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TEXAS BIG RICH By Sandy Sheehy Morrow, $22.95 Nonfiction
For months the date had been set aside in Houston's Black Book, the leather- bound calendar that regulates the ebb and flow of social life among the / city's haut monde. On the evening of Friday, January 22, 1988, the only place to be was at the opening night of John and Nellie Connally's four-day bankruptcy auction. By six-thirty BMWs, Rolls-Royces, and Chevy Suburbans packed the parking lot surrounding Hart Galleries, a thirty-thousand-square-foot erstwhile supermarket a few blocks from the mansions of River Oaks. In a line that wrapped around the building, men in custom-made alligator cowboy boots and women clutching Judith Leiber handbags to their Blackglama mink coats waited to fork over the fifteen-dollar admission fee. As hot tickets go, it was the bargain of the season.
THE BODY AND ITS DANGERS By Allen Barnett St. Martin's, $15.95 Fiction
There is something I do not like about old photographs-snapshots, I should say-the kind that one's grandmother keeps in a box on a closet shelf, or in old albums that crack as the black pages are turned, spilling more photos than are held in place. I don't like the way people in these photographs speak in a tense that is theirs alone, or their unquestioning faith in the present tense. Now, the smiling person seems to say, Should I sit on the couch or the coffee table? Should I hold the baby? Should I hold my knee? Yes! Now!-this is me at my best. I do not like the way these old pictures fail the trust that is placed in them. I do not like how easily we are betrayed, or how easily we betray ourselves.
THE END OF THE LINE The Failure of Communism in the Soviet Union and China By Christopher S. Wren Simon & Schuster, $22.95 Nonfiction
Our ferry boat had navigated the choppy currents of the Yellow River in a ne rain. My companion, Tony Walker, an Australian journalist, and I were traveling north through the back country of central China, and on the left bank of the old river port of Wuhu we looked for a train that could take us to Hefei, the capital of Anhui province. We had to cajole our tickets from a reluctant clerk at the station window. Foreigners were supposed to ride in the upholstered luxury of what the Chinese call soft class, and the next train out offered only the wooden benches of hard-class carriages, the lot of ordinary Chinese.
RIDING IN CARS WITH BOYS By Beverly Donofrio Morrow, $16.95 Fiction
Trouble began in 1963. I'm not blaming it on President Kennedy's assassination ; or its being the beginning of the sixties or the Vietnam War or the Beatles or the make-out parties in the fall-out shelter all over my hometown of Wallingford, Connecticut, or my standing in line with the entire population of Dag Hammarskjold Junior High School and screaming when a plane flew overhead because we thought it was the Russians. These were not easy times, it's true. But it's too convenient to pin the trouble that would set me on the path of most resistance on the times.
