Masks of the Universe, Edward Harrison (Macmillan:...

Masks of the Universe, Edward Harrison (Macmillan: $9.95). As with other physicists, the author, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, is convinced that “universes” (the masks we fit “on the face of the unknown Universe”) are “verifiable and falsifiable.” Nevertheless, it is with a tinge of regret that Edward Harrison traces the “progressive” evolution of our visions of the cosmos, from Aristotle (Earth as center of the Universe) and Dante (Earth surrounded by hemispheres--Air, Fire, the Empyrean Paradise) to Copernicus (sun as center of the Universe) and Giordano Bruno (sun as one of many stars). The gains in scientific accuracy are undeniable, of course, but Harrison is perceptive enough to see that our new vision--more “mechanistic” than “magical”--lacks emotional and intellectual immediacy. Ours is an astronomically apathetic age, in which stars are hidden by electric light (the medieval sky, writes Harrison, was “a mysterious and divine panorama of immediate significance, resonant with the choirs of heaven”) and our proclivity to easy answers (we look for simple truths in science in order to cast doubt from our lives, for doubt leads to searching, searching leads to further doubt, and further doubt leads to frustration and despair). In fact, writes Harrison, science can offer few answers. Harrison suggests that poets try to bring this notion home by “catching up with the antics of the atomic and subatomic world,” such as the quantum world of potentiality, in which “everything is becoming and never in an actual state of being.” The message at the heart of this book, then, is an old one: “He will be the more learned the more he comes to know himself for ignorant.” Terence Dickinson’s “The Universe and Beyond” (Camden House/Firefly Books: $19.95), forwards only one vision of the cosmos, but it too offers unorthodox thoughts (arguing, for instance, that Pluto is a comet, not a planet) and asks tough questions, such as, does the matter “swallowed” by black holes reappear in another plane of space-time?

Brave New Workplace, Robert Howard (Penguin: $6.95). The Tenneco Employee Center in Houston, where light streams through three-story windows and silence is broken only by the gentle gurgling of garden fountains, best represents the new model of corporate life to which the author refers. It’s a far cry from Industrial Age sweatshops and hardly an environment suggesting Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” So why the book’s title? Because, Robert Howard argues, modern amenities such as employee centers are being offered in lieu of more significant employee benefits, such as worker equity, “meaningful employment,” worker involvement in corporate profits and social renewal. Howard’s Marxist orientation prevents him from considering worker benefits such as Employee Stock Ownership Plans and a predicted increase in leisure time due to computers. But this 1985 book does convincingly demonstrate the merits of unions and the centrality of work, “the major activity through which we shape our ambitions and our talents, and, thus, come to know ourselves.”

Sitting in Darkness: Americans in the Philippines, David Haward Bain (Penguin: $8.95). Those unable to see why politics in the embattled nation swings from left to right like a pendulum are bound to gather insights from this spirited narrative about two soldiers at the turn of the century. David Bain’s story begins in 1898, a year with enough tumult to give any nation an identity crisis. We begin with Emilio Aguinaldo’s insurrection against Spanish rule. Aguinaldo was close to taking the country when U.S. land forces arrived. Aguinaldo was skeptical about receiving help. “What can we expect to gain?” he asked American diplomat Spencer Pratt. “Much greater liberty and many more material benefits than the Spaniards ever promised you,” replied Pratt. Aguinaldo’s skepticism was well-founded, though, for the constitution he had proclaimed--the first democratic one to date in Asia--was annulled after the war, when the Treaty of Paris transferred the Philippines to American rule. Aguinaldo fought the United States (taking more American lives than the Spanish-American War) before being captured by the other principal player in this book, Col. Frederick Funston. Funston’s vision did not exactly promise “greater liberty” for Filipinos: “Rawhide these bullet-headed Asians until they yell for mercy,” Funston was fond of saying. Nevertheless, to Bain’s credit, there are no despots or heroes in this book. Bain studies Aguinaldo and Funston with empathy--Aguinaldo had his faults too, we find, backing the Japanese during World War II because they would “unite the Asian people,” while Funston possessed at least a smidgen of rationality, opposing the dominance of the Dominican friars in the Philippines.

NOTEWORTHY: The Secret of Santa Vittoria, Robert Crichton (Carroll & Graf: $3.95). Led by a wine merchant turned mayor who’s all-too-fond of sampling his goods, citizens of a small village in war-torn Italy plot to prevent the Germans from locating and looting the town’s wine cellars. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, Daniel J. Kevles (University of California: $9.95) argues that the science of improving the human species is “cruel and always problematic” because it elevates “abstractions--the race, the population and more recently the gene pool--above the rights and needs of individuals and their families.” Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, Volumes 1-3, Douglas Southall Freeman (Scribner’s: $16.95 each). The emergence and failure of a number of military charlatans and the rise of Stonewall Jackson are detailed in Volume 1, while the second book looks at the battles of Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville. Volume 3 depicts Gettysburg and the slow ruin of the Confederacy.