Fort Worth Star-Telegram from Fort Worth, Texas • 149

I 11 i -9 Mit Ot VP VI I 0 11 V' VVVVVV Vt ks o-00 SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 27 1 981 01981 FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM 7D ti 4 0 0 A yew that changed the design of history He may have been the most human of our presidents THE ROAD TO PEARL HARBOR: 1911 By Richard Loper A theocum Via 9 iiriell 4 it'll yi '1( 4q t' i '4 -'444wf 1:: it' t'16' 4 4: 1 tj ''4'' t'' (' i4 11 T' li l' 1 4 0- 4 I oO 4 A e32 -4 ktf 1 's- 1 Ns'' :) ::4: 7 i I I) 0' 11 4 -v4 itAl si fts 4 "Its4N 16 1 1" 4rNloo7) i'' 0 c' -ki ''1es 't (''' ticA ie oitt LETTERS FROM FATHER By Margaret Truman Arbor House MSS Stalin at Potsdam 1945 Reviewed by PAUL LaROCQUE Nearly a decade ago Merle Miller said in his biography of Harry Truman Plain Speaking that Truman "was always a person a human being" Two more recent books compilations of Truman letters and papers fortify Miller's assessment Lettersfrom Father by Truman's daughter Margaret is a homey personal glimpse of the former president Off the Record by historian Robert IL Ferrell is an official but personal look at the president through a collection of letters sent and unsent speeches memos and diary entries Truman was one of the few presidents to keep a diary Although he did not write in it faithfully every day Truman noted some of the significant periods of his presidency and some rather insignificant ones too "Went to the 'Great White Jail' White House had lunch a short nap then went to the executive office and worked until 6:30" Truman was a downhome president Ile left Missouri but Missouri never left him OF THE TWO BOOKS of Truman papers the Ferrell book is the more interesting particularly to those who enjoy history It provides a front-row seat at Potsdam and in Congress a place at White House functions a look over Truman's shoulder while he worked at his desk and a parlor chair in Independence Mo Margaret Truman's collection of Churchill Truman and and domestic problems he had inherited upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt He closed "I went to Potsdam with the kindliest feeling toward Russia in a year and a half they cured me of it" TRUMAN WAS NOT one to hide his feelings but in FerreIrs collection we learn that he suppressed them on occasions There are several undelivered speeches and letters in the book The president put his anger on paper and later after thinking it over did not deliver the messages He wrote tirades on Congress the press the Russians some politicians and Gen Douglas MacArthur "Mr Prima Donna Brass Hat Five Star MacArthur" whom he fired Truman was blamed for many of the ills of the time during his presi EASY TRAVEL TO OTHER PLANETS By Ted Mooney Farrar Sinus Giroux $1195 might be expected from a lesser writer Mooney's narrative ability is awesome as be slips in effortless references to ray guns an international political crisis in Antarctica a strange information sickness that attacks people who encounter more than 72 billion pieces of information yearly and schoolchildren who wear patches over their right eyes to develop their left brain capabilities THE USE OF quotations from the work of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss indicates his importance to this novel There are underlying references to Levi-Strauss' A dazzling debut a bold novel to reckon with I I Reviewed by SPENCER TUCKER The year 1941 was not the turning point of World War II that came in 1542 But 1941 was the year in which the Axis powers failed to win the war It was a year filled with incredible events: the German invasion of the Balkans and the Soviet Union the successful German assault on Crete the sinkings of the Bisnzarck and the Prince of Wales Rudolf Hess' flight to Scotland Rommel's offensive in North Africa and the British counterthrust disastrous to him and the two decisive events of the year which came at its close the battle for Moscow and the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor Richard Collier author of several acclaimed histories has used a chronological approach in reconstructing the events of 15411Ie uses eyewitness accounts an American woman who joined the Yugoslav underground a Belgian girl who helped rescue downed American airmen and get them to Spain a young SS officer involved in the Final Solution There are aLso weightier individuals: Hitler Churchill Roosevelt SS COLLIER WRITES well and his fast-paced book is difficult to put down Often ascerbic in his treatment of leaders Collier offers little in the way of major new interpretations but this is a good solid work and he makes some interesting points: British workers succumbed to "an insidious apathy" in 1941 and a million working days were lost to work stoppages by the end of the year Republican presidential candidate Wendell Wilikle's support for' lend-lease legislation "ultimately turned the tide" in favor of its sage The British military intervention in Greece which ended in debacle was largely the work of British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden The offensive unleased by Germany's Rommel in Libya was undertaken in defiance of orders Peter's amazing advanced sonar sense that has picked up Melissa's "fear of the shortness of life" A wistfulness pervades this book As Mooney shifts adroitly from character to character dolphin to human earth to moon life to death we are reminded of our human inability to relate to most others for anything but the most basic of needs We are like Melissa who on her return to New York thinks "you can never return home without thinking of what you will not do there or have not done there previously or have failed elsewhere to do" Mooney's stunning novel demands reading Easy Travel is a sometimes painful chronicle of our too-human selves but its style and skill should delight you (Sub le Green is director of public information at Texas Wesleyan College) for the usual sentiment in this story about the complicated friendship between Lymie Peters and Spud Latham Stained Glass by William Buckley Jr (Avon $295) Lots of folks admire the ubiquitous Buckley's international thrillers starring agent Blackford Oakes This one is a post-World War II opus with Oakes overseeing the restoration of Count Axel Wintergrin's church in St Anse im to spy on the politically ambitious count Co-starring more or less real people such as the late Sen Joseph McCarthy and Allen Dulles I found it all a little dull This Calder Sky by Janet Dailey Vincont Bug liosi 7-----77 igF14441- ctfNsr Vk''t'f'7 I fl While 70 per cent of Americans wanted to break Hitler an equal percentage wanted to avoid war at all costs By late 1941 both British and American outposts in the Pacific "lay naked" to Japanese attack and would not be capable of effective re- sistance until the spring of 1942 Certainly more could have been done but commanders of both nations on the spot in Asia suffered from "an abiding contempt for the Japanese" All over the Far East it would be not only a case of too little too late but also of incredibly inept planning and poor utilization of available supplies BY THE END of 1941 however the Allies had reason for hope Hitler had lost the war in the Soviet Union by shifting his objectives too many times and failing to take Moscow: With temperatures as low as minus 48 degrees Farenheit and the German army still in summer uniforms there would be no victory over the Soviet Union in 1941 Hitler in fact had enjoyed his last victory on the cheap The German army geared for the Blitzkrieg now was forced into the long drawn-out war for which it was not prepared And Japan pushed into a decision by American economic pressure had opted for war rather than lose face in a withdrawal from China The strike at Pearl Harbor on Dec? I was devastating and destroyed much of the Pacific fleet but it also united Americans behind the war as nothing else could With the Soviet Union surviving to develop its strength and the United States now in the conflict with all its economic might committed the war was lost for the Axis powers (Spencer Tucker is associate professor of history at TM specializing in modern Euro- peso history) (c) Thomas Vidor Ted Mooney (Pocket Books $595) Independent but poor Maggie O'Rourke not quite 16 and hardly kissed meets rich Chase Calder down at the old swimming hole He snatches her clothes then joins her and the book steams over with the kind of prose that should be purple-rated The sort of contemporary lovewestern that you cast in your mind with TVtars not movie stars it's that kind of daydream but mostly in Montana not Dallas for a change Literary quiz This is a peace offering to those who protest the recent difficultness of some of these games It's not a matter of matching books with authors but authors with authors first names with last names all being well-established contemporary Americans First names first: 1 Barbara 2 Walter a Mary 4 Tom 5 Eudora 6 William 7 Shirley 8 John 9 Joan 10 Larry The surnames: a Manchester Didion McCarthy McMurtry Wolfe Tuchman Irving Hazzard I Lord Welty You really should have as many as eight correct answers to believe you've passed this one The answers: 1-f 2-1 3-c 4-e 5-k 6-a 17-h 8-g 9-b 10-d I 441r' VJIII '')IA eaj i i 11 'A Sitl 41 1 1 1 -113 1111-1' 2' kir: '7V P'r 7 2: kiN :04 'Ad I 'X444 4 14 14 4 v4 i 4 1 111PM41Mde OFF THE RECORD Edited by Robert Ferrell harper Row $15 family Ictters is a more personal por trait of her father It is like scanning the the family album warm and enjoyable but not very interesting Ferrell who teaches at Indiana University did extensive research at the Truman Library Ile injects just enough comment in between sets of papers to point out the significance of the material leaving Truman's writing to carry the weight of the book and delight the reader Both books present the presidency in an era that only those over age 40 may recall when security was minimal and the White House was still a house and not a government institution Truman said it was haunted They show us a president who slipped away from his "prison" on occasion in attempts to return to being just one of the plain folks Margaret Truman's collection of letters touch Truman's public life lightly They are for the most part family letters on Margaret's singing career and about relatives One exception was a letter to Margaret from her father on March 3 1948 It was a lengthy piece of writing in which the president related the weight of world three-month experiment she finds herself in a changing relationship with Peter In a wonderfully sensual albeit a bizarre description Melissa and Peter become lovers shortly before her return to New York for a brief visit In New York Melissa finds her relationship with her former lover Jeffrey strained by her absence and by the presence of other women (and the recent results of her work with Peter) As Melissa and Jeffrey attempt to regain a comfortable relationship they reach out to friends and family for understanding but new problems convolute the old Mooney's finely drawn characters seemingly are unable to cross barriers defined by their egos Easy Travel employs frequent references to an everyday technology that far surpasses our own but we are spared the self-conscious gimmickry of pseudo-scientific jargon that Paperback By RICHARD FULLER Special to the Star-Telegram To paraphrase Tennessee Williams I have always counted on the kindness of strange humor To witless: "And all the while he held her mouth captive first harshly ravaging like a barbarian conqueror" "Standing there like a jungle animal muscles rippling under darkly tanned skinn he made her breath come shortly" "She felt the stabbing of his tongue and the roughness of his beard" A remake of The Sheik? Aeoupleof gorillas getting it on? Nah It's Love is the best SHADOW OF CAIN By Vincent Bugliosi and Ken Hurwitz Notion $1295 THE LAST AMBASSADOR By Bernard Kalb and Marvin Kalb Little Brown $1310 sume he is no longer privy to all the inside information that made his "real life" books so electrifying NO MATTER He and Hurwitz offer terror of another kind Shadow of Cain is the story of Ray 'mond Lomak a convicted mass-murderer who connives his way past a dency Only in later years did we learn how much he had accomplished in a strife-torn world that was emerging from the worst war in history He did it with wit sarcasm toughness compassion and patriotism An incident Ferrell reports in the book's introduction is typicalTruman Truman rode to the inauguration in 1953 with Gen Dwight Eisenhower On the way Ike told Truman that Secretary of the Army Kenneth Roy-all had tried to order him home for the 1948 inaugural but he refused because half the people cheering Truman at that time had told Ike they were for him (Ike) Truman snapped "Ike I didn't ask you to come or you'd been here" (Paul Laltoeque is editor of the Star-Telegram editorial page) work in totemism defined as man's classification of nature in relationship to himself This was diametrically opposed to earlier beliefs of the religious and utilitarian elements surrounding totemism before Levi-Strauss' work in the 1960s Throughout Easy TravelMelissats experiments with the dolphin are focused on teaching Peter to use human speech The dolphin's own extraordinary powers are barely recognized by the scientists Melissa spends hours each day teaching Peter (who can think "simultaneously of 2119017 names for the taste of to make words for ridiculously everyday objects Peter senses the human need to name objects monuments experiences but this was surpassed genera- tions before by dolphins whose limitless memory "grows more elaborate and agile with each generation" It is to endure and prevail Will love conquer all? It takes almost three generations from Kassandra and her children Ariana and Gerhard to Artana's son Noel And it's about as believable as a papier-mache castle I suppose these fantasies by Rogers and Steel are no sillier than Louis L'Amour's western daydreams But they are funnier especially when I think of my male acquaintances Shoot! Not a decent jungle animal among the litter The Folded Leaf by William Maxwell (A Nonpareil Book $795) is a reissue of a classic novel about adolescence in a classic paperback edition beautifully printed and bound by David Godine Publisher Don't look they witnessed during the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese in April 1975 and their book uses fictional characters to show how the entire humiliating affair occurred The hero is the American ambassador to South Vietnam Hadden Walker a career diplomat placed in a no-win situation by a devious president and a wily secretary of state both willing to sacrifice a country and its people to retain their own political prestige at home Walker does his best to deal with a situation that only can continue to deteriorate In the end he fails entirely as history told us he must It's hard to care Bugliosi writes about the types of situations In which he has participated bringing an intimacy that is difficult for the Kalbs observers not participants to achieve (Jell Guinn is a Fort Weals writer and re viewer) shelf: There's gold and pulp in such jungles 1 Play by Rosemary Rogers (Avon $195) 378 mirthful pages about how innocent Sara has her mouth et at taken captive by a barbarian conqueror named Marco he of the rippling muscles and the etcetera The gimmick is that Sara's sister Delight (honest I'm not making this up) wants to run off and marry Carlo so Sara must pretend to be Delight and take her place in a movie and You don't believe any of it right? Maybe you'd prefer The Ring by Danielle Steel (Dell 8350) which is not as amusing as Steel's Palomino but is right up there with some of those goofy black-andwhite movies of the 1940s les a sort of family chronicle of the von Gotthards in Nazi Germany and later in America as they try Re ieutd by SUBIE GREEN This novel certainly suggests a superior technological age but preventions and cures of human isolation have not sped along at the same rapid pace In this important first novel by Ted Mooney (a Dallas native reared in Washington DC) human frailty and fragmentation still have not been overcome People are isolated and disconnected victims of the inability of bodies and minds to reach the su periority of their inventions Easy Travel to Other Planets asks the most basic of human questions: Why are we here and what binds us together? Mooney restructures the questions through a vivid collection of disparate characters but in each case the questions lead "to thoughts they do not know how to finish" Mooney has taken a glittering array of interests marine biology philosophy stock car racing sky diving reggae music and anthropology and spun them into an absorbing magical book It is centered around Melissa a marine biologist conducting communication experiments with a dolphin named Peter attempting to teach him human speech In the flooded house which serves as her laboratory in the Virgin Islands Melissa thinks am going to die from the strangeness of this" Back home in Connecticut Melissa's mother Nona is experiencing the slow death of inoperable lung cancer When Melissa telephones Nona to ask how she feels Nona answers "It's terrifying Not the pain nor the weakness it's how I frighten people that frightens me" AS MELISSA'S initial testing with the dolphin is concluding and she must decide whether to enter a new Experience Reviewed by JEFF GUINN It's becoming a trend that those who can do also write The market is flooded with novels by authors whose reputations were made in other fields These two dual-author novels are based on the authors' experiences in their respective arenas One is a winner well-written and gripping the other is a lukewarm effort at political hindsight and there's good reason for the difference Vinbent Bugliosi has written Shadow of Cain with Ken Hurwitz also his collaborator on Till Death Us Do Part based on a case handled by Bugliosi while be was a prosecutor in the Los Angeles district attorney's office Bugliosi's first book was the famous Hater' Sketter written with Clint Gentry but since Bugliosi has entered private practice we must as teacher for fiction parole board hearirig and back onto the streets Through the current leniency of the prisonparole system it's not long before Raymond assumes some distasteful old habits and the psychiatrist assigned by the parole board to deal with him must battle red tape and a maniacal killer to see justice done With the pending parole hearings of Sirhan Sirhan and the continuing saga of Charles Manson's duels of wits with his parole board it becomes clear that the situation Bugliosi and Hurwitz portray for us one day will be enacted in real life They provide compelling evidence for a return to the old practice of locking up some hardened criminals and throwing away the key BERNARD AND MARVIN Kalb fail to be compelling The brothers diplomatic correspondents for NBC News still are affected by events AP ate A (4t i otorowi hiswAli w040 44.