Wildlife in America, Peter Matthiessen, drawings by...

Wildlife in America, Peter Matthiessen, drawings by Bob Hines (Viking: $24.95, hardcover reprint); Wild California: Vanishing Lands, Vanishing Wildlife, A. Starker Leopold, photographs by Tupper Ansel Blake (University of California: $19.95). Black-footed ferrets, sea turtles, California condors and other endangered creatures could not have found more eloquent and informed champions than A. Starker Leopold and Peter Matthiessen. “Wild California” is abundant with color photographs that contrast flocks of geese against a cloudy sky, evoke the vibrant color of wildflowers on steep green foothills and capture the elegance of a long-billed curlews. On another level, Tupper Blake’s pictures show that while the agility or adaptability of these species no longer can protect them against man’s incursions, their beauty remains a formidable defense. Leopold, a leading conservationist and wildlife biologist who died before this book was finished, offers less sentimental reasons for setting aside “more samples of the old California.” He asks lumber developers to consider that “natural forest types of mixed conifers and hardwoods might retain fertility better than pure conifer plantations” and points out that “50% of all pharmaceuticals have a natural component as their active ingredient, yet only 20% of the world’s plants have been tested.”

Both authors see nature as intricately interdependent and believe strongly that meddling without prior understanding can be disastrous: “A look at what man hath wrought,” says naturalist Durward Allen in Peter Matthiessen’s pages, “suggests that we got into the construction business without the benefits of blueprints.” Not surprisingly, for he is a Zen Buddhist, Matthiessen is best at evoking the holistic nature of our ecosystem, discovering the rich life, for instance, within the seemingly barren Joshua tree, whose blossoms feed yucca moths, fallen branches nest nocturnal desert lizards, leaves offer material for small mammals’ nests and upper branches serve as havens for desert birds. Matthiessen wrote “Wildlife in America” in 1959, before he became established as a novelist (and before ecology was taken seriously), yet his skill as a writer is readily apparent in the book’s effective appeal to our intellect through hard facts and to our empathy through poignant accounts of animals’ histories.

As 1988 approaches, many of us will tack wildlife calendars on one of our office walls to remember that there remains a rich, colorful world somewhere outside of the city, its survival assured, perhaps, by the $11.95 we paid the Sierra Club. These authors remind us that nature is more precarious. And contrary to popular belief, preserving nature, as Matthiessen writes, means ensuring, not endangering, progress: “The concept of conservation,” he writes, “is a far truer sign of civilization than the spoiling of a continent which we once confused with progress.”

The Central American Crisis Reader, Robert S. Leiken, Barry Rubin (Summit: $12.95); El Salvador: Central America in the New Cold War, edited by Marvin E. Gettleman, Patrick Lacefield, Louis Menashe and David Mermelstein (Grove: $12.95). While news about human-rights abuses in Guatemala seldom reaches our shores, books about conflict in El Salvador and Nicaragua seem as abundant as arms shipments. Rare, though, are books such as these, which weave essays from liberal and conservative leaders around the editors’ dispassionate reporting. The editors’ cool objectivity amid the heat of undeclared war is most noteworthy, for it should appeal to the growing number of readers who have stopped caring about the region, convinced that it’s impossible to sort reality from political rhetoric and conflicting information.

The most cogent summary of the Reagan Administration’s policy comes from former U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, who admits that former Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza never “sought to reform his country in the light of social justice or political virtue (or) attempted to alter the distribution of goods, status or power.” Nevertheless, she writes, “authority in traditional societies is necessary,” and the more repressive right-wing governments usually “weaken over time.” Most important, she concludes, the United States should not criticize leaders like Somoza unless it is prepared to take on leaders in China, Cambodia and Vietnam.

Kirkpatrick’s liberal critics counter that the United States has more sway in Central America than in Asia and that the nations we support in the region are not “democratic” by Kirkpatrick’s own definition of the word: countries that “pursue power only by legal means, eschew violence, theft and fraud (and) let a substantial number of citizens participate in society’s decision-making.” While “El Salvador” is more tightly written than the “Central American Crisis Reader” (an expansive book that relies heavily on official documents), both books thoroughly overview the region, clarifying the issues but leaving readers free to decide whether military intervention is necessary to ensure our national security.

Preparing for Power: America’s Elite Boarding Schools, Peter W. Cookson Jr. and Caroline Hodges Persell (Basic: $9.95). Boarding schools cater to the rich on the one hand or are imposed on the deviant on the other. In either case, argue the authors in this unique, perspicacious overview, they can become a prison for students. The authors’ dramatic conclusion seems at odds with the body of this book--a factual study straying from the impartial only long enough to celebrate the rewards of privileged learning. The schools offer an “exceptionally good quality of teaching,” the authors write, and are rated “boring” by fewer than 25% of the students surveyed. Most important, boarding school classes are small, encouraging students to participate actively in learning, contributing their own ideas about politics or literature. Unfortunately, the authors do not examine the significance of this personalized learning: While students in crowded public school classrooms must spend most of their time passively listening, private school students are encouraged to participate actively, early lessons that can sort out society’s leaders and followers.

The authors do briefly mention that blacks are not represented in the private schools, but their main concern is whether boarding schools serve the elite as well as they could. “Preparing for Power” could have been more interesting and revealing had they expanded their central question from “Do the schools prepare students for exercising class power” to “What in the social and academic curriculum makes them members of America’s elite?” Still, this is the first work to show the subtle ways in which elite boarding schools, dedicated in principle to enlightening and liberating their students, also can socialize them “for lives as prisoners of their class.”

NOTEWORTHY: A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor (Ballantine: $4.95). Phillip Carver reluctantly returns home after his sisters ask him to avert the remarriage of their father, an elderly widower. He learns to forgive without forgetting and to allow a sense of injury to grow into a reason for living. Acclaimed for its psychological acuity and emotional power and awarded the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.