The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 224

Tm TTv In Brief Sjje Mania urnal the Atlanta constitution Sunday, October 1 6, 1 988 10M 'Peachtree Road' Is Journey Through Modern Atlanta 5 4 Mil Am, i 'ilium Going Downtown: The War Against Hanoi and Washington. Jack Broughton. Orion Books, $18.95. Jack Broughton, a former lead pilot for the Thunderbirds and a fighter-bomber pilot commander in the Vietnam War during the late 1960s, has two very good reasons to be angry, even now, about that war. First as he documents his experiences as both a vice wing commander in Takhli, Thailand, and as a decorated combat pilot over Hanoi his last war was dreadfully over-managed and mismanaged.

Second once caught in the lying that seems to have undermined the American officer corps in Southeast Asia he was drummed out of the service in a shameful manner. The retired Air Force colonel certainly had paid his dues to his country. He flew combat missions in Korea and North Vietnam, 102 of them in his second war. In the introduction to this volume, author Tom Wolfe cites Col. Broughton's earlier book, "Thud Ridge," as one of the first things that alerted him to the fighter-pilot mentality, and thus to "The Right Stuff." (The "Thud," by the way, is the F-105 Thunderchief, which Colonel Broughton flew in Vietnam.) This second book includes more descriptions of "going downtown," which was the pilots' slang for their missions to the heavily defended Hanoi area.

It is gripping reading. Colonel Broughton is a sound user of the English language; he explains at least some of the insider jargon of air warfare, and his experiences were hair-raising. But much of the book is devoted to his battle with Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. "President Johnson was serious when he said that we couldn't even hit an outhouse without his permission," Colonel Broughton writes. In his view, Mr.

Johnson took his military advice almost exclusively from Secretary of Defense Robert McNa-mara, who would not attend to his military commanders and did not believe the bombing campaign would be effective. Colonel Broughton marshals significant evidence for his side the view that bombing would have broken North Vietnam's will and ability to fight That assumes that the bombing campaign relatively unknown because it was not accessible to television would be effectively managed. Colonel Broughton argues, persuasively, that it was not. "Fighter wing commanders and their key people were on the end of a sharpened stick," he writes. "Their job was to lead and translate often conflicting directives into targets destroyed, while trying to preserve their aircraft and air crews.

But everyone who had an opportunity to reach for the stick seemed to feel an obligation to shake it, wheth- er from good intent or from a desire for personal aggrandize- ment The result was that the men on the end of the stick were constantly harassed and bothered in their pursuit of suc- cessfully completing an already extremely difficult task." Reviewed by Hank Ezell, a staff writer for The Atlanta Jour-. nal-Constitution. The Gunsllnger. Stephen King. Plume, $10.95.

"The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed." Thus begins Stephen King's epic series, "The Dark Tower." The author refers to "The Gunslinger" as "the first stanza" of the unfinished series, and he suggests that the series may approach 3,000 pages before it ends. rf id LJ It- 71. II ihif mtmmmmmm mmjmmmmmmifm' if Peachtre Road. Anne Rivers Siddons. Harper Row, $18.95.

By Bob Summer Special to The Joumal-Comtitutkm A couple of years ago, a leading critic of what is called Southern literature waslisked at a literary symposium if there was anything in the South to write about that had not already been appropriated by William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty and other noted writers of previous generations. Oh yes, he replied, pointing out that ongoing changes and accommodations in the region provide today's writers with a mother lode of possibilities. Look at what has happened in Atlanta since World War II and especially in the 1960s and '70s, the venerable critic admonished, a drama he contended surpassed Sherman's burning and the city's rebuilding. Yet, he added, Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind" remains the Atlanta novel. But that, of course, was said before the publication of Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel, which uses the backdrop of the city during the decades of the recent past as effectively as Ms.

Mitchell did the Civil War and early Reconstruction to tell a compellingly readable story about Atlantans reacting to change. "Peachtree Road," ambitious in scope and accomplished in the telling despite occasional lapses of overwrought prose, is Me Atlanta novel for our time. And if none of Ms. Siddons's major characters among her large cast are as memorable as those of Scarlett and Rhett, she comes close with Lucy, a stepchild of the Buckhead set on which the multifaceted novel is focused. On the other hand, Shepard Gibbs Bondurant III, her "sensitive" cousin and lifelong spiritual partner, retains an ambivalence that enhances his narrator's voice with a perceptive credibility.

Together they transform the detail of Atlanta's history through the past four decades with the breath of life. But if Lucy, daughter of a socially ambitious mother from South Georgia and a ne'er-do-well charmer, is once removed from and never to be a part of the Buckhead elite that remade Atlanta, Shep is fated to never escape the role he inherited. With the dowry of a wife from Griffin to give him a toehold, his father, born in Fay-etteville, had climbed rapidly to a secure position in Atlanta's business-oriented aristocracy and built a Georgian-styled great house at 2700 Peachtree Road, a symbol of success, a shrine to newly bought elegance and a mausoleum for the stillborn happiness that doomed the family's scion. Yet Shep and Lucy, who comes to live with the Atlanta Bondurants at age 5, escaped into what seems the promise of eternal happiness during their school years. Ms.

Siddons's epigraph is James Dickey's 'Looking for the Buckhead Boys," a poetic remembrance that symphonically resonates through the novel: First in the heart Of my blind spot are The Buckhead Boys. If I can find them, even one, I'm home. And if I can find him, catch him in or around Buckhead, I'll never die; it's likely my youth will walk inside me like a king. It is the memory of those golden years at Washington Seminary and North Fulton High, the lyrical epiphany pf the Pinks with their orchid corsages and the Jells with their newly Published in a limited edition in 1982, "The Gunslinger" is now a mass-released trade paperback, including the original's color illustrations by Michael Whelan. As Roland, the last gunslinger, tracks the mysterious man in black across a surreal desert landscape, Mr.

King draws the reader deeper into mystical fantasy, packed with violent action and philosophical notions. Along the way, the gunslinger encounters an oracle who exchanges prophecy for sexual favors, a boy mysteriously drawn from our modern world to serve a darkly symbolic purpose, and the slow mutants, hideous creatures aware maleness, that Ms. Siddons celebrates most rapturously. "We waltzed and tangoed and shagged and lindied," Shep remembers of the formals then. "Some of us Charlestoned, and A.L.

Kemp once drew a cheering, clapping crowd at Brookhaven with a twenty-minute exhibition of the Lambeth Walk. All over Atlanta, on those luminous Fridays in the velvet dark of winter and the tender green lace of spring, to the music that beat like a pulse buried deep in the marrow of our youth, we danced. We danced." The joy of the era of the spritely Pinks and the strutting Jells soon comes to an end, however. After graduation, Shep heads to Princeton, although his father's death draws him back to Atlanta. And even after a shocking betrayal by his mother, soon to be a victim of the disaster at the Paris airport that killed 105 other Atlantans from the Art Association, he never leaves.

But neither' does he become engaged in what is happening around him, preferring to retreat to the summer-house behind 2700 Peachtree Road and watch his friends move into power in the city nurtured by their fathers. He watches as the civil rights, DUFFY JAMES DOLANStaff claim their share of that power. He watches the unendingly love-starved Lucy play out her increasingly chaotic life, unable to reclaim her from a downward spiral of self-destruction. He sees Buckhead being swallowed up into the traffic and sprawl of a city constantly reaching toward the new. And increasingly he follows "Old Atlanta" and its rituals and burials in Oakland Cemetery.

But into this melancholy somberness Ms. Siddons skillfully weaves bright threads of humor, nuance and an exacting observation of the social mores of the times she is writing about; surely she is the Jane Austen of modern Atlanta. And although her plot is convoluted and circularly moves at times by forshadowing what is to come, she controls its movement with the storytelling assuredness of the novelist who writes for a popular audience, one that remembers what it has read after the final page has been turned. Everyone remembers Scarlett's last words: "Tomorrow is another day," she said about her future. Well, others may decide otherwise when they reach the end of "Peachtree Road," but I think it will be for Shepard Gibbs Bondurant III also.

Bob Summer is Southern correspondent for Publishers Weekly. Stephen King movement develops with increasing force, open ing the way for blacks former servants to 'MexAmerica' Explores Mexico's Influence on the U.S; who want to feed on the hero and his companion. In the last chapter, the gunslinger finally catches up with the man in black and learns that his true quest is just beginning. At the end of the quest lies the Dark Tower, "a single nexus" where all worlds meet, "a stairway, perhaps, to the Godhead it-. self." Blending some of the elements of the heroic Western novel with the nuances of post-apocalyptic fantasy, Stephen King's "The Gunslinger" is an impressive work of mythic magnitude.

The second book of the series, "The Drawing of the Three," is scheduled for paperback release in March 1989. If 'The Gun-. slinger' is any indication of what is to follow, 'The Dark Tower" series may turn out to be Stephen King's greatest literary achievement. Reviewed by Randy Chandler, former editor of "The Li'l De- mon Review." Memories of Amnesia. Lawrence Shainberg.

British American Publishing, $16.95. Isaac Drogin is in revolt against own brain. Does that make him revolting? Or does that make him Shirley. If you said no but you mean yes, you will be in tune with Lawrence Shain-' berg's new novel, "Memories of Amnesia." Appropriately, Mr. Shainberg puts a quote from "Alice in Wonderland" on the frontispiece, for this is a through-the-look-l ing-glass experience.

Drogin, the protagonist, is a neurosurgeon 1 who works daily with the pathology of brain damage in his pa-: tients. When he detects the first evidence of brain damage in himself (forgetting a patient's name and bursting into a chorus of I "Oh, Susannah!" during surgery), he is excited, believing that he has somehow chosen his illness. "By this supreme act of will-: power, I had established mastery over my brain," he exults. Drogin progresses through a variety of symptoms, which may be either imposed by his illness or chosen by his will, including paralysis, aphasia and epilepsy. He is cheered on by his wife, a nurse who studies karate and existentialism, and who really should know better.

Drogin's mother and father argue intermina- bly in his head, joined at times by his medical colleague, Eli. Drogin also indulges in circuitous monologues with himself along these lines: "Logic being the brain's own invention, how could I not take faith from indications of its absence?" Eventually, he ends up on the operating table under local anesthesia, watching in mirrors as Eli probes his living brain to find the sdurce of the malfunction. Mr. Shainberg once wrote another novel, "One on One." Then he spent 10 years researching a non-fiction book, "Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of His World." That research is apparent in his fascinating descriptions of brain function and neu- rosurgery. There is no doubt that he is very knowledgeable about how brains work.

There is some doubt as to whether Mr. Shainberg's brain was working when he wrote this novel. Perhaps you are a patient person and you will enjoy having characters' names change several times within the same para-; graph. Maybe you will not be irritated by Mr. Shainberg's pixie-; ish forays into incoherence, such as, "I don't deny that I doubted those thoughts, but once again, I took my doubts as proof of their validity." This reviewer, however, gets cranky in the face of too much whimsy, suspecting that the author is having a good laugh at her expense.

Drogin's words only reinforce that suspi-I cion: "Speaking incorrectly, that's the main tiling. Say what you don't mean, betray your thoughts, put one over on your brain. When symptoms aren't available, invent them. Have you ever heard such nonsense in your life?" Reviewed by Doris Reidy, whose essays have appeared in Redbook and other magazines. other part Neither accepts the Mexicans who journey north.

"The cultural elites of each Mexican as well as American speak grimly of a Third World in their midst encroaching upon them in their cities, a plague of human misery and desperation that neither economy can absorb, neither social service can accommodate, and neither can get rid of. Each government wrestles with a disposal problem." This, too, is at best an overstatement; it ignores their contributions to the United States and through remittances to Mexico. At other times, Mr. Langley suggests that the Mexican-American's problem is within himself. The reason that the new immigrants do not have more political influence, he writes, is because "they have not resolved a debate among themselves about who they are and what they want in America's political culture." The "inner feature" of the Mexican-American character "yearns for acceptance but resists dilution." In brief, they have been unwilling to commit themselves to returning to Mexico or staying in the United States.

This was reflected in the lowest rate of naturalization among immigrant groups. This, too, is beginning to change. An increasing proportion of Mexican immigrants are now becoming U.S. citizens. Some fear this, but nationally, the numbers are small, and there are abundant sips like intermarriages that the new ethnic groups are much like the old ones.

Moreover, as Mr. Langley correctly notes, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Mexican immigrants reflect the political diversity of the nation rather than their origins. Fears of a Quebec-like problem are unfounded. Nonetheless, Mexico raises issues of the greatest national import to the United States, and Mr. Langley's "MexAmerica" offers a splendid path for Americans to better understand that complex country and our relationship with it Robert A.

Pastor is professor of political science at Emory University and director of the Latin American Program at the Carter Centef. He is the author of "Condemned to Repetition: The United States and Nicaragua" and the coauthor of "Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico," which will be published this fall. MexAmerlca: Two Countries, One Future. Lester D. Langley.

Crown Publishers, $19.95. By Robert A. Pastor Special to The Journal-Constitution Aside from the Soviet Union for strategic reasons and perhaps Japan for economic ones, Mexico has the greatest potential impact on the United States. Its influence, however, stems less from its power than from its potential instability. As Mexico's population has expanded and its economy has contracted, its people have become restive.

Opposition to the government has grown and so has immigration to the United States. From 1970 to 1987, the number of Americans of Mexican origin in the United States increased three times from 4.2 million to nearly 12 million. This is both a source of pride and added confidence to Hispanics in the United States and a source of tension and concern to some native-born Americans the rest of the population. Lester Langley's new book, "MexAmerica," explores the relationship between Mexico and the United States by examining the interaction between the two nations and this ethnic group. This is an unconventional approach by a traditional historian.

Lester Langley, a professor at the University of Georgia, has written several important books on U.S. foreign policy and is one of the premier diplomatic historians in the country. In "MexAmerica," Mr. Langley takes a stylistic and substantive risk, but it suits his subject, and he succeeds. Instead of focusing on governments, he focuses on people; instead of connecting events, Mr.

Langley tells his story in the first person, by anecdotes and through the language of the people he meets as he travels through both countries. The point of departure for the book is Mr. Langley's first encounter with Mexicans as a young man picking cotton in the Texas Panhandle. He did not try to learn about Mexico or Mexicans then, but after years of teaching and writing about Latin America, he recognized the growing importance of both to the United States. The book is his return journey to find Mexicans in this country and to understand their origins and problems.

Mr. Langley's is not a quixotic quest, but an earthy, -picaresque jaunt He begins in the Southwest, where Mexicans are most numerous, and travels north with them to Pilsen in Chicago, where Mexican-Americans replaced Polish- and Czech-Americans. Then, he turns south to Monterrey, Guadalajara and Mexico City. Because of the proximity and easy access to their homeland, the Mexican-American experience is somewhat different from that of other immigrants. For many decades, Mexicans came to the United States to earn money, and they returned after working hard.

Increasingly, Mexicans are staying and are compelled to make decisions about who they are. The Mexican finds himself, in Mr. Langley's view, trapped between two cultures: "American culture will not have him as he is, and Mexican culture will not accommodate him no matter how hard he tries to be Mexican." Here, Mr. Langley is as ambivalent as his subject Sometimes, he berates North Americans for not respecting or accepting the Mexican immigrant or, for that matter, Mexico. "Americans do not have respect for Mexico and what it stands for as a culture, because they have never respected Mexicans who came to this country, save for their labor.

We value Mexico for where it is and not what it is." If the United States is a part of the problem, Mr. Langlqy acknowledges that Mexico is the JL 4-.