they assert. The authors admit to certain omissions low-budget releases of negligible quality; Kenny Najee and other marginal pop-jazz instrumentalists; albums that simply couldn't be found and to using their discretion on distinguishing the difference between jazz and blues artists. The two also make close calls figuring out which popularly successful singers to include in a jazz guide (Mel Torme) and which to leave out (Peggy Lee).

The breezy topical references sometimes touch on particularly English references saxophonist Bud Freeman "looked, and chose to behave, like the secretary of some golf club in the Home Counties" that suffer in the passage across the Atlantic. And some collectors might find it an oversight that the recordings' running times and dates of release are nowhere to be found. Those quibbles aside, the book is a marvelous achievement, full of authoritative entries on such major figures as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis and John Coltrane, as well as such brilliant but unsung players as German trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, prolific New Yorjc saxophonist David Murray and THE PENGUIN GUIDE TO JAZZ ON CD, LP CASSETTE. By Richard Cook and Brian Morton. Penguin.

1,287 Pages. $22.50. Rock fans have long had access to the "Rolling Stone Record Guide" and Robert Christgau's collections of frequently biting commentary, and Ira Robbins has given alternative music its due with the delightfully opinionated, wide-ranging "Trouser Press Record Guide." But jazz listeners have had to make do with reading Down Beat and Cadence religiously andor regularly subscribing to record company newsletters. English critics Richard Cook and Brian Morton thankfully have devised a solution to a jazz devotee's or brand-new fan's dilemma. What releases are available (currently being manufactured, distributed and accessible in stores or by special order), when were they recorded, and how do they stack up against the artist's other works? "The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, LP Cassette," by far the most intelligent, most even-handedly evaluative and best-organized effort of its kind, offers an entertaining avenue out of the morass.

Cook and Morton, London residents and well-known writers and broadcasters whose passion for the music is palpable in their often enthusiastic, always knowledgeable entries, clue us to their motivation the very beginning of.