Darkness Casts No Shadow; Night and Hope;...

Darkness Casts No Shadow; Night and Hope; Arnost Lustig (Northwestern University: $6.95 and $7.95). The backdrop for these stories is black--evil, betrayal and death--but in Arnost Lustig’s works, it’s the courage, dignity and bravery of characters in the foreground that one remembers. They might be “wrapped in pain, the way the darkness was wrapped in light and the stones in water,” but the two boys in “Darkness Casts No Shadow” narrowly escape a train traveling to a Holocaust death camp because of their conviction that to keep moving is everything. Lustig’s stories chronicle survival, not only suffering, during the Holocaust. They are sagas of adventure and endurance as well as parables with a timeless, humanistic message: Ultimately, any attempt to eclipse the individual will fail. Even the Nazis required that their actions be legitimized in their own eyes, writes Jonathan Brent in a new, perceptive introduction to “Night and Hope,” and so, unless the individual agrees to his own extermination, it is the totalitarian state that loses. “Night and Hope,” based on the author’s own experience as a child in the Terezin concentration camp, collects seven stories: A woman struggles to retain her dignity despite her slow death; children band together after their family units are shattered. In “Darkness Has No Shadow,” purposeful Danny and reflective Manny also have the necessary resources to endure and rebel, but the sheer evil of the townspeople who hunt the two, starving, emaciated boys at the end of the book often threatens to overshadow Lustig’s optimistic message. Lustig has tried to show that all were oppressed during World War II--”Everybody wished for wind or for the Earth to rotate in the opposite direction”--but the reader cannot help concluding that some were more victims than others.

Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon, Theodore H. White (Laurel: $4.95). When the Supreme Court hearings on the involvement of the Nixon Administration in Watergate began with the traditional “God-save-the-United-States-and-this-Honorable-Court,” the words could be taken at face value. After beginning with this confrontation between the judicial and executive branches of government, leading political historian Theodore H. White holds the dramatic tension for 436 pages. Former President Richard M. Nixon’s final moments in office are made all the more engaging, for instance, because White centers on the efforts of former Chief of Staff Alexander M. Haig Jr. to trigger “political realities which the President would be unable to ignore.” The rest of the book looks at Nixon’s rise to office, explaining how the embattled President came to view politics as a war. Nixon, White writes, failed to understand “how faith worked.”

Swallow, D. M. Thomas (Washington Square: $4.50) visits an international Olympiad dedicated not to sports but to poetic improvisation. Markov, a Soviet poet, invents Charsky, a failed Soviet writer and dissident, while Rozanov improvises about Surkov, another writer who knows when to be outrageous and when to absorb all that free food and drink offered. Despite the many layers of the book’s plot, which continually moves between fantasy and reality, these four characters make up the book’s core. While D. M. Thomas is primarily interested in their battle between speaking out and selling out, he doesn’t burden readers with weighty tracts on the artist’s struggle to balance libertarian principles with the need to be officially supported. The stories in this book are humorous, full of parody as Thomas takes on various institutions. Surkov, for instance, meets a U.S. President who suffers from a “slowness” that causes him to answer not the question he is asked, but the one before it (asked what woman he most admires, he replies “the Pope, perhaps”; asked how he visualizes God, he answers, “I guess, Margaret Thatcher”).

The Cognitive Computer: On Language, Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Roger C. Schank with Peter Childers (Addison Wesley: $12.95); Into the Heart of the Mind: An American Quest for Artificial Intelligence, Frank Rose (Vintage: $6.95). Roger Schank, one of the founders of the group studying artificial intelligence at Yale, gets right to the point in “The Cognitive Computer,” telling us why we should care about computers (“they might contribute to daily life by providing some kind of service”) and showing exactly what a computer can and can’t do. Intelligence might, for example, refer to the computer’s ability to distinguish between two possible meanings of a word in a sentence. In a few years, writes Schank, computers will be able to serve as financial and medical advisers--diagnosing our ailments, then checking to see if we have any allergies to a prescribed course of treatment--and in the more distant future, they might invent recipes or even facilitate democracy. Computers could make direct government by the people a reality, Schank believes, though he remains convinced that our representative system of government will continue: “The populace,” he writes, “is not well enough informed to decide whether we should invade a country at a particular time.” Having spent more time at Yale than in Hollywood, however, Schank doesn’t think computers can threaten humans, at least in the near future. Artificial intelligence researchers, he emphasizes, are working to help the computer communicate with humans, not to turn it into a human. “If computers gain any semblance of intelligence,” writes Schank, “it will be because we have begun to unravel some of the mysteries of human intelligence and model them on the computer.” Frank Rose, on the other hand, opens with allusions to “Frankenstein”: “What is it that makes the scientist want to play God when the consequences of error could be so dear?” While he succeeds in simplifying such theories about knowledge-gathering as phenomenology, the majority of “Into the Heart of the Mind” is crowded with anecdotes: A computer discussion club at UC Berkeley learns about knowledge and higher reasoning powers by watching “Mork and Mindy”; Berkeley engineers name their DEC Vax computer Kim No-VAX. The book is chatty and often engaging, but it tells us little of substance about the nature of artificial intelligence.