Kim Williams’ Book of Uncommon Sense (Fawcett:...

Kim Williams’ Book of Uncommon Sense (Fawcett: $3.95). While the author’s grandmotherly, jovial voice and deceptively sophisticated advice will be familiar to listeners of National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” this book failed to garner its fair share of critical attention when it first appeared last year. No doubt this was partly because the subtitle--”A Practical Guide With 10 Rules for Nearly Everything”--pegged it as “self-help,” a popular though overpopulated and often predictable genre. Williams devotes fewer than 10 pages to the 10 rules, however, and the advice she enthusiastically doles out in other pages bears less resemblance to au courant self-help techniques drawn from cognitive psychology than to homespun wisdom: intuitive, moral, forthright and occasionally flaky speculations on everything from marriage (“I swallowed the whale when I married Mel. It caused me tremendous indigestion. But here I am, bigger than I was”) to senior citizen centers (“We know we have arthritis, give us something bigger than arthritis. We wish to be involved, to seek, to quest, to adventure, to laugh at death”). Though the author blurb in this “April, 1987” edition oddly fails to mention it, Kim Williams died of cancer last August after refusing chemotherapy.

Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad (Vintage: $8.95). Both fans and detractors are likely to be drawn into this in-depth report on the people and politics involved in creating the original program, for the authors offer not fanzine gush but a thoughtful look at the process of redefining creative forms in television. Excerpts from the program’s brash, irreverent comedy sketches are sprinkled through these pages. Their appearance isn’t gratuitous, however, for the program was aimed at a savvy TV generation, and so many of the skits--a network executive enters the “Star Trek” set, for example, to inform Capt. Kirk that his mission has been canceled--are themselves reflections on the industry. The show also makes good fodder for an analysis of TV because in trying to break video convention, it forced TV executives to reflect on traditional practices. Thoughtful writers and aggressive reporters, the authors center their story on Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator, from his early brainstorming sessions while under the influence of “magic mushrooms” in the Mojave Desert to politicking in the network’s corporate tower, getting valuable aid from NBC’s president and unrelenting scrutiny from a bespectacled budget boss and chief censor “almost sick with concern” about the show’s humor.

An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols, J. C. Cooper (Thames & Hudson: $12.95). This is one of the few reference works that can be read with pleasure from cover to cover, in small part because, at 200 pages, its size is less-than overwhelming, in large because the author has chosen to emphasize the dynamic meaning of the symbols rather than the often-mundane details of usage. Differences in usage are, of course, significant--A black cat doesn’t mean bad luck to everyone, after all--and so J. C. Cooper draws contrasts between everything from ants (“righteous insects” in China, reminders of transitoriness in the Hindu tradition) to rainbows (“celestial serpents” in parts of Africa, ladders of access to unknown worlds in Amerindian culture). Ultimately, though, Cooper seems most interested in the relevance of symbols to contemporary society. Symbols do more than “equate,” Cooper contends; they are not only “artifacts from our past,” but signs “of some essential part of our subjective world.” Quoting Mircea Eliade, the author concludes that the recovery of symbolism offers a chance to “rescue modern man from his cultural provincialism and, above all, from his historical and existential relativism.”

The Use and Abuse of History, M. I. Finley (Peregrine: $8.95). The author isn’t referring to grammar school history--names, dates, places--but to “History,” a narrative portrayal of the sentiments and ideas that have moved governments as well as an account of “objectively” discernible alterations in society. The narrative approach is necessary, the author believes, to capture the values that endure through divergent events; the objective account, for keeping us from losing sight of the dynamics in society. M. I. Finley agrees with Nietzsche that without “critical” methods of studying the past, “the past itself suffers wrong” and history then “annihilates and degrades life.” Thoughtful and unusual in its consideration of psychology (how mythical history helped us fill the “blank spaces” in the past) and subjectivity (“tradition did not merely transmit the past, it created it”), this 1971 book is ultimately a work about how the “living” past can inform a present that is daily growing more fragmented. Also recently reprinted is Finley’s Ancient History (Peregrine: $8.95), a more specialized study of the flaws inherent in conventional explanations of the Greek city-state.

NOTEWORTHY: The Cloud Forest; Under the Mountain Wall, Peter Matthiessen (Penguin: $8.95 each). “The Cloud Wall” finds the author crisscrossing the South American wilderness, from Machu Picchu to Tierra del Fuego. It was published in 1961, while the author was in New Guinea, observing Stone Age culture for “Under the Mountain Wall.” Continental Drift; Love Life, James D. Houston (McGraw-Hill: $4.95 each). The Doyles live along the San Andreas Fault in California. In the first novel, a series of homicides panics the community and they find themselves caught up in the search for the killer. In the second, they become isolated by a Pacific storm that, for all its perils, offers refuge in distraction and time. War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War, John Dower (Pantheon: $9.95). Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for best nonfiction book of 1986, this study of the war between Japan and the United States draws upon American and Japanese songs, slogans cartoons and films to show the perils of unreflective patriotism. No Marble Angels, Joanne Leedom-Ackerman (Saybrook/Norton: $7.95). Characters in the American South struggle to close the gaps between each other in this 1985 collection of short stories, which also considers the efficacy of doing good deeds in a less-than-ideal world. Testing the Current, William McPherson (Washington Square: $6.95). Eight-year-old Tommy MacAllister explores a midwestern town drowsing by a deep running river on the eve of World War II, discovering “sweet and frightening truths” about the adult world around him.