Books, Arts & Manners: Gorbachev’s Dilemma

Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, by Mikhail Gorbachev (Harper & Row, 254 pp., $19.95)

The remarkably gifted General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union comes close to spelling out his dilemma in this refreshing book. That is, he gives us all the clues, though he can’t quite bring himself to put them together. But the clues are there, all right.