LOS ANGELES TIMES 1985 BOOK PRIZE NOMINEES : <i> The sixth annual Los Angeles Times Book Prize program takes place this year on Nov. 1. Today we publish excerpts from the five books nominated for the biography prize.</i>

RICHARD P. FEYNMAN,

Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Norton: $16.95).

Overwhelmed by a flurry of job offers after working on the atom bomb during World War II--including a position at the Institute for Advanced Study (“Better than Einstein, even! It was ideal; it was perfect; it was absurd!”)--Richard Feynman began to worry about whether he could live up to his colleagues’ expectations:

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the “Arabian Nights” for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate--two to one. It came out of a complicated equation! Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one? . . . .”

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there’s the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was “playing”--working, really--with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems: all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business (for which) I got the Nobel Prize came from piddling around with the wobbling plate.

SUSAN CHEEVER,

Home Before Dark (Houghton Mifflin: $15.95).

Having first profiled her father in a 1977 cover story for Newsweek, Susan Cheever creates a more intimate portrait in this biography, drawing upon letters, unpublished journals and her own loving memories for a look at John Cheever’s strength of vision, as well as his uncertainties as a writer:

Once, when I was about 14, as we were coming back across the Tappan Zee Bridge . . . I noticed that the car seemed to be stalling. As we approached the curving superstructure at the center of the bridge, the stalling seemed to get worse. I looked over at my father and saw that his foot was shaking against the accelerator. He was very pale.

“Talk to me,” he said.

“About what?” I noticed that his hands were trembling too. The car bucked along, edging toward the guardrail at the side of the bridge.

“It doesn’t matter, just talk.”

“Well, I’m reading a novel that I like a lot,” I said. We had passed under the superstructure by now and were on our way down the other side. The car veered back into the center of traffic and out again toward the guardrail.

“Go on,” my father said.

“It’s about a love affair. When he loves her she doesn’t love him and when she loves him he doesn’t love her. He writes her a lot of letters . . . .” We had reached the tollbooth at the end of the bridge. My father’s breathing relaxed and the car moved smoothly up the exit ramp. We stopped at the light and turned north up Route 9 toward home.

Years after that, my father wrote a story about his fear called “The Angel of the Bridge.” “I felt that my terror of bridges was an expression of my clumsily concealed horror of what is becoming of the world,” he wrote in the story. He was troubled by the unhappiness of his friends, appalled at the rows of new houses going up where meadows and trees had been, disgusted by the substitution of freeways for country roads and fast-food burgers for home cooking.

That was what he called “the dark side.” But his worst depressions were often lightened by his vision of what life could be. “It all came back--blue sky courage, the high spirits of lustiness, an ecstatic sereneness,” he wrote in the story, describing the way he felt after a harp-playing hitchhiker dispelled his fear by singing as they drove across the bridge. “I offered to take her wherever she wanted to go, but she shook her head and walked away, and I drove on . . . through a world that, having been restored to me, seemed marvelous and fair.”

PRIMO LEVI,

The Periodic Table (Schocken: $16.95).

Through vignettes from his life and brief fictions, Primo Levi, who was sentenced to Auschwitz after fighting with the Partisans in Italy, recounts how the war challenged his passionate enthusiasm for chemistry, his struggle as a member of the Italian resistance and his identity as a Jew:

In January of 1941 the fate of Europe and the world seemed to be sealed. Only the deluded could still think that Germany would not win; the stolid English “had not noticed that they had lost the game,” and obstinately resisted under the bombings; but they were alone and suffered bloody losses on all fronts. Only a voluntarily deaf and blind man could have any doubts about the fate reserved for the Jews in a German Europe. . . .

And yet, if we wanted to live, if we wished in some way to take advantage of the youth coursing through our veins, there was indeed no other resource than self-imposed blindness; like the English, “we did not notice,” we pushed all dangers into the limbo of things not perceived or immediately forgotten. . . .

Neither in us nor, more generally, in our generation, whether Aryan or Jew, had the idea yet gained ground that one must and could resist fascism. Our resistance at the time was passive and was limited to rejection, isolation, and avoiding contamination. . . . We had to begin from scratch, “invent” our anti-fascism, create it from the germ, from the roots, from our roots. We looked around us and traveled up roads that led not very far away. The Bible, Croce, geometry, and physics seemed to us sources of certainty. . . .

Chemistry, for me, had stopped being such a source. It led to the heart of Matter, and Matter was our ally precisely because the Spirit, dear to fascism, was our enemy; but, having reached the fourth year of Pure Chemistry, I could no longer ignore the fact that chemistry itself, or at least that which we were being administered, did not answer my questions. To prepare phenyl bromide or methyl violet according to Gattermann was amusing, even exhilarating, but not very much different from following Artusi’s recipes. Why in that particular way and not in another?

After having been force-fed in liceo the truths revealed by fascist doctrine, all revealed, unproven truths either bored me stiff or aroused my suspicion. Did chemistry theorems exist? No: Therefore you had to go further, not be satisfied with the quia, go back to the origins, to mathematics and physics. . . . At the origin of physics lay the strenuous clarity of the West--Archimedes and Euclid. I would become a physicist, ruat coelum: perhaps without a degree, since Hitler and Mussolini forbade it.

MICHAEL MOTT,

The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95).

Below, Michael Mott looks at Gethsemani, Thomas Merton’s sanctuary for 27 years, exploring why the gregarious writer, poet, professor, linguist, environmentalist, civil rights activist, monk and ecumenist would end his “roaming and looking” with “A burst of sun through the window. Wind in the pines. Fire in the grate. Silence over the whole valley.”

In 1941, the goal of all his wandering was certainly fixed. In the 12th Century, Hugh of St. Victor had declared that the aim of all human activity was to be the recovery of Eden, and it was the very nature of Eden to be unchangeable. It was Merton’s very nature both to seek changes and to desire the unchangeable. . . .

Much has been written on the subject of Merton’s own changes, his later ambivalent feelings toward the only family and the only home he knew for half his lifetime . . . .

In “The Sign of Jonas,” Merton recorded the physical changes that had taken place in his first 10 years when he made his fire watch on July 4, 1952. Today it is difficult to retrace his steps that night. New buildings have been added to the great fortress of God on the Kentucky hill. The silver spire and the water tower are gone, with much else. Where the old buildings remain, the interiors have been gutted and altered, some several times, within the facade.

It is far more important, and much more difficult, to record the enormous changes within a continuity that took place in the life inside those walls of new and old brick over the years. There is a certain irony in wondering what the Thomas Merton of 1941 would make of Gethsemani today.

MICHAEL SCAMMELL,

Solzhenitsyn: A Biography (Norton: $24.95).

In a 1978 speech at Harvard (“A World Split Apart”), the Nobel-Prize-winning author delivered a message that confirmed his reputation as independent and bellicose, imperious and brilliant. Harshly criticizing human-rights abuses in the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn, Scammel writes, insisted that “for the East to become like the West would be for it to lose more than it gained”:

Whatever his difficulties with the Political Establishment, Solzhenitsyn had succeeded in getting his message across to the American people as never before. He would have much preferred, of course, to be speaking to his own people, and it was poorly understood for a while that his words had indeed been directed as much to them as to his listeners in America. But he had done his best, as he saw it, for both, and was able to retire in triumph to Vermont to savor the impact of his words. . . .

In Solzhenitsyn’s view, communism was not something particularly Russian, nor was it external to the West: It was inherent in the civilization common to both Russia and the West. . . . The forces that had brought communism to power there were the same ones that had racked Europe in the 19th Century and that were still at work all over the world. If the West did not heed the warnings of Solzhenitsyn and others, it, too, would be devoured by this anti-life and change its very nature. The decision as to whether this would happen or not lay in the West’s own hands. . . . Whatever the individual views expressed about the speech (an enormous variety of opinion emerged in the usual flood of comment and letters to the press), one thing was undeniable: Solzhenitsyn had again fulfilled his self-chosen function of drawing attention to the subjects and ideas that preoccupied him and putting them on the public agenda. Since the day when “Ivan Denisovich” was published, that agenda had steadily widened: Stalin’s labor camps, the Soviet labor-camp system in general, Soviet history, the history of the Revolution, Russian history before the Revolution, the nature of Soviet society, and now the nature of Western society and the conflict (and also the similarities) between the two.

He may have been overreaching himself, his voice may have been growing shriller and less convincing as he tried to extend his range further, but the sheer nerve, the sheer courage, and the sheer ambition of the man commanded attention and admiration. They had made him what he was. There was to be no changing him, and no going back. He would continue to proclaim his vision from the roof-tops come what may, and because of his fanatical dedication, the immense strength of his will, and, above all, the magnitude of his past achievements, the world would continue to listen.