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Means of Ascent The Years of Lyndon Johnson By Robert A. Caro Knopf, $24.95, Biography As the long line of limousines began to pull away from the White House in the darkness, the protesters were there, outside the gates, as they had been for weeks. Over their radios they had been listening to the latest bulletins from Selma, and they were singing ''We Shall Overcome.'' It was a song of defiance-even as a hymn sung in black churches a century earlier it had contained the line ''I do not yield''-and of demand: it had emerged from the churches into a broader sphere in October, 1945, during a strike in South Carolina by black women tobacco workers against a company that seemed too strong to be beaten; one day, after months of futile picketing, some of the women, surrendering, dropped off the picket line during a storm and went back to work; the others, to keep their courage up, began to sing in the rain, and suddenly one of them started singing the church song, adding two new lines-''We will win our rights'' and ''We will overcome.''
Nine Sides of the Diamond Baseball's Great Glove Men on the Fine Art of Defense By David Falkner Times Books, $18.95, Nonfiction
The photographs show sunlight that day. Thirty-seven years old and snowy with time, the images are as permanent in our memory as if they were recorded yesterday. The box score says that there were 52,751 actual witnesses on September 29, 1954, at the Polo Grounds for the opening game of that year's World Series between the Giants and the Indians, but the number of people who remember, freeze frame by freeze frame, what is referred to now simply as the Catch probably includes every baseball fan on earth. There are one to four frames that bind our memories. The first shows Willie Mays, his white-shirted number 24, his back to the world, running out of room at the far end of the longest outfield in baseball, his hands up, his head slightly back, a blob of white clearly in his glove. That is almost enough in itself. Who ever has made a catch like that, out where the wild things are, 450 feet from home plate?
''What Does Joan Say?'' My Seven Years as White House Astrologer to Nancy and Ronald Reagan By Joan Quigley Birch Lane Press, $17.95, Nonfiction As might be expected, I read My Turn with more hindsight and also with a greater sense of anticipation than most readers will bring to it. I was pleased to note, then, that Mrs. Reagan has confirmed the accuracy of every important point in my book, For the Record. Where we differ in our versions of events, it is often though not always a matter of interpretation. What she cannot understand is why I did it-that is, why I revealed that the president's schedule and therefore his life and the most important business of the American nation was largely under control of the first lady's astrologer. Frankly, I hesitated before putting this astounding fact into the historical record. I certainly did not ''take this information and twist it to seek revenge.'' The fact is, I wrote about astrology because it was an essential truth about the way the Reagans operated.
