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Beirut Fragments A War Memoir By Jean Said Makdisi Persea Books, $19.95 Nonfiction It is a beautiful evening. From the balcony of my at near the American University of Beirut, I watch the sun sink into the calm blue waters of the Mediterranean. The red-tiled roofs of the older buildings on campus, among the last left in this once-beautiful city, and the dark green grace of the cypress trees gradually lose their distinctive contrast as the sun rays fade away and the city lights come on. To the east, the deep purple of the distant hills above Jounieh modulate into a serene blackness, and the sparkle of village and automobile lights re ect the stars in the night sky. The clock on the tower above College Hall strikes, and the chimes die away into the quiet evening. Often I stand, as I do tonight, listening, thinking of how these same chimes have rung over the decades, when a clock was just a clock, not a bell tolling for a dying city and a dying time.
12 Days on the Road The Sex Pistols and America By Noel E. Monk and Jimmy Guterman Morrow, $19.95 Nonfiction Sid Vicious's face is smeared with blood. Not all of it is his. The Sex Pistols have hit Texas, and Texas has hit back. It's January 10, 1978. The Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas is packed, eighteen hundred strong. The air is hot and heavy as England's Sex Pistols conclude a thrash through ''Holidays in the Sun,'' the most barbed, repulsive tale of a vacation ever put to harsh music. While Sid punches his bass-guitar strings with his wrist, drummer Paul Cook, stuffed into a white T-shirt that proclaims never mind the bollocks, here's the sex pistols!, pushes his palms into the beat with the ferocity of a thug. To Cook's left, guitarist Steve Jones sprays sweat from his shaking forehead and jagged machine-gun chords from his battered, out-of-tune Les Paul. Frequently he lifts his right hand from his six-string to wipe audience spit off his face. He spits back just as often.
In the Blue Light of African Dreams By Paul Watkins . Houghton Mifflin, $18.95 Fiction Halifax flew in from the desert, a thousand feet above the sand. When he reached the coast, he turned north and followed a line of waves breaking jade and white against the beaches. His strut wires hummed with the speed. He pulled down his goggles and undid the strap of his leather ying cap, the sun jabbing at his eyes. When the town came in sight, he eased his plane down to four hundred feet and throttled back the engine. A shepherd's hut slid by underneath. Goats scattered into thorn bushes. He saw shing boats rising and falling in the swells near the harbor. Fishermen pulled in their nets and emptied onto the decks a silver- ickering mass of sh.
The Fullness of Wings The Makings of a New Daedalus By Gary Dorsey Viking, $19.95 Nonfiction Once in the woods near Peachtree Creek, not far from the Bobby Jones Golf Course and the Atlanta Memorial Arts Center, way up on Northside Drive, a little boy's war games diminished and dwindled and, nally, disappeared. The regular blitz of toy tanks, plastic soldiers, and backyard battles played behind mud forti cations gave way to more organized games after school: The Viking Club, Cub Scouts. But he lived too far away from others; he had allergies; he was too small. When other boys' war fantasies turned to hard scrapping football games in neighborhoods far away, the boy in the woods turned to airplanes. He went indoors.
