There's something a little unsavory about Davis, the former First Lady's first cousin, making a book out of his memories of her youth. He clearly never knew Jackie that well, hut as a Bouvier family insider he can dissect her parents' nasty divorce (when Jackie was 9) and make a strong case that it was the formative event of her childhood.
Young Jacqueline became intensely private, hiding her shame and anger about the very public and very bitter split that relegated her to poor-relation status—especially after her mother married the spectacularly rich Hugh D. Auchincloss in 1942. Jackie lived in luxury but knew she would never inherit any of it. Davis believes that she thus resolved to marry well—as she did, twice.
What's new here is the pro-Bouvier slant. Jackie's much maligned father, "Black Jack," comes across as a devoted parent, not as the drunken wastrel of previous accounts. Even his failure to walk Jacqueline down the aisle at her wedding to John Kennedy is recast, with the blame assigned to Janet Auchincloss, a mother who never stopped hating her famous daughter's father. (Wiley, $24.95)
by Joyce Carol Oates
In this slight (86-page) novel, Oates returns to an old haunt (Upstate New York), some well-worn themes (the clash of dreams against reality, sexuality as suffering) and her standard MO (going inside the mind of her protagonist). Eleven-year-old Josie and her mother have moved to the country town of Ransomville to live with great-aunt Esther and cousin Jared Jr., a hermitlike seminary student who moves through the huge old house like a wraith. It is a place of bad blood and dark family secrets, as Josie learns on the sticky summer day she encounters Jared at the river marsh and their passion begins. But theirs is a twisted love—involving gagging, bondage and mutilation—and as Jared's demands grow more feverish, Josie comes to a crossroads. Moody and vivid, if not gripping, First Love is a little gothic romance with a bittersweet aftertaste. "You would not call it love," Josie tells herself as spring comes. "You would have another name for it." (Ecco, $18)
by Peter Blauner
Jacob Schiff has it all: a brilliant law career, a lovely wife, a teenage son who sports only one nose ring, and an elegant Manhattan townhouse. But a chance meeting with a disturbed homeless man, John Gates, puts the whole yuppie shebang in jeopardy. As Jacob struggles to deal with Gates, who has taken to stalking, he is sucked into a vortex of danger and complicity. Author Blauner {Slow Motion Riot) focuses a chilling eye on the emotional nuances of the husband-father saving-his-family theme. He also raises larger questions about contemporary urban life and random violence. The realization that the story could happen to any city dweller will keep The Intruder pulsing in readers' minds long after the book is safely back on the shelf. (Simon & Schuster $23)
by Elizabeth Berg
The strength and precision of novelist Elizabeth Berg's prose tugs readers into The Pull of the Moon. She writes vividly about the inner life of Nan, her main subject, who has left her family and her home near Boston to travel across country and to come to grips with turning 50. But our interest wanes as it becomes clear that Nan is fundamentally uninteresting.
She's a whiner, always railing about a husband too absorbed in his work to talk about his emotions, and her ideas are a catchall of pop-feminist clichés: Girls are cheated in the classroom by boy-centric teachers; by the-time the girls reach their teens, they've been dissuaded from adventurous careers; as young women they're helpless prey for sexually predatory men.
Most frustrating of all is Nan's inability to improve her lot. Mourning her "change of life" and the loss of attention from men, Nan loathes her waist-high cotton panties as symbols of her reduced sexual status. So why doesn't she throw them out and buy some bikini-cut briefs? Berg shows considerable writing talent but in Moon, common sense—the sort that women of a certain age often have in abundance—is at low ebb. (Random House, $21)
by Martha Grimes
Emma Graham, the child narrator of this fine, melancholy suspense novel, would find To Kill a Mockingbird 's plucky Scout a kindred spirit. Both are small-town girls—both from single-parent families—who poke their noses into a mysterious local murder and learn some life lessons that leave them sadder and wiser. The neglected daughter of a fading resort hotel cook, Emma craves something her mother's pancakes, fried chicken and mashed potatoes can't provide. In the summer of her 12th year, she becomes obsessed with the drowning of another 12-year-old in nearby Spirit Lake 40 years earlier. Prying the past out of the town's old-timers and piecing it together with local gossip and history, Emma unravels the mystery—as well as the recent murder of a 40-year-old woman. Like rural life, Paradise moves slowly, sometimes too slowly, and the narrative suffers occasional lapses. What 12-year-old describes dusk as "that period of lavender light that signals approaching darkness"? But Grimes perfectly captures the world of a lonely and gifted child. (Knopf, $24.)
by Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman
In the past few years, Star Trek memoirs have been proliferating as fast as the show's infamous furry tribbles. But the latest, by former Desilu Studios production vice president Solow and producer Just-man, purports to go where no Trek book has gone before: into the boardrooms and executive offices from which the USS Enterprise was first launched.
Unfortunately it's a trip that proves only moderately interesting. Solow's account of how Desilu owner Lucille Ball badgered him for updates on "that South Seas series" (she assumed that a show called Star Trek would be about a USO celebrity tour to somewhere) is funny. And the book's portrait of Trek creator Gene Roddenberry as a philandering megalomaniac who steals ideas and cheats at pool is unflatteringly intriguing. But most of the anecdotes have been told before—and more colorfully—by the show's actors turned authors, including William Shatner, George Takei and Nichelle Nichols. While compulsive Trekkers will no doubt pick up the tome just to keep their archives complete, the casual fan should warp right by. (Pocket, $30)
by Glenn Meade
If a book-cover swastika tells readers to expect a World War II adventure, the red star of the former Soviet Union now signals a Cold War tale, in this case a taut one. Former journalist Meade examines a bloody niche of postwar Soviet history. By late 1952, Joseph Stalin has already sent 20 million of his countrymen to the Siberian gulags and was spouting off about a "final solution" to Russia's "Jewish problem." Then, gripped by what his doctors fear is a dangerous dementia, Stalin plots to use the hydrogen bomb against the U.S. When Washington learns of the development, the CIA hatches an audacious plan that has almost no chance of success. Still, President Eisenhower approves the scheme for CIA assassin Alex Slanski, code name Snow Wolf, to kill Stalin. But even before Slanski and Anna Khorev, a Gulag escapee posing as his wife, parachute into the Eastern bloc, things go horribly wrong. The KGB learns of the plot—and the CIA knows the cover is blown. In a twisting tale that leads from the Finnish border to Stalin's dacha near Moscow, Alex and Anna become the hunted as well as the hunters. Rich in period detail, crisply plotted and paced, Wolf runs well ahead of the pack. (St. Martin's, $24.95)
by John Morgan Wilson
Beach Book of the Week
GAY JOURNALIST BENJAMIN JUSTICE WAS stripped of his Pulitzer after the couple he movingly depicted in a series on AIDS proved to be fictitious. Now, six years later, as this tantalizing whodunit opens, his old editor offers what may be his only shot at redemption—helping a promising cub reporter probe the apparently random murder of a wealthy Los Angeles family's son outside a gay bar.
But this could be a tougher assignment than Justice wants—and not because of a shortage of suspects (including the club's behemoth bouncer, a former NFL player with a nasty past; a closeted lesbian tennis pro; and a charismatic senator's son). The real problems lurk in the murkier corners of Justice's own past—and the painful I question of whether the I sensitive reporter is finally ready to confront them.
As its subject matter suggests, this moody first mystery from Wilson, a West Hollywood freelance journalist, isn't your typical day at the beach. But with its vivid dissection of Los Angeles low life and intriguing characters, you may find it tough to put down, even as the surf beckons. (Doubleday, $21)
>Jeff Shaara
THE SON ALSO SHINES
JEFF SHAARA'S FATHER, MICHAEL, wrote the great American novel about the great American battle (Gettysburg); The Killer Angels won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975. So it was no casual undertaking for Jeff, 44, a rare-coin dealer without a literary resume, to write a prequel to his father's Civil War masterpiece.
The gamble paid off. Shaara's Gods and Generals, an epic novel that probes the hearts and minds of four great military leaders up to the time of Gettysburg, has been on the bestseller list for seven weeks, and his publisher has already signed him up to write a sequel to The Killer Angels.
Shaara, who lives in Missoula, Mont., with his wife, Lynne, says he wrote Gods and Generals because he wanted to add to the legacy of his father, who died from heart disease in 1988. "Before I committed to the project, I talked with my sister Lila about worst-case scenarios," says Shaara. "She said if it was good, every reviewer under the sun would compare it to my father's book, and if it was bad, well, enough said."
Despite the pressure, "the story just poured out, as if it were being told through me," says Shaara. "It felt like the characters and my father were helping me write the novel." Two years of extensive research—walking battlefields and camping out in libraries reading Civil War-era journals and biographies—also helped.
Shaara says the book has changed his life. "The Civil War has become a mission for me," he says. "Once I started the first book, I felt my father had handed me the torch." Shaara is keeping it well lit.
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