NIXON: AN OLIVER STONE FILM

NIXON: AN OLIVER STONE FILM Edited by Eric Hamburg (Hyperion, $14.95) There's a fitting compatibility at work in the idea of Oliver Stone chronicling Richard Nixon, one American chameleon studying another, a revisionist historian putting a frame on the life of a man who fought bitterly to control history's perception of him. This book contains more than just a shooting script of the film. There are also essays about the 37th President by Nixon-era principals John Dean and E. Howard Hunt, various Watergate documents, even transcripts of real Oval Office conversations (some never before released to the public), which are a study in the genesis of a grand deception. The screenplay (rife with footnotes and a bibliography) is vintage Stone: the wide canvas, the merging of reality and speculation, the flights of imagistic fancy, the big cast of characters -- a provocative assessment of an American politician steeped in Shakespearean tragedy, doomed less by those around him than by the fear that consumed him from the inside. A

-- Michael E. Ross