“It’s tighter here than at the Gorbachev-Reagan...

“It’s tighter here than at the Gorbachev-Reagan talks,” said Caltech professor Dan Kevles, one of hundreds of authors, editors, publishers and other bookish folk jammed into a single tiny room at the Algonquin on Nov. 21. Kevles’ book, “In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity” (Knopf), was among three nominees in the nonfiction category for this year’s American Book Award.

Soon the crowd moseyed over to the New York Public Library, where champagne corks could be heard popping like a kind of ebullient punctuation to the roar of the crowd.

“Um, well, I’ve had too much to drink,” said J. Anthony Lukas, announced as nonfiction winner for his “Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families” (Knopf).

Far more taciturn was fiction winner Don DeLillo, awarded the top honor for “White Noise” (Elisabeth Sifton/Viking). Said DeLillo, simply, “This is a great honor in wonderful surroundings. Thank you.”

Bob Shacochis, named the winner for “Easy in the Islands” (Crown), took to the podium in tuxedo jacket, blue jeans, bright orange socks and aerobic shoes. Bowing to the two other finalists, Cecile Pineda (“Faces,” Viking) and Elizabeth Benedict (“Slow Dancing,” Knopf), he said, “One broke my heart, and the other took my breath away. I hope you read them.”

Each winner receives $10,000. Runners-up get $1,000.

Footnote: Four of the nine TABA nominees this year (though none of the winners) are from California. Besides Kevles and Pineda, who lives in the Bay Area, historian Walter McDougal, a Berkeley professor, was nominated for “Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age” (Basic), and novelist Ursula LeGuin, from the Napa Valley, was nominated for “Always Coming Home” (Harper & Row).

One of several Soviet deserters to the Afghan resistance, as reported in The New York Times (Nov. 1), was a Ukrainian, born Aleksandr Yuryevich Levenets, now called Ahmed by his Afghan comrades. “Our officers said we must go into a village and kill all the people and animals, sheep, horses, even dogs and cats. But I thought it was the mujahedeen who were fighting us, not elderly people and dogs and cats.”

There may have been a faint echo in Levenets’ memory of the 1933 Soviet-engineered famine in his Ukrainian homeland when, as Miron Dolot related in his recent “Execution by Hunger” (Norton), dogs and cats were indeed executed and their bodies confiscated. Dolot, a boy at the time, saw his dog shot and thrown atop a wagon load of dead pets.

Dolot’s book, published quietly by Norton, is about to go into a fourth printing and is being translated into French. Historian Robert Conquest’s more scholarly work on the Ukrainian famine will be published by Oxford University Press next spring and should keep the Ukrainian famine, and perhaps also its Afghan relevance, in the public eye.

Recognized as “persons of abiding importance whose works affirm the moral principles of Western civilization,” Eugene Ionesco, the 73-year-old playwright, and University of California social historian Robert Nisbet were named winners of the 1985 Ingersoll Prizes, presented by the foundation of the same name. Ionesco received the foundation’s T. S. Eliot Award, presented to authors, poets, critics and dramatists. Nisbet’s Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters is given each year in recognition of merit in the fields of philosophy, history, ethics or social and political science.

Each prize carries a cash award of $15,000.

At last, Bubbie and Zadie have a story of their own.

So overwhelming, so ongoing and consistent, was the response to Daniel Halevi Bloom’s fictional Grandma and Grandpa that the former University of Alaska public information officer decided to give Bubbie and Zadie “a nice Jewish folk tale” to explain their tradition of making annual Hanukkah visits to Jewish children all over the world. Like Bloom, Bubbie and Zadie live in Nome, and for the last five years, the pair have been the object of a worldwide letter-writing campaign: the Jewish counterpart of “Dear Santa.” According to the Bubbie and Zadie story line as presented in “Bubbie and Zadie Come to My House” (Donald I. Fine Inc.), the pair owns a tailor shop. Once a year, on the first night of Hanukkah, the two take off “like figures from a Chagall painting” and fly to every Jewish home in the world, sharing the joy of the holiday. Even though Bubbie and Zadie are now stars of a book, Bloom cautions, the two will continue to answer letters sent to their address in Auk Bay, Alaska.

One monitor of “The Great American Success Story,” according to George M. Gallup Jr. and Alec M. Gallup, authors, with William Proctor, of the new book for Dow Jones of the same name, is reflected in a person’s reading habits. The vast majority of successful people read far more than most people, logging an average of 19 books per year. Usually, they’re hooked on reading by age 10, and most watch comparatively little TV--about 1 1/2 hours per day. The findings are based on a survey of 1,500 achievers listed in “Who’s Who in America,” including Sally Ride, Carl Sagan, Howard Cosell, J. C. Penney president Donald Siebert and John Marks Templeton, described as “the world’s greatest living investor.” In case your name was omitted, the book offers personal success formulas and guidelines for achievement.

News from the cosmetics war zone: No sooner does Estee Lauder publish her autobiography, “Estee: A Success Story” (Random House), than along comes detractor Lee Israel, asserting that all that glitters in Lauder’s life is metallic-hued eye shadow. Writing “Estee: Beyond the Magic,” a “decidedly unauthorized” biography of the 77-year-old beauty doyenne for Macmillan, Israel all but suggests that Lauder has been living under the kind of facial mask she might prescribe for highly troubled skin. For example, Israel asserts that the chemist uncle from whom Lauder claims she got her earliest formulas was not “a very famous skin specialist in Vienna” at all, but rather was Lauder’s uncle-from-Hungary John Lotz, whose beauty preparations stood alongside the poultry lice killers, dog mange cures, paint and varnish removers, freckle removers, toothache drops, mustache wax and embalming fluids he also concocted.

Write quickly, for the deadline for the 1985 $10,000 prize for a biography of any person “significant in the culture or history of what may be called Mormon Country” is Dec. 31. The award is offered by Brigham Young University, and is not limited to Mormon authors or Mormon subjects. Mormon Country, incidentally, is defined as spanning the intermountain West from southern Canada to northern Mexico.

Diplomacy, literary style: Even as President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev were meeting in Geneva, a delegation of prominent U.S. and Soviet writers was trading ideas first at a four-day conference in Lithuania, and later in gatherings in the homes of the Soviet writers themselves. First initiated when President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked Norman Cousins to lead an ongoing program for the exchange of ideas by writers, the mission has for the last two years been organized by Malibu’s Pepperdine University.

Accompanying Cousins as this year’s U.S. literary ambassadors were Arthur Miller, Harrison Salisbury, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, William Gass, Louis Auchincloss, Jerome Lawrence, Robert E. Lee, Maya Angelou, Charles Fuller, William Gaddis and Vera Dunham.

Dick Lochte has been named winner of this year’s prestigious Nero Wolfe Award by the Nero Wolfe Society for his new novel, “Sleeping Dog” (Arbor House). Presentation was in New York on Dec. 7.