THE FITZGERALDS AND THE KENNEDYS by Doris...

THE FITZGERALDS AND THE KENNEDYS by Doris Kearns Goodwin (St. Martin’s Press: $5.95) The history of two major American political families, whose alliance in the marriage of Rose Fitzgerald and Joseph Kennedy Sr., the author argues, established the foundations for the Kennedy dynasty. Based on thorough research, numerous interviews, and drawing on 150 cartons of previously unexamined Joe and Rose Kennedy papers, this is a major, if somewhat hagiographic, work of history. If Goodwin’s work can be faulted, it is that in her somewhat breathless admiration of the Kennedys (admittedly shared by many Americans) she contributes more to the myth of the Kennedys than to a broader and richer understanding of their phenomenon.

BEHIND THE FRONT PAGE A Candid Look at How the News Is Made by David S. Broder (Simon & Schuster: $8.95) According to Pulitzer Prize-winner David Broder, this book had its origins in a speech he delivered in 1979 in which he said that newspaper slogans such as the New York Times’ “All the News That’s Fit to Print” should more correctly read: “A partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours. . . . But it’s the best we could do under the circumstances.” In “Behind the Front Page,” Broder’s intent is to demythologize the delivery of news, “to look realistically and critically at contemporary journalism.”

Now an associate editor for the Washington Post, Broder’s beat for the last 20 years has been national politics and government. He knows firsthand the limitations of print media, where “an editor may have two columns to convey the substance of a strategic-arms agreement seven years in the negotiation.” But Broder is not entirely pessimistic. “A good newspaper is a citizen’s best resource for exercising his rights and responsibilities in this Republic.” He simply encourages the newspaper reader or television viewer to ask, “Where does the story go next? What questions remain unanswered? What new puzzles are to be solved?”

THE KILLJOY by Anne Fine (The Mysterious Press: $3.95) Told in dramatic monologue, “The Killjoy” takes the form of a 153-page alibi and self-justification as told by Prof. Ian Laidlaw before a detective who has come to arrest him for a crime undisclosed until the final pages of this bizarre novel.

The quiet, deliberate 49-year-old man, head of the political science department of a Scottish university, was viciously mauled at age 5 by a German shepherd. The ensuing hideous, livid, lumpish scar on his face ensured a life far from normal: “Nobody treats a man as disfigured as I am as if he were human. . . . You came in to arrest a man like yourself,” he tells his interrogator, “and you encountered me instead. Instantly you became like everybody else, as steady and courteous as a rock. . . .

“I’ve struggled in a swamp of courtesy and consideration since I was five years old”--that is, until the day a 19-year-old student of his, Alicia Davie, laughs in his face, breaking all the rules of etiquette and propriety. Thus begins the sordid, passionate, quasi-sadomasochistic affair that unleashes the full anger and resentment of Laidlaw’s sorry, half-lived life.

“Life is no fairy tale, and this was not a story of Beauty and the Beast, with their eventual triumph over ugliness. I proved to have none of the Beast’s gentleness and nobility of mind, and there were aspects of Alicia that mesh most uncomfortably with one’s notion of Beauty.” “The Killjoy” is an unsettling tale of suspense and a horrific psychological study of a suffering, deformed man.

SUMMERTIME by Maureen McCoy (Washington Square Press: $6.95) This wry, tender novel begins with the marriage of the 85-year-old Jessamine Morrow (in flight from the suffocating rigors of the nursing home where she’s been stashed, she elopes with an aged widower) and traces one summer in the lives of the matriarch, her daughter-in-law, Alice, and her granddaughter, Carla. “McCoy writes beautifully, and her characters are equally engaging across the generations,” Taffy Cannon wrote in these pages.