The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 347

,1 ill jTZT I I rn Cellist John Holt: "We all have greater powers than we think." Cellist's 'journey of exploration into music' Never Too Late by John Holt (Delacorte: $10) Television novel goes down the tube Nielsen's Children by James Brady (Putnam's: "If Hollywood was casting a movie about Kate Sinclair," writes James Brady of his heroine, "they might think in terms of Faye Dunaway." She's 35 and beautiful, "a Farrah Fawcett-Majors with brains, an Ed Mur-row with sex appeal." She's the first woman anchor on network news, at one million dollars a year. What she really is, of course, is a fictional spinoff of Barbara Walters. Her co-anchor is Chester Albany, "once one of Mur-row's brightest young men," an old-line professional who resents sharing time with the former morning talk -show host and who bears a certain resemblance to Harry Reasoner. Their "marriage" on the air, which was not made in heaven, has been programmed by this season's boy-wonder, Bobby Klaus, at 29 graduated from the enter-Reviewed by Ron Bernstein tainment division. Roone Arledge? If not, try George Venables, who "took up where Cosell left off in popularizing prime-time sports on TV." Venables wants to take over the news and he doesn't like Kate Sinclair.

Threatening all of them are Nielsen ratings, those impartial monsters ultimately deciding who and what works. The novel, unfortunately, doesn't. What begins as a promising roman a clef about network infighting soon devolves into a punchless plot, ponderous with triviality and unsupported by substance. The characters appear petty and venal; even Kate, in her lonely battle for survival, is not drawn in a sufficiently sympathetic fashion. Worse, Brady is more comfortable telling us what happens, rather than showing.

He details Kate's romance with the "soon-to-be-president" Sen. Nick Blanchflower at the expense of the complications upon which the plot of network intrigue turns. In the crucial conflict, Kate antagonizes a feminist group with an unflattering news bit but exactly what she said is never revealed. Blanchflower also has trouble with feminists during his reelection campaign but the reason is never given. When feminists picket the network for censoring and then Blanchflower for influencing the minds of their sisters, we have no idea how this happened.

There are hints the White House is behind it all, suggesting Kate's plight has less to do with falling Nielsens than having been caught in the cross-fire of presidential politics. A media analyist might argue that Kate's attendant publicity would solidify her star quality and insure her job. It doesn't, and Faye Dunaway has already made the movie, anyway. Bernstein is a novelist whose latest book is "Straight Down," published by Ross-Erikson. Holt taps the Mitty dreamer in each of us with his cherished fantasy of becoming a proficient musician.

His teaching method is to challenge clinical presuppositions and lazy misconceptions which plague musical education and, by extension, education in general. To describe an art objectively is one matter, but Holt has made his music come alive in his words; his writing seems the natural echo of his playing. He writes about music much as I imagine he performs it comfortably, flexibly and gracefully. It is astonishing to find a book on education that is actually readable, but Holt's carefully-composed autobiography is music to the eye and ear. And to the mind.

Although he argues it is too late to reform the defects of "compulsory" education, Holt offers some exciting alternatives. His personal music lessons successfully stimulate us to explore our own creative imaginations and energies. A jazz-loving classical musician with one foot in the past, Holt is light years ahead of his time as an educational reformer. "Never Too Late" is a delightfully subversive book. Lachtman is a writer, musician and contributing editor to Contemporary Quarterly.

Most musical autobiographies have less to do with the intricacies of music (which the reading public presumably wouldn't understand anyhow) than with the convoluted private lives of concert hall stars, impresarios, self-destructive rock stars and legendary virtuosi. A more unusual example of a musical life story is one which John Holt has orchestrated for us in "Never Too Late." Holt is a refreshingly literate and innovative professional educator who has a standing quarrel with the way most of us are "educated." He is also an enthusias- Reviewed by Howard Lachtman tic amateur cellist whose desire to teach us exactly how and what he learned from his music is coupled with an earnest wish to reassure us we learn best when we learn how to become our own teachers. "If I could learn to play the cello well, as I thought 1 could," he explains, "I could show by my own example that we all have greater powers than we think; that whatever we want to learn or learn to do, we probably can learn; that our lives and our possibilities are not determined and fixed by what happened to us when we were little, or by what experts say we can or cannot do." Holt's brand of optimistic self-reliance may seem a trifle out of date in this age of global pessimism and individual self-doubt, but his "journey of exploration into music" offers eloquent personal evidence that the writer personally benefited from just such a philosophy. Peru under Inca 'socialism' and Spanish sadism Dorothy Eden Her most romantic novel ever. The Storrington Letter to a King by Huaman Poma (Dutton: $10) The classic story of Inca life before and during Spanish rule has for several hundred years been the account of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega.

Now comes the translation, by English novelist Christopher Dilke, of this "Peruvian Chief's Account of Life Under the Incas and Under Spanish Rule." A manuscript composed some- papers By thi' host-sellinj; author of The Sa.imjnra Drum and Thv Millionaire's Daughter Lon-hidden diaries yield up atrocities that the Spanish made part of the daily round of a conquered Indian people become all the more horribly intense. Having traveled across Peru for more than 30 years, Huaman Poma, linked by blood and service to both the Inca and Spanish ruling groups, gathered evidence he hoped to deliver to the Spanish monarch on behalf of his downtrodden and humiliated people. He emerges in these pages, boldly accompanied by reproductions of his original drawings, as a sharp-tongued as well as a sharp-eyed polemicist who castigates the corrupt and repulsive practices of the priests and governors of the region. Dilke spent five years translating this document and then edited it with the shaping powers of a novelist. Anyone with more than a casual interest in the period will want this volume.

Cheuse is a frequent contrilmtor to several national publications. an lent tamily se ret and the lite ol a modem youn woman is hailed forever. "Delectable escapism. the best elements of "if Reviewed by Alan Cheuse where between 1567 and 1615 by a member of the Peruvian chicftan class with a Christian education, it permits interested nonscholars at last to gain access to the single most important document relating to the conquest of Peru. The rigors of life under Inca "socialism" are quite well known, but they become more vivid that ever before in Huaman Poma's sympathetic narrative, while romance fuse here with dramatic effect.

-Publishers Weekly al all liookstoies 77- I I Who" Coward, McCann Geoghegan.