Liana, Martha Gellhorn (Penguin/Virago: $6.95). Martha Gellhorn...

Liana, Martha Gellhorn (Penguin/Virago: $6.95). Martha Gellhorn is perhaps best known for her brief and turbulent marriage to Ernest Hemingway, but she is also a skilled and noted journalist and a novelist of some distinction. “Liana,” first published in 1944, is the powerful story of a young mulatto native from the fictional French Caribbean island of Saint Boniface, whose marriage to an island white leaves her captive and friendless, ostracized from the community into which she marries and from her own people as well. Marc Royer takes Liana as his mistress when she is 16; he is a relatively wealthy, though vulgar, man with good business sense. Four years later, when he decides to marry her, the decision does not grow out of love: “Marc took her because he could not have Marie; (Liana) was something he had bought for use when he could not have what he loved.” And he has indeed bought Liana: He’s promised her mother, Lucie, ownership of the farm where she lives and works with her five children and a pension of 3,000 francs a year during her lifetime. It is not an offer a poor black woman can refuse.

Liana tries as best she can to adopt the manners, speech and attire of a white woman, but, rather than accept her into their fold, the island whites entirely cut the two of them out of white society. For Liana, known on the island as a “careless and laughing and lovely” girl, has inherited a dead life. As Marc is reading one evening, she flies into a rage at his indifference to her; he simply suggests that she read too. When he realizes she’s never read a book, he hires the local schoolteacher as her tutor.

Pierre Vauclain, who had recently arrived on the island from the fighting in Paris (it’s World War II), opens new worlds to Liana. They read books together, take picnics on Saturdays and eventually become lovers. As they hear from radio broadcasts that the United States has joined World War II, Pierre decides to return to France and the army he had deserted. Having lost a love who was her only ally and friend in this isolated world, Liana, this “shy and gay and . . . soft and loving” woman takes her own life. Gellhorn has written a novel about race, prejudice, love and betrayal that is engrossing, but very, very disturbing.

The Riddle of the Dinosaur, John Noble Wilford (Vintage: $8.95). Paleontology, the study of fossils and ancient life forms, is a relatively new science. The first few scraps of dinosaur bone and teeth, encrusted in ancient sediments, only began to be discovered in the first quarter of the 19th Century. In “The Riddle of the Dinosaur,” John Noble Wilford (science reporter for The New York Times, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, “The Mapmakers”) provides a fascinating survey not only of general, if little-known information about dinosaurs but also of the history of their discovery. Thus this book is as much a story of the paleontologists who hunted the dinosaur bones, competed over sites and warred with one another over theory as it is about their quarry.

There is Gideon Algernon Mantell, the Englishman who first assembled an actual skeleton (it was a jawbone) of a dinosaur and the countless other dinosaur hunters who capitalized on, and continued his achievement all the way to current times. Wilford presents us with a portrait of James A. Jensen, otherwise known as “Dinosaur Jim,” who has scoured the American Southwest and discovered bones larger than any found previously, so big that Dinosaur Jim has labeled the creatures they came from supersaurus and ultrasaurus. Handsomely illustrated with photographs, drawings and lithographs, this is a lucid and accessible history not only of the vast variety of creatures who inhabited the Earth millions of years ago but also of the men who have brought their story to us.

Keeping Hope Alive: On Becoming a Psychotherapist, F. Robert Rodman MD, foreword by Robert Coles (Harper & Row: $7.95). In this volume of Harper & Row’s Series on the Professions, Dr. Robert Rodman provides a frank, instructive account of a psychiatrist’s medical training, his own experience of analysis and of his own practice. Rodman explains that any physician who constantly confronts illness and possible death must almost inevitably “become rocklike, practically inanimate in (his) capacity to withstand emotional pressures in order to make salient judgments that would save lives.” And, while a training in detachment is indispensable to an analyst or therapist, these disciplines demand of them that they regain touch with their more humane selves in order to permit “the analyst to use his imagination in proportion to his fidelity to fact.”

When Rodman begins his own analysis, his therapist speaks so infrequently that he talks just from a need to fill the silence, just as he had as a child obediently filled his own mother’s silence. As an analyst, he himself will be the object of his patients’ displaced emotions when transference takes place, accused of being “hurtful or mean or indifferent or exploitative” as he sits passively listening. “Being misunderstood persistently can feel like a violent assault, and sometimes is.” But it must be endured by any successful therapist because it is the misconception, which is transference, that offers the ultimate hope that change can occur in a patient, “which, with good luck, can make of insoluble conflict the beginning of a more livable life.”

Though this book will certainly prove invaluable to anyone considering medical school or training as a therapist, Rodman’s writing, interspersed with references to Franz Kafka and R. P. Blackmur and John Gardner, suggests that his own interests and experience have been far broader than the medical sciences. “I could never tell when some odd bit of knowledge or imagination would prove to be a facilitating link in the effort to arrive at an understanding of a patient,” he says. The breadth of his reading and education can perhaps be summarized in the position that he feels a therapist holds “between the objectivity of science and the inwardness of poetry.”

NOTEWORTHY: The Triumph of Democracy in Spain, Paul Preston (Methuen: $13.95). This is the vivid, authoritative record of the reinstatement of the constitutional monarchy in Spain, beginning in 1969 with Franco’s growing senility and the disintegration of his dictatorship, and ending with the remarkable Socialist election in 1982. Home: A Short History of an Idea, Witold Rybczynski (Penguin: $7.95). Rybczynski takes the reader on an engaging tour of household arrangements from the Middle Ages to Ralph Lauren’s contemporary home furnishings boutique at Bloomingdale’s, New York.