What’s Right With America, Dwight Bohmbach with...

What’s Right With America, Dwight Bohmbach with Michael Bohmbach (Bantam: $3.50). Look elsewhere if you want a carefully reasoned analysis of why political and economic trends in America are inspiring rather than worrisome. The author, a former advertising executive, has a penchant for over-generalization, and so the fact that a 557.13-pound carp was caught in the Potomac River becomes proof that Americans are explorers, while Coca-Cola’s decision not to abandon the old formula signifies the public’s leverage over big business. Still, this 1972 book, updated for the Statue of Liberty anniversary celebration, is an impassioned portrait of the ideals to which our nation aspires.

The Novel of the Future, Anais Nin (Swallow/Ohio University: $10.95). Taken at face value, this book makes a case for idealism and against realism. Modern neuroses, writes Anais Nin, can be traced to “our attempt to separate physical and metaphysical levels.” Prose writers only heighten this division by using dreams “decoratively,” refusing to give credence to subconscious human aspirations while cynically accepting the status quo through such literary devices as caricature. This 1968 book, however, is not a dated appeal for the power of reverie in itself; being able “to see reality in the imagination,” Nin believed, would help us confront the issues of the day, not remove us from them. Writers of prose, she believed, can take the first step toward a solution by walking with poets, over “the bridge from conscious to unconscious, physical reality to psychological reality.”

Iwo Jima: Legacy of Valor, Bill D. Ross (Vintage: $9.95). The battle for Iwo Jima, a tiny Pacific island preventing American planes from reaching the Japanese heartland during World War II, was one of the most dramatic military maneuvers in history, with 75,000 American troops locked in a monthlong fight with 22,000 Japanese on the island. The strength of this story, however, lies in the telling: A combat correspondent during the battle, Bill D. Ross commands a wealth of data with such authority that this 1985 book reads like a taut thriller. Yet however engaging Ross’ accounts of Adm. Chester Nimitz’s battle in the Pacific and his struggle in the States (Nimitz’s plan to take Iwo Jima was almost scrapped when Gen. Douglas MacArthur proposed a more flamboyant scheme to capture Formosa with 250,000 U.S. troops), we are never given the illusion that Iwo Jima was anything other than a brutal horror, claiming the lives of 644 U.S. soldiers during the first two days of combat.

Money Talks: The 2,500 Greatest Business Quotes From Aristotle to Iacocca, edited by Robert W. Kent (Pocket: $7.95). While the pithy expressions collected here all address a narrow concern--making a profit--few are predictable. The author, an instructor at Harvard Business School, treads considerable terrain in search of the best quotes to trade by the water cooler, from the strange--”You must automate, emigrate or evaporate” (General Electric’s James A. Baker)--to the self-important--”There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full” (Henry Kissinger)--and the wise--”There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: When he can’t afford it, and when he can” (Mark Twain).

The Straight Dope, Cecil Adams (Ballantine: $3.95). Where Abby reassures, Cecil Adams insults. “We will attempt to ignore your first three questions,” he tells a typical letter writer, while questioning the “moral character” of another. That both Abby and Adams have found their columns increasingly successful in the last decade is not as surprising as it sounds, however, for, while Abby’s readers ask questions that hit close to home, those writing to Adams go out of their way in pursuit of the ultimate trivial question: “Whatever happened to (TV) Channel One?,” asks one reader. “It was reassigned for use by people with mobile radios,” responds Adams, adding, as always, a gruff aside: “And considering how things have turned out they would have done well to reassign Channels 2 through 13 while they were at it.”

NOTEWORTHY: Laguna Heat, T. Jefferson Parker (St. Martin’s: $4.50). Shortly after Tom Shepard returns to his hometown of Laguna Beach to be the city’s homicide detective, a murder forces him to investigate torture, murder and his own dark past. This first novel won wide critical acclaim after it appeared last year. Perfect Symmetry: The Search for the Beginning of Time, Heinz R. Pagels (Bantam: $4.95). The attempts of scientists to explain the origin of the universe--when gravity, time, light and physical space were at once the same element--have spawned numerous popular science books; this 1985 overview, written by the executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, is one of the most successful. The Tie That Binds, Kent Haruf (Penguin: $6.95). Set against the barren, desolate backdrop of Colorado’s high plains, Kent Haruf’s well-received first novel follows the history of the West since the turn of the century through the life story of Edith Goodnough, a “beautiful girl” who manages to survive by learning the importance of love and duty. Fire From the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista, Omar Cabezas; foreword by Carlos Fuentes (Plume: $7.95). While the author is currently the chief of political direction at the Ministry of the Interior of Nicaragua, this moving, intimate biography is nearly devoid of rhetoric and ideology. Instead, Omar Cabezas recounts his spiritual and physical journey from the city to Sandinista training in the mountains. The work was nominated for the 1985 Times Book Prize for Current Interest. Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning, M. Christine Boyer (MIT: $9.95), written in 1983, is a deeply analytical, pessimistic appraisal of how the “physical and social devastation” caused by 19th-Century industrial development was not accidental; modern society grew, the author argues, by thwarting the development of the individual’s social identity.