Books, Arts & Manners: Random Notes

September Titles: Kurt Vonnegut is back, with Jailbird (Delacorte, $9.95), a political satire. Protagonist Walter Starbuck is a low-life bungler who happens to meet a shopping-bag lady. The lady, it turns out, is the world’s most powerful financier, and Starbuck’s college lover. It’s wild, and funny, but the reader will search in vain for a vision of the proper order of things. . . . Philip Roth is also back, with The Ghost Writer (Farrar, $8.95). It is the short, elegant story of Nathan Zuckerman, a beginning novelist. The New Yorker has serialized. … In a different style of fiction, M. M. Kaye offers another historical saga. Shadow of the Moon (St. Martin’s, $12.95) takes place in exotic India. . . . Alistair Horne, the British chronicler of French history, will publish Napoleon: Master of Europe, 1805-1807 (Morrow, $17.95). Horne writes that the exploits of the little dictator make for “rattling good history.” . . . The Rasputins of American history are extolled in The Shadow Presidents: The Secret History of the Chief Executives and Their Top Aides (Times Books, $12.50) by Michael Medved. Did you know that Joseph Stanley Brown, a 22-year-old secretary, actually ran the U.S. Government for ten weeks in 1881? Did you know that he is still running it?. . . Eager for another adventure after his train ride through Europe and Asia, Paul Theroux decided to travel down the Americas, from Boston to Argentina. The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas (Houghton Mifflin, $11.95) records the trip, by Theroux’ account a tedious, depressing journey. … In The Long Road North (Doubleday, $7.95), Texas reporter John Davidson reverses Theroux’ path to accompany two Mexican brothers on illegal border crossings into the United States. . . . Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (McGraw-Hill, $12.50), by Kermit Roosevelt, describes how the U.S. restored the Shah to power the first time around, in 1953. Roosevelt, who was chief of Middle East operations for the CIA, describes the unity of American purpose and the appreciation of Winston Churchill. Times were different then.

All That Jazz: Dizzy Gillespie, the king of bop, writes of his almost fifty years in the business of making America’s most original music in To Be, or Not … to Bop: Memoirs (Doubleday, $14.95). The book is said to be better than the title.

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September Titles: Kurt Vonnegut is back, with Jailbird (Delacorte, $9.95), a political satire. Protagonist Walter Starbuck is a low-life bungler who happens to meet a shopping-bag lady. The lady, it turns out, is the world’s most powerful financier, and Starbuck’s college lover. It’s wild, and funny, but the reader will search in vain for a vision of the proper order of things. . . . Philip Roth is also back, with The Ghost Writer (Farrar, $8.95). It is the short, elegant story of Nathan Zuckerman, a beginning novelist. The New Yorker has serialized. … In a different style of fiction, M. M. Kaye offers another historical saga. Shadow of the Moon (St. Martin’s, $12.95) takes place in exotic India. . . . Alistair Horne, the British chronicler of French history, will publish Napoleon: Master of Europe, 1805-1807 (Morrow, $17.95). Horne writes that the exploits of the little dictator make for “rattling good history.” . . . The Rasputins of American history are extolled in The Shadow Presidents: The Secret History of the Chief Executives and Their Top Aides (Times Books, $12.50) by Michael Medved. Did you know that Joseph Stanley Brown, a 22-year-old secretary, actually ran the U.S. Government for ten weeks in 1881? Did you know that he is still running it?. . . Eager for another adventure after his train ride through Europe and Asia, Paul Theroux decided to travel down the Americas, from Boston to Argentina. The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas (Houghton Mifflin, $11.95) records the trip, by Theroux’ account a tedious, depressing journey. … In The Long Road North (Doubleday, $7.95), Texas reporter John Davidson reverses Theroux’ path to accompany two Mexican brothers on illegal border crossings into the United States. . . . Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (McGraw-Hill, $12.50), by Kermit Roosevelt, describes how the U.S. restored the Shah to power the first time around, in 1953. Roosevelt, who was chief of Middle East operations for the CIA, describes the unity of American purpose and the appreciation of Winston Churchill. Times were different then.

All That Jazz: Dizzy Gillespie, the king of bop, writes of his almost fifty years in the business of making America’s most original music in To Be, or Not … to Bop: Memoirs (Doubleday, $14.95). The book is said to be better than the title.