The Clay Pedestal, Thomas A. Preston (Scribner’s:...

The Clay Pedestal, Thomas A. Preston (Scribner’s: $9.95); Medical Care Can Be Dangerous to Your Health, Eugene D. Robin MD (Harper & Row: $7.95). These books are so critical of the American medical establishment that one is tempted never to visit a doctor again--until, that is, one realizes that both authors are very much insiders in the medical establishment: Thomas Preston, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington; Eugene Robin, a professor of medicine and physiology at Stanford. Their skeptical voices are being heard. Still, the dangers they detail are intrinsically part of the medical establishment and consequently, far from being solved. “Overtreatment” is a central concern in both books. Seventy to 80% of the people who go to doctors have “nothing wrong with them that wouldn’t be cleared up by a vacation, a pay raise, or relief from everyday emotional stress,” according to a survey quoted in “The Clay Pedestal.” Robin points out one of the many dangers in a seemingly innocuous visit to the doctor: Of 1 million patients tested for pancreatic cancer during a year, he estimates, 100,000 will be falsely diagnosed as having the disease; of these, 310 are likely to die while being tested or having surgery. Seeking treatment for serious illness is still imperative and usually helpful, the authors emphasize, but patients must first take doctors off the pedestal by participating in the decision-making process; not doing so, the authors warn, encourages doctors to embrace false notions of scientific infallibility.

The Investigation and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub, Stanislaw Lem ($4.95 each). The author is often seen--and sometimes scorned--as a science-fiction writer, but the categorization isn’t entirely fair, for without odd machinery and 22nd-Century time-lines, Stanislaw Lem’s stories would be social criticism, not speculative literature. Thumbnail sketches of his plots don’t make this evident. Ostensibly, “The Investigation” follows a young officer at Scotland Yard as he tries to solve an eerie case of missing--and perhaps resurrected--bodies, while “Memoirs Found in a Bathtub” is written by a man trapped in an underground community in AD 3149. Truth be told, though, “The Investigation” (written by a Polish author in 1974) pokes fun at organized systems of thought--from the scientific to the theological--by illustrating their inability to help our investigator solve his case, while “Memoirs” is one of Lem’s many attacks on bureaucracy and the utilitarian mentality. Only inveterate cynics are likely to enjoy this assault on those who worship “the angry god Kap-Eh-Taal,” jettisoning anything “that did not directly serve to save the bare framework of society.”

Executive Suite, Cameron Hawley (Dell: $5.95). Before he can name a successor to head the behemoth Tredway Corp., Avery Ballard unexpectedly dies of a heart attack, leaving his five vice presidents to fight it out on their own. Suspense certainly didn’t make this novel a classic (it sold 1 million copies after first appearing in 1952), for Cameron Hawley’s favorite candidate becomes apparent early in the book’s pages: Only Don Walling, in charge of design and development for Tredway, garners the same glowing adjectives as Ballard. Male idol worship is the real business of the executive suite, as is evident when Ballard first calls the executive elevator to his floor. Luigi, the elevator operator, gawks at the signal, “an exciting crimson flare that sent him skyrocketing up the shaft.” Hawley doesn’t let poor Luigi alone: Later, after being beckoned once again by the man upstairs, Luigi is seen “flying up the shaft, alive with silent flight, no sound except the soft swish of the air.” No satire, this foray into corporate culture is fun as steamy soap opera and revealing as sociology. Perhaps most enlightening is the fact that both Ballard and Walling are more interested in productivity and efficiency than in the office intrigue that forms the book’s core: We like our heroes, apparently, to rise above the situations that fascinate us.

Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt, Geoffrey C. Ward (Harper & Row: $9.95). We learn about his “headlong enthusiasm for hobbies and collecting,” his fondness for foresting desks with “scores of miniature donkeys and elephants,” his insecurities; we learn, in short, about a typical, politically aware child. This 1985 biography, drawn mostly from primary sources (oral histories from friends, letters, cables) doesn’t succeed in its attempt to be a “psychohistory”--Geoffrey Ward offers few revelations about why Franklin Roosevelt had more of the right stuff than his classmates--but it remains fascinating as a social history of aristocracy in 19th-Century America and as a balanced portrait: Roosevelt is seen as ebullient, yet also aloof and even, at times, duplicitous.

The Trouble With Being Born, E. M. Cioran, translated by Richard Howard (Holt: $8.95). “Fear is an antidote to boredom . . . . Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessor.” The hundreds of aphorisms collected in this 1973 work at first seem to blindly embrace nihilism, falling prey to dogma in the process of attacking it. Cioran’s only conviction, however, is that there can be no conviction. His fondness for morbid imagery might convince readers otherwise, but in relinquishing a sense of certainty, he gains a new curiousity about life: “No one has lived so close to his skeleton as I have lived to mine,” he writes, “from which results an endless dialogue and certain truths which I manage neither to accept nor to reject.”

NOTEWORTHY: Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family, Shirley Christian (Vintage: $8.95). One of the more critical accounts of the Sandinistas’ rise to power, this 1985 book, updated with a new report on the Contras, records events since 1978 in the tiny nation from a perspective of one convinced that political pluralism only can be assured through U.S intervention. Hiroshima Maidens, Rodney Barker (Penguin: $6.95). Cultural understanding and courage dominate this story of how 25 young Japanese women, crippled and disfigured after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, came to the United States for plastic and reconstructive surgery. High Adventure, Donald E. Westlake (Tor: $3.95). Just when Kirby Galway thinks he has a new drug-smuggling scheme all worked out, plans start unraveling, and he finds his life endangered. Set in the Caribbean, this fast-moving adventure won wide critical acclaim when it appeared in 1985. Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, Richard Schickel (Fromm: $10.95). The film critic for Time looks at the impact of mass culture on our conception of the world; in rejecting interpretations that are “knowledgeable or eccentric, quirky or individualistic,” Richard Schickel believes, we ignore the “pullulating reality spread out enigmatically” around us.