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Angel Falls By Paul Guernsey Simon & Schuster, $19.95 Fiction
I call myself Jimmy Angel. I have always been a Jimmy; Angel is a name I took shortly after my twenty-first birthday. I took it in an attempt to create an identity for myself out of longings and old memories. Before I was an Angel, I was a Teller, a name I borrowed from my mother's family. Some would say I borrowed it without permission. I was more than happy to give it back.
A Cloud on Sand By Gabriella De Ferrari Knopf, $19.95 Fiction
In the years before the war, when Antonia was a girl, Artemisia was one of those towns on the Italian Riviera that managed to look both very old and very new at the same time. It was a trait foreign tourists found disconcerting, and few of them stopped there on the way south from Genoa to Pisa or Florence. From the highway they could see most of what was worth seeing there. Parts of it-the broad, blue bay and the high, green hills rising out of it-must have looked very much as they had when the Romans came. Along the ridges of some of the hills were piles of ancient masonry, signifying an unimaginably distant past. Below were bands of olive and orange groves, divided here and there by tall, yellow, leaning walls, and below these stretched the town itself.
When She Was Bad The Story of Bess, Hortense, Sukhreet & Nancy By Shana Alexander Random House, $19.95 Nonfiction
This is a tale of New York City. It could have happened nowhere else but New York, the shining Apple, and at no other time but now. New York, alas, is not what it used to be. Today, in the last gray twilight of the 1980s, so much of the city is a blasted landscape of drugs and AIDS and filth and crime, a place where hospitals and schools have broken down, where homeless adults roam the streets and crumbling walls hold tens of thousands of abandoned children. Today anybody can see that the Apple is rotting. The wonder is not the decay, but that it all happened so fast.
Creative Differences By Buffy Shutt Robinson Soho Press, $18.95 Fiction
- I'm trying to decide if I should get my hair cut today at lunch. I've made an appointment at Kenneth's. One of the other secretaries suggested I go there. She goes there. I'm not crazy about how her hair looks. It's so layered I don't think any two strands are the same length. But since I made the mistake of asking her advice, I guess I'll go there if I decide to go. My hair is dark brown, very thick and hangs just below the middle of my back. Hangs is the operative word here. It has no real style, which was fine at school, but somehow it seems out of place at work. In the business world.
Men At Work The Craft of Baseball By George F. Will Macmillan, $19.95 Nonfiction
A few years ago, in the Speaker's Dining Room in the U.S. Capitol, a balding, hawk-nosed Oklahoma cattleman rose from the luncheon table and addressed his host, Tip O'Neill. The man who rose was Warren Spahn, the winningest left- hander in the history of baseball. Spahn was one of a former group of All- Stars who were in Washington to play in an old-timers' game. Spahn said: ''Mr. Speaker, baseball is a game of failure. Even the best batters fail about 65 percent of the time. The two Hall of Fame pitchers here today (Spahn, 363 wins, 245 losses; Bob Gibson, 251 wins, 174 losses) lost more games than a team plays in a full season. I just hope you fellows in Congress have more success than baseball players have.'' The fellows in Congress don't, and they know it. There are no .400 hitters in Washington.
