Detroit Free Press from Detroit, Michigan • Page 45

6E DETROIT FREE PRESSSUNDAY, June 16, 1996 Detroit 4frce Vxcbz 71 i i i. i li.m READfesr ON jT' I A(), Your guide to books and new media Reviews of new books A son recreates the dad he lost RICK NEASEDetroit Free Press Easy does it Quasimodo endures, even in Disneyland Next Friday millions of American children will be introduced to one of the most famous figures in literature. Yes, I mean Quasimodo, aka "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." This is a good thing, although one fraught with problems, not the least of which is when to tell the kids that the characters in the book did not, in fact, live happily ever after. Don't laugh; this is not such a minor matter. Victor Hugo's 1831 classic is in some ways unlikely material for a Disney movie.

First of all, it's depressing as hell, ate deals everyone a bad hand, from Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy who loves unwisely, to the deformed Quasimodo, whose deafness proves a serious handicap and whose essential goodness and heroism can't, in the end, compete with Archdeacon Claude Frollo's evil. Second, aside from Quasimodo and Esmeralda, there's no one to like in this story. Third, there's the small matter of a priest in lust. And then there are the chapters and chapters, pages and pages of description of 1482 Paris and the cathedral of Notre Dame itself, which Hugo felt was a major character in his novel. IU be honest The first 300 pages of this book were work, and I wager I'm one of the few parents who, having decided to brush up on the source material this month, actually completed the assignment (And if I hadn't thought that re-reading it would be a column, I'm not sure I would have, either.) But I did and I'm glad.

Because the reason "The Hunchback" endures and the reason it's been made into several movies is the character of Quasimodo. The scenes in which he cares for Esmeralda, whom he has saved from the noose and offered sanctuary in the church, are profoundly touching. It would take a very jaded reader not to be moved when he tells Esmeralda, who tries not to flinch at his appearance, that he will watch her from where she can't see him so as not to offend her sensibilities. But Hugo was no romance writer, and though The Hunchback" was an instant success when it was published in France, he'd have a tough time on today's bestseller list Justice is not done? The good guys don 't triumph? The heroine dies? You've got to be kidding! I'm not One of the dilemmas of parenthood is how long to shield children from the awful truth: life is not fair, there are bad guys out there, the Tooth Fairy is not exactly what you imagine. With each revelation, they are a little less children, a bit more adults.

This is painful, probably more so for parents than for their offspring. If I wasn't a parent I would probably condemn Disney for changing a great book's ending. But I am a parent and it pains me to explain to a six-year-old that Victor Hugo was right Good people don't always live happily ever after. She and all the other kids who will make The Hunchback" a major summer movie will learn that soon enough. Probably long before they have the patience to read the book.

What lingers in my mind days after finishing The Hunchback" is not the gypsy camp or the mobs storming Notre Dame, but Quasimodo's essential nobility. Because of the hand fate dealt him, he was less than an ordinary man. Yet he was heroic. If our kids come away from the movie understanding that then happy ending or not maybe even Victor Hugo wouldn't complain. Linnea Lannon is the Free Press book editor.

You can reach her via Voices e-mail or write her at 321 W. Lafayette, Detroit, 48226. 'A Little Yellow Dog" By Walter Mosley WW. Norton Co. 304 pages.

$23 'My Father's Wan A Son's Journey' By Peter Richmond. Simon Schuster, 263 pages, $23 Review by James Ricci Nearly every man's basic model for manhood is his father. Fortunately, most men have their fathers long enough into life to learn at least something about their inevitable inadequacies, which definitely takes some of the pressure off the sons. For Peter Richmond the process of father-knowing came to a premature halt on Dec. 16, 1960, when the United Airlines DC-8 carrying his father Tom, a business executive and World War II Marine Corps veteran, collided with another plane and crashed in Brooklyn, N.Y.

All 134 people aboard perished. Peter Richmond was seven at the time. Thirty-three years later, he set out to know his father better by retracing his footsteps through what surely must have been the most character-defining experience of Tom Richmond's life, combat in the South Pacific. The result is an easy-reading hybrid of military history, family memoir, travelogue and investigative reporting. Peter Richmond's only memories of his father were the unassuming impressions of childhood.

He remembered Tom as a compact, physically vibrant man dutifully contained by postwar suburban life on Long Island, but ever happy to speed away in his big Chryslers for the rustic farmhouse he kept in the wooded Peter Richmond Berkshire hills of Massachusetts. "I'd sit on the front seat next to him," Richmond writes, "beneath the blast of the heater and the green-blue glow of the dashboard The rhythrn of the bouncing would lull me; his right thigh was my pillow." Early in life Richmond was vaguely aware his father had been in a war. At the farmhouse, Tom Richmond sometimes broke out ferocious-looking Japanese weapons and fired them. But the father was dead before the son was old enough to ask him about his war. As the author grew older, the attic trunkful of his father's mementos combat medals, his Marine dress uniform, a Japanese flag "stained with Rorschach blotches of blood" spoke ever more convincingly of Tom Richmond's having "taken the most essential test a man can take life, and passed it." For many years, Richmond had little interest in finding out more.

Perhaps, he speculates, he feared learning his father hadn't been quite the hero he'd assumed him to be. More likely, he admits, he was afraid that confirming details of his father's bravery amidst the savagery of the South Pacific war would make him ashamed that he'd been ready to flee to Canada rather than be drafted during the Vietnam War. It was the thought of the author's own son that finally moved him to undertake the quest Ifhe couldn't ask his father how to bea father, "at least I could enlist the help of his example, his legacy." So Richmond read up on the war, rummaged in Marine Corps archives and interviewed and corresponded with now elderly men who'd fought alongside Capt. (later Maj.) Tom Richmond on Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu. Finally he traveled to those places to "find pieces of the war as a way of finding pieces of him." What he learns about his father is everything a proud son might imagine.

Tom Richmond was fearless, cool-headed under fire, decent to and loved by the men he commanded. An interesting and touching concept lies at the center of this book. Its execution is not without flaws, however. The first third of the book, during which we learn the kind of soldier Tom Richmond was, gallops past a reader's eager eyes, little is added to that portrait of the man the rest of the way. Despite the good research and frequently sparkling prose, a curious inarticulateness straitjackets "My Father's War," and not because of any failing of the author.

Descriptions of the battlefields and the relics they contain scarcely whisper of what it must have been like to fight and die there. Even the old vets, despite their wealth of stories, struggle to convey a sense of the terror. Nonetheless, at the end of his journey, Richmond achieves a kind of oneness with his father. He concludes, as has many another writer examining the motives of warring men, that his father and the other marines were motivated to embrace their ordeal, not by some shining ideal of patriotism or love of freedom that's beyond the men of today, but by simple devotion to one another. "Fifty years later we wonder at what they did, at their selflessness, but the truth of it is that, if we had to, we'd do the same thing," he writes.

"I no longer need worry about whether I could have been him. I could have." Free Press feature writer James Ricci has known the expectations of being a son and the edgy responsibility of being a father. I I 1 Walter Mosley's fictional sleuth takes his place among the best place bets. Soon, this poor fellow also is targeted by killers. Rawlins' whole world seems to be tilting wildly out of balance.

In the midst of the chaos, Rawlins' most loyal friend, Mouse, spins off in the opposite direction toward purity of heart Readers of Mosley's other novels recall Mouse as a man so violent that mere crooks quake in his presence. In "Yellow Dog," Mouse develops an interest in literature and the church. Can Rawlins hope to set all of this right and restore harmony in his friends' households? Sure he can! The real fun is watching Rawlins' cat-like movements along the way. It's an entertaining journey partly because the novelist is every bit as clever as his main character. The writer's and the detective's voices fuse in the first-person narrative and, like Chandler and Ellroy, Mosley's wry wit holds nothing sacred.

Describing a particularly disheveled police sergeant Mosley writes: "He hadn't shaved that morning and his brown suit was rumpled. His breath was coming quicker than mine and there was dirt under his chipped nails. He had on a violet tie with a knot that even Jesus would have done over." However, Mosley never lets such flourishes get in the way of his powerfully spare prose. Deep in the novel, after Rawlins has learned the full scope of the tragedy surrounding his passionate moments with the teacher in the empty classroom, he meets another beautiful woman. This time, he succinctly concludes: "I wanted to kiss her.

"She wanted to kiss me. "But there had been too much kissing lately and none of it had come to any good." David Crumm is the Free Press' widely read religion writer. Miscellaneous Review by David Crumm Sometimes, the most dangerous weapon is not a knife, a gun or a bomb. It's the truth. Merely exposing the truth about someone's past, secret desires or crimes can be more explosive than lighting a stick of dynamite.

That's the premise of nearly all great detective stories from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Raymond Chandler and James EU-roy. Walter Mosley's fascinating twist on this genre is making his private eye, Easy Rawlins, a black man swimming upstream through the.rampant racism of America. Talk about lies! Rawlins' world is a complex fabric of deception, secret desires, hatred, favors, debts and crimes both minor and major further complicated by the fact that Rawlins must move back and forth between the private worlds of black and white Americans. What has made Rawlins so endearing through four previous novels is that his main desire is the American dream itself: simply to be left alone to enjoy life in his modest Los Angeles home. As "A Little Yellow Dog" opens in 1963, the former private eye has found a job as the head custodian of a public school.

He likes nothing more than putting in a solid day's work, heading home to dinner with his two kids and then settling back on the sofa to catch an episode of "Rawhide" or "Hazel." That's when a sexy teacher turns Rawlins' world upside down by seducing him in her empty classroom and, then, asking him to do a favor Take care of her little dog, Pharaoh. Their tryst appears to have been only a minor indiscretion, until the teacher's husband turns up dead in the school's garden. BEST Once again to save himself, his home and his job Rawlins is forced to play detective and wade neck-deep into the swamp of lies oozing all around him. True to his nickname, Rawlins bravely tries to make his problems seem easy. Certainly, his quest for truth is dangerous, he admits, but it comes down to a straightforward contest between right and wrong.

That's what street life is all about" he says. "You get thrown in the mix and see if you can get your bearings before your head's caved in." A lot of people he encounters are skeptical of his sincerity. At one point a woman with more than her share of secrets challenges his motives. "It's not your problem," she says. "You haven't done anything." "But that's what an honest man is supposed to do," Easy tells her.

"If there's something wrong, he's supposed to stand up and say, 'Look and tell what he knows. If he can't do that then his whole life falls apart it just falls apart." Rawlins knows that all too well. His boss at the school, a man Rawlins considers a friend, nearly loses his job and destroys his marriage by secretly helping an old girlfriend who has become a heroin addict A stewardess Rawlins befriends tries to protect another young woman who is smuggling drugs. For her trouble, the stewardess winds up risking either a stiff prison sentence or death at the hands of gangsters. Another of Rawlins' long-time buddies designs an electronic device for tapping into telephone lines used by bookmakers to SELLERS if II General i 2 3 1 1 Bad A I Wanna Be, Dennis Rodman (Delacorte, $22.95) Sex, money and cross-dressing in the NBA 2 2 The Dllbert Principle, Scott Adams (HarperBusiness, $20) i Business practices in America, with a satirical bent 4 4 In Contempt, Christopher Darden (ReganHarperCollins, $26) i i A prosecutor's contempt for the O.J.

trial and verdict I ill Fiction 1 1 1 The Runaway Jury, John Grlsham (Doubleday, $26.95) i 1 Jury tampering in a smoker's wrongful death case 2 4 8 Falling Up, Shel Silverstein (HarperCollins, $16.95) i i New poetry from the 20th Century's Mother Goose 3 i Crown of Sword, Robert Jordan (St. Martin's, $27.95) i Last book In the "Wheel of Time" fantasy series 4 3 a The Tenth Insight, James Redfield (Warner, $19.95) More New Age finding yourself for all those "Celestine" fans 5 2 2 How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Terry McMillan (Viking, $23.95) i Finding love in the arms of a man who's not only younger but perfect 6 6 7 Oh, The Ptacee You'll Oo, Dr. Seuss (Random House, $16) Life is gonna be great, gradsl 7 6 6 Moonlight Become You, Mary Higgins Clark (Simon Schuster, $24) Another damsel in distress this time a photographer tracking a killer 8 8 4 The Ceteetlne Prophecy, James Redfield (Warner, $19.95) Discovering fulfillment via an ancient Peruvian manuscript 9 11 I The Fourth Etate, Jeffrey Archer (HarperCollins, $26) ii Media moguls battle to control the world 10 10 8 I Sudden Prey; John Sandford (Putnam, $23.95) i i i Cop Lucas Davenport deals with revenge-minded killers Advice, How-To and Simple Abundance, Sara Ban Breathnach (Warner, $17.95) Oprah's new favorite self-help book Men Are From Mar, John Gray (Harper Collins, $23) Men and women communicate differently The Zone, Barry Sears with Bill Lawren (ReganHarperCollins, $23) Diets to enhance mental health The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Deepak Chopra (New World Library, $14) Generating wealth in its many forms 2 2 3 4 i.