The Post-Star from Glens Falls, New York • 23

Sunday, Feb. 10, 1991 Post-Star, Glens Falls, N.Y. C5 Books and Author Newbery Medal comes just in time for author Jerry Spinelli, a shell-shocked veteran of many a writer's battle, has finally won the war. His tactical weapon, so to speak, is the heart-rending tale of 13-year-old Maniac Magee who, orphaned by a' train wreck, is sent to live with his miserable aunt and uncle. By Joe Logan Knight-Ridder The phone rings at Jerry Spinelli's Phoenixville, home for the seventh time, maybe the eighth, in about an hour.

"Well, thank you," Spinelli's wife, Eileen, can be heard saying in the. next room. "Yes, we are excited." Spinelli, 50 and every inch the rumpled, middle-aged writer, seems embarrassed by yet another intrusion. He shrugs almost apologetically, then says, "It has been like this ever since the award was announced." jit was Jan. 14, with the nation on the cusp of war, that the mild-mannered, self-effacing Spinelli got the phone call that changed his life.

At vJWO that morning, a woman from Chicago called to tell him he had won the 1991 John Newbery Medal, the most prestigious prize in chil- Mars Bar, a tough kid; a couple of neglected brothers; a grizzled good Samaritan who wants to help but ultimately cannot, and a loving black family from the wrong end of town. It is that family, the Beales, to whom Maniac is most drawn. But in his innocent mind, he cannot understand the fuss over this black-white thing. "For the life of him, he couldn't figure out why these Last Enders called themselves black," Spinelli writes of Maniac. "He kept looking and looking, and the colors he found were gingersnap and light fudge and dark fudge and acorn and butter rum and cinnamon and burnt orange.

But never licorice, which, to him, was real black." It was passages like those, no doubt, that helped earn Spinelli the Newbery. The awards committee said, in part: "The beat of Spinelli's irresistible poetic prose keeps time with the slap slap slap of Maniac's sneakers as he runs in search of a home. Through (his) encounters with an extraordinary cast of characters, the reader not only sees the world as it is but as it could be." A Norristown, native, Spinelli planned to become a writer at 17, when the local paper published his poem about a big high school football game. His early plan was to become a writer and professor at an "ivy-covered New England college, sort of a J.D. Salinger." He taught briefly at Temple University but found the job too time-consuming.

He took a job at Chilton where he became an editor of Product Design and Development, one of the company's trade magazines. "I wrote pieces about new products, like a new valve, a new transistor, just little product descriptions," he says. "Most people are looking for an interesting, exciting, glamorous job. I looked for just the opposite, something that was routine and wouldn't leave me exhausted at 5 o'clock." In fact, Spinelli learned to steal snatches of time for writing whenever and wherever he could at home at night, on guard duty when he was in the Army Reserve and in his office over lunch; Many people at Chilton, he admits, thought he was a bit odd. While they were struggling for promotions, Spinelli avoided more responsibility.

While they socialized at lunch, he closed his office door and climbed into his world of novels. He didSo for 12 yearns. And what he had to show for it was four unpublished manuscripts and a stack of rejection slips. But through it all, Spinelli believed in himself See Medal: Back Page dren's literature, for his young-adult novel, "Maniac Magee" (Little, Brown, Spinelli had hot even known that he had been nominated. The Newbery, named for an 1 8th-century publisher of children's books and given by the American Library Association, carries no cash award.

But Spinelli, who admits to cash-flow concerns of late, nonetheless expects a financial windfall for himself, his wife, who also writes children's books, and their six children. For starters. Little, Brown is printing 60,000 more copies of "Maniac." He will benefit from the sale of the book-club rights. "And," SpineTHays with" delight, "now every library in the country will buy at least one copy." Jerry Spinelli, a shell-shocked veteran of many a writer's battle, has finally won the war. His tactical weapon, so to speak, is the heart-rending tale of 13-year-old Maniac Magee who, orphaned by a train wreck, is sent to live with his miserable aunt and uncle.

He soon runs away literally runs away and spends the next 184 pages crisscrossing Two Mills, in search of a family to call his own. Along the way he encounters a rich cast of characters, including r. ieep 0 TP Ted Mooneys Train in Wide awake in London Review Balancing stories ahoul real people against images transmitted through the media -J A cutting from city to city, from real life to screenplays. Mooney writes of an age in which any secret can be uncovered by simply switching to the right channel, a hot light shining on lovers in Los Angeles and negotiators in France. "I do see things as happening simultaneously," Mooney said.

"It comes from television and newspapers and the disjointed way we receive information. My books are about education, communication. During the '80s the idea of communication changed greatly." He was born in Dallas, but spent much of his childhood in Washington, D.C., where his father served, as an aide and speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson. Mooney attended Columbia University, graduated from Bennington College and moved to Manhattan. "I had been working at Fiction magazine, and I was very lucky in that I met a lot of writers and got to know what it means to be writer.

However, I was living on $3,000 a year in New York. "Then my father died, and literally the day he died I realized I can't go on living this way, this is ridiculous. I answered an ad to work at an art magazine, and I still work there after 1 3 years," said Mooney, a senior editor at Art in America. "Easy Travel," which received a National Book Award nomination, was published in 1981. Second novels are often difficult and especially for Mooney.

Shortly after "Easy Travel" came out, his mother fell ill with cancer, and he spent much of the next seven years caring foi her until her death. So it was a sober, reflective Mooney who went to work on "Traffic and Laughter." Lovers are drawn into politics, and politicians pause to reflect. In one passage diplomats Bloch and Walters take a walk in the woods, discussing the possible explosion of a fission bomb. As they approach a small clearing, Walters ponders his career: "The weedy white and orange blossoms reminded Walters of the year he courted his wife, and he was forced to reflect upon how much of what he'd done in life hundreds of thousands of miles of clandestine travel; countless hours of negotiation and assessment; severe decisions inflecting history for better or worse he had done, at bottom out of love for her." Said Mooney, "My characters are all performers, and they share information. "What 'Traffic and Laughter' is interested in is the continuum of the most private aspects of life and the most public aspects.

"What I'm suggesting is there's no conflict between the two. One simply grows out of the other. But as our world gets more and more electronic, I'm likely to find the visceral more and more important." By Helene Lorber Knight-Ridder Scientists say that dreams get rid of the tangled bits of psychic energy that sizzle around our craniums. If our dreams are interrupted, those twisted spurts must still come out, but they do so during waking hours, when crazy scenarios are much more frightening. In "Dr.

Sleep," the new novel from Madison HOW many Smartt Bell, for Whom the desperate sleeplessness Sleep 0f insomnia COmeS meshes very easily have well with the Considered surreal atmo- what sPhere of eU sent-day msomnia Lond on a IS? city divided racially, filled with bizarre-looking punks and codified by sensational tabloids. But jnsomnia and a menacing city are but part of the convoluted life of Adrian Strother. Adrian is an American ex-junkie working as a hypnotherapist in a lower-class district of the city. He's parlayed his skill into a couple of sidelines performer in a burlesque show and unofficial hypnotist to a shadowy police official (this last makes it possible for him to stay in England on an expired visa). In the course of three days and sleepless nights, he: returns from a bakery to discov-.

er that his longtime girlfriend has moved out, uncovers multiple personalities deep within an agoraphobic patient, reluctantly meets a former druggie companion, in London from New York, and the woman they both loved, is taken hostage by a crime boss is badly injured in a Dr. Sleep. By Madison Smartt Bell; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 304 pages. $19.95.

martial arts demonstration (I neglected to mention that he has a black belt). This flurry of events, and Adrian's constant motion, by foot and by subway, don't rush by. Bell crafts his words so well that we float-with Adrian from one experience to another, observing as we experience. Adrian's insomnia smudges the line between sleep and wakefulness, his profession the line between illusion and reality. Here, toward the end of the book, after three days without sleep: "The shape of the mean hallway shimmered and blurred and I eould easily perceive that it was not real, not any part of it.

But I went out by the door, out of politeness, since I could as easily have passed through the walls, and returned to the stage to continue my work. I turned sugar to salt, light into darkness, laughter to tears, grief into anger, rage into passion, and passion into nothing at all." Through such powerful writing, Bell conveys a state of mind and a state of place that are fascinating. How many for whom seep comes easily have considered what insomnia is? Adrian isn't tired, and he has moved beyond despair at his wakefulness. And London, too, has taken oh a new aspect the refined precincts of "Upstairs, Downstairs" have, in my mind, been replaced by the malignant world of Charles Palliser's "The Quincunx," Martin Amis' "London Fields" and now, Madison Smartt Bell's "Dr. Sleep." By Hillel Italie The Associated Press NEW YORK An author grows up, learning stories.

They come from relatives, from books, from friends. They're beamed in from outside, from television. The author takes those stories and turns them into other stories, processing fact and fiction into a world both real and imagined. Ted Mooney is an author. He watched television during the day, and at night his parents would read to him in bed, especially "A Child's History of the World" and "A Child's Geography of the World." He developed a sense of both place and time, of worlds outside his home and of the people who lived there.

"Easy Travel to Other Planets," his first novel, told the story of a woman's relationship with a dolphin and her equally complicated relationships with people outside the water. In "Traffic and Laughter" (Alfred A. Knopf, Mooney scatters great communicators around the world a radio star and filmmaker from Los Angeles, rock stars from South Africa, ambassadors in Europe and uses an international crisis to make their lives collide. "One of the things television encourages viewers to do is think that events are happening out there to people that are not really people, just images. I'm trying to give a reminder that even the president gets out of his pants one leg at a time, or in this case, I show the ambassador getting out of his boxer shorts," Mooney said in an interview at his Manhattan apartment.

"That's all really part of life. I think it's enormously helpful and humanizing to remember Ted Mooney sorting through the messages that with so much getting lost in created personalities, personalities that don't have that much to do with the person they were attached to." Mooney's work reflects a struggle with information and disinformation, the fight to balance stories about real people against images transmitted through themedia. There's an other-wordly quality to his books, a sense of life as if it took place on the moon, where people are merely bodies drifting in space, struggling to communicate. For "Easy Travel" he remembered swimming with dolphins as a child and being amazed by their intelligence. Later, when he had an apartment in Manhattan, he was again confronted by an animal with a mind that was hardly subhuman.

"I was at home, writing, and one of the people who lived down the hall had a large black Labrador retriever, Elmo, who was very intelligent and was liable to get bored. I was sitting at my table and watched my front door open and close. It1 was Elmo the dog, opening the door with his nose. It made me think about animals walking around, doing things that humans do." "Traffic and Laughter" is an electronic noyel. Best Sellers Game of venery gives birth to ultimate 'Larks' Review By Nancy Pate Orlando Sentinel Long before television, boom boxes and Super Mario Brothers, civilized folk had to think up their own forms of entertainment.

In 15th-century England, the gentry found amusement by playing something that has come to be known as "the game of venery." Back then "venery" signified "the hunt," and the game consisted of creating poetic, collective nouns to describe groups of animals encountered while hunting. A proper gentleman, for example, would never, handed down over the years becoming such a familiar part of the English language that we say them as a matter of course a pride of lions, a plague of locusts, a barrel of monkeys. But if you do stop and think about these terms, you realize how wonderfully inventive and apt they are. Writer James Lipton is one person who has done considerable thinking about them, and in 1968 he wrote a delightful little book, "An Exaltation of Larks," which contained 175 collective nouns. Many of the terms Lipton came up with were authentic ones he had found in 15th-century books and manuscripts.

Others were contemporary expressions he invented a wince of dentists, a lurch of buses, a slouch of models. Lipton's book caught the public fancy. The first edition of 5,000 copies sold out, and the book went back for another printing and then another. In 23 years, it has never been out of print, in hardcover or paperback. And now it has given birth to a new illustrated volume, "An Exaltation of Larks: The Ultimate Edition" (Viking, See Birth: Back Page An Exaltation of Larks: The Ultimate Edition.

James Lipton. Viking. 324 pages. $18.95. ever refer to "a bunch of foxes" or "a flock of crows." He would know that the only proper expressions were "a skulk of foxes" and "a murder of crows." Many of these terms have been Reviews: New in paperback Hardcover Fiction 1.

The Secret Pilgrim. John le Carre. Knopf, $21.95. 2. The Plains of Passage.

Jean Auel. Crown, $24.95. 3. Cold Fire. Dean Koontz.

Putnam, $22.95. 4. The Witching Hour. Anne Rice. Knopf, $24.95.

5. Dazzle. Judith Krantz. Crown, $21.95. 6.

The Fourth K. Mario Puzo. Random House, $22.00. 7. Possession: A Romance.

A.S. Byatt. Random House, $22.95. 8. Jurassic Park.

Michael Crichton. Knopf, $19.95. 9. Circle of Friends. Maeve Binchy.

Delacorte, $19.95. 10. Battleground. W.E.B. Griffith.

Putnam, $19.95. Hardcover Non-Fiction 1. Financial Self-Defense. Charles Givens. Simon Schuster, $22.95.

2. Iron John: A Book About Men. Robert Bly. Addison-Wesley, $18.95. 3.

A Life on the Road. Charles Kuralt. Putnam, $18.95. 4. Homecoming.

John Bradshaw. Bantam, $18.95. 5. The Civil War: An Illustrated History. Geoffrey Ward et al.

Knopf, $50. 6. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. Daniel Yergin. Simon Schuster, $24.95.

7. Patrimony: A True Story. Philip Roth. Simon Schuster, $19.95. 8.

Wealth Without Risk. Charles Givens. Simon Schuster, $19.95. 9. Bo Knows Bo.

Bo Jackson and Dick Schaap. Doubleday, $18.95. 10. Millie's Book. As Dictated to Barbara Bush.

Mildred Ken-Bush. Morrow, $17.95. Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by R.R. Bowker Division of Reed Publishing, USA. (c) 1 989 by Reed Publishing, USA By Nancy Pate Orlando Sentinel These new paperbacks offer fine fiction: Ordinary Love Good Will.

By Jane Smiley. Ivy BooksBallantine. $4.95. This is actually two books in one two thematically linked and sharply observed novellas of family life. A mother narrates the first, a father the second.

But both parents come to realize that love and good intentions aside, they cannot protect their children from the consequences of choices that they themselves have made. In the first story, Rachel Kinsella has never told her grown children the true story of her divorce from their father 20 years ago. Bob Miller, the narrator of "Good Will," is proud that he and his wife and son live a totally self-sufficient life on a small farm. But their Eden disintegrates in the wake of a surprising act of violence. Smiley skillfully evokes her characters' interior together and "a million laughs." But Harold wouldn't trade that time with Cherry, even though his friends have called him a fool.

"He Stepped out of his average life for her, he gave up being a good man, but the rewards have been extraordinary." Picturing Will. By Ann Beattle. Vintage. $9.95. Since the 1970s, Beattie has been documenting in stories and novels the fragmented lives of a new lost generation with camera-like immediacy.

Here, she zooms in for a closeup of a small group of characters whose lives are connected to 5-year-old Will. His divorced mother, Jody, is a photographer whose career is taking off under the tutelage of her lover, Mel, and gallery owner HaverfordrBut Will's father, Wayne, is caught in a downward Spiral, living in Florida with his third wife, Corky these characters take turns at parenting Will in their own ways as Beattie explores the complexities of family. lives at the same time that she firmly places them in their familiar domestic milieu. In fluid prose, she captures the intimate exchanges between husband and wife over breakfast, the interplay between brothers starting a lawnmower, the things left unsaid between parent and child in a darkened hallway. Me and My Baby View the Eclipse.

By Lee Smith. Ballantine. $4.85. The nine short stones in this memorable collection all exhibit Smith's affection for small-town Southerners, her skill at rendering their lives in realistic fashion. Many of her characters never have stopped to think where life is taking them, but they experience moments of epiphany in the face of unexpected love or grief.

In "Intensive Care," for example, Harold Stikes has left his wife and three children for redheaded waitress Cherry Oxendine, "a fallen woman with a checkered past." Now Cherry is dying, and Harold is stunned that they only had three years.