Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified...

Superforce: The Search for a Grand Unified Theory of Nature, Paul Davies (Simon & Schuster). While to most of us “information overload” might mean a busy news day, pity the poor scientist. With new technology, data about natural phenomena has grown at such a lightning pace that scientists cannot help fall behind in their attempts to make sense of it all. That’s why excitement has been building over a new notion that matter, space-time and force--properties heretofore thought of as unrelated--might all be part of a single “superforce.” The discovery of such a force would be an unprecedented event in physics, because, as Davies writes, “all science is essentially a search for unity.” The quest began in the 19th Century, when Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell discovered that electricity and magnetism were part of the same force, and continued into the late 1960s, when two more forces were shown to be similar. Davies picks up the quest in the 1980s. His descriptions are highly accessible because he views physics as a spiritual adventure: “The laws which enable the universe to come into being spontaneously,” he writes, “seem themselves to be a product of exceedingly ingenious design. If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modern physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us.”

A Six-Letter Word for Death; Black Widower; The Coconut Killings, Patricia Moyes (Holt, Rinehart & Winston). Moyes is among the top echelon of mystery writers and, to solve the murder and mayhem in these novels, she employs a man among the top echelon of fictional sleuths: Inspector Henry Tibbett, chief superintendent of Scotland Yard. In “A Six-Letter Word for Death,” Tibbett completes a crossword puzzle sent anonymously in the mail and finds that the answers are names of friends and relatives of people who have died under suspicious circumstances. In “Black Widower,” Tibbett investigates the death of a diplomat’s wife. Tibbett also meddles in politics in “The Coconut Killings,” looking into the brutal murder of a U.S. senator, who is killed with a machete on a British isle. The police arrest an amiable young islander, but Tibbett soon uncovers an international intrigue reaching far beyond the Caribbean.

The Car Buyer’s Art: How to Beat the Salesman at His Own Game, Darrell Parrish (Book Express, Bellflower, Calif.). As defined by Darrell Parrish, the car dealer’s art resembles leading lambs to the slaughter. Yet, as Parrish sees it, the car dealer is more mathematician and actor than crook. Consumers also can learn this “science,” Parrish believes, steering clear of duplicity through “soft intelligence” and “buyer’s commandments.”

The Haight-Ashbury: A History, Charles Perry (Vintage). This intimate portrait of an isolated time and place, sympathetic to the moment, will be welcomed by those weary of ambiguous overviews of student protest and 1960s conflict. Perry begins in 1965: Writer Ken Kesey has just hit the road in his bus (multicolored with Day-Glow paint), the urban conflict in Watts is threatening to explode in a riot, and a Time cover story heralds “The Turning Point in Vietnam.” While understanding his subjects’ “spiritual revolution,” Perry is careful to acknowledge excesses. He is critical, for instance, of one “acidhead” who spends several minutes asking for a glass of water: “I--or rather this person, this one who speaks--wants; that is, expresses a need, its cells that metabolize . . . .”

The Fourth Dimension: Guided Tour of the Higher Universes, Rudy Rucker (Houghton Mifflin). A professor of mathematics and a writer of science fiction and fact, Rudy Rucker looks upon this dimension as “a higher reality” transcending “struggle, loneliness, disease and death.” He takes us there through text, pictures and puzzles, all based on the headiest of theories in physics and mathematics.

Grandparents/Grandchildren: The Vital Connection, Arthur Kornhaber MD and Kenneth L. Woodward (Transaction). Since World War II, grandparents have played at best a peripheral role in the American family. No longer, argue Kornhaber and Woodward. They predict that grandparents will soon regain the position of respect traditionally accorded to elders. Their arguments are clearly presented, backed up by a study of hundreds of U.S. families and by the authors’ experience--Kornhaber is a social scientist and Woodward a senior writer at Newsweek.

The Brotherhood of Oil: Energy Policy and the Public Interest, Robert Engler (University of Chicago). Oil permeates every level of international politics, writes Engler, arguing that even the blockade against Cuba, American policy in Asia and the arms race in the Middle East are governed, in good part, by the flow of oil. This book, which convincingly proves its points through an in-depth study of the 1973-74 energy scare, first appeared in 1977, after the author’s critically acclaimed 1961 work, “The Politics of Oil.” Engler proposes that energy crises and environmental pollution can be avoided by instituting “economically just and ecologically sane” international regulations and by eliminating “private advisory bodies . . . nesting cozily within the public bureaucracy” in the United States.