Table Money, Jimmy Breslin (Ticknor & Fields)....

Table Money, Jimmy Breslin (Ticknor & Fields). “The book is brawny and Irish, but (Jimmy) Breslin’s sensibility is so pan-ethnic, the story teeming with believable characters of every stripe, that you don’t feel that it’s an Irish or ethnic novel. It has heft and weight and a certain essential goodness” (William Hochswender).

Good-bye to the Low Profile: The Art of Creative Confrontation, Herb Schmertz with William Novak (Little, Brown). Herb Schmertz, vice president of public relations for Mobil Oil, “understands the media, and as unsettling as I find some of his judgments, I suspect that his advice on press relations could be very useful to its intended reader, the ambitious corporate executive” (David Shaw).

The Ambassador, Andre Brink (Summit). A feather-brained Parisian stripper jilts a South African diplomat, setting off a social drama and a meditation on “the human impossibility of separate development, the ideology on which South Africa has pinned its hopes of salvation” (John Sutherland).

Manhunt, Peter Maas (Random House), “is frightening because it . . . shows how endemic corruption has become in America, how some Pentagon officers sell out their oaths for money and how the defense and intelligence communities utterly fail to control profiteers unless and until someone outside the system raises hell” (David Johnston).

Milwaukee the Beautiful, Dakota James (Donald I. Fine). “An engaging, incisive satire on America’s extremes set in the not-distant future, (the book) demonstrates no small insight into the foibles of contemporary Ameri-Think, the machinations of big business and the contradictions of corrupt politics” (Jesus Trevino).