THE BURGER YEARSRights and Wrongs in the...

THE BURGER YEARS

Rights and Wrongs in the Supreme Court, 1969-1986 edited with an introduction by Herman Schwartz (Penguin Books: $8.95)

A collection of essays by legal scholars on the record and decisions rendered by the Supreme Court during the years 1969 to 1986--the so-called “pudding years without a theme”--years when Warren Burger presided as chief justice. The writers collected in this volume chart the drift rightward of Supreme Court rulings, away from the landmark decisions set by the Warren Court in such areas as equal rights for women, capital punishment, religious freedoms, civil rights, the First Amendment.

As Herman Schwartz writes in his introduction, “We will not know whether the Burger Court was only a transition from the liberal activism of the Warren Court to the reactionary activism of a Rehnquist Court . . . and even then, not all the great landmarks of the last 30 years are likely to fall. Although the notion that justices frequently disappoint the presidents who appoint them is largely a myth, . . . the Court continually surprises its observers, and even extreme conservatives may want to avoid the instability that comes with radical change and indifference to precedent.”

GIOVANNI’S ROOM by James Baldwin (Laurel Books/Dell: $4.95)

Set in the expatriate American community in Paris of the 1950s, this brilliantly written, wrenching novel portrays the awakening of a young man’s sexuality. A conventional man, the narrator, David, has been living a lie all his life: He tells his girl, Hella, that he loves her and makes himself believe it; he proposes marriage and imagines a life of “light and safety” on “steady ground,” with lovemaking “the most mechanical responsibility.”

But it is Giovanni, a man, whom he loves. While Giovanni loves without reservation and “with a terrible desire to please,” David’s morality, coldness and self-hatred make him resist Giovanni’s love “with all my strength. . . . The beast which Giovanni had awakened within me would never go to sleep again; but . . . there opened in me a hatred for Giovanni which was as powerful as my love.” Giovanni accuses him at last that “You want to kill me in the name of all your lying little moralities.”

Giovanni will die by book’s end, though not by David’s hand. And David realizes a part of himself will die as well. He will lead a loveless, bitter life of conformity and deception. By no means secondary to the plot, the beauty and cadences of “Giovanni’s Room” mark James Baldwin as a masterful American stylist. First published in 1956, “Giovanni’s Room” is one of six titles by James Baldwin to be reissued this month by Dell. THE QUEST FOR MERLIN by Nicolai Tolstoy (Little, Brown: $9.95)

Fascinated as a child by the legend of Merlin--wizard, prophet, enchanter--in King Arthur’s court, Nikolai Tolstoy has now produced a passionate work of scholarship establishing Merlin for the first time as a historical figure who lived in the Lowlands of Scotland in the 6th Century. Tolstoy argues that Merlin “was an authentic prophet, most likely a Druid surviving in a pagan enclave of the North.” He was not, sadly, Arthur’s contemporary.

Merlin also represents the archetypal trickster, a “figure who transcends the centuries.” Drawing on Jung, Tolstoy writes that “Myth is not fiction, it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again”: in Celtic verse, in the shamanistic cults of Siberia, in Norse legends. Readers may be skeptical at the parallel Tolstoy draws between Merlin and Christ, as a figure both mortal and divine. But nevertheless, as Charles Champlin wrote in these pages, the book has “the non-pedantic warmth of a passionate act of faith.”

FORREST GUMP by Winston Groom (Berkeley Books: $3.95)

The picaresque adventures of Forrest Gump, IQ 61, as he goes from mental institution to the University of Alabama, where he plays football for Coach Bear Bryant; to Vietnam, where he takes part in the Tet offensive, wins the Medal of Honor, returns home a hero; travels to China and ultimately to space as an astronaut.

Written in a vernacular first person, the novel purports to depict a veritable idiot’s progress through a series of American institutions. The problem here is that the targets of the satire are far too easy, in some cases racist and sexist, and very often, dumb. A clever idea in search of a novel.

ALONE TOGETHER by Elena Bonner translated from the Russian by Alexander Cook (Vintage Books: $8.95)

In her own informal words, Elena Bonner recounts her life with her husband, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, from their courtship to their years of exile and virtual house arrest in Gorki. Sakharov has just been freed by the Soviet regime.

Sakharov’s own memoirs, recently smuggled to the West, are about to be published, and Bonner presents her own book as a postscript to what her husband will produce. Nevertheless, it is important in its own right as a portrait of two Soviet heroes and their courageous struggles against the petty harassments and outright brutalities of totalitarian government.