CHURCHILL & ROOSEVELT The Complete Correspondence (3...

CHURCHILL & ROOSEVELT The Complete Correspondence (3 volumes) edited by Warren F. Kimball(Princeton University Press: $49.50)

On Sept. 11, 1939, eight days after Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote a letter to Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, suggesting a personal correspondence to ensure effective cooperation between their two nations. Churchill welcomed the opportunity to establish contact with a potential ally, and their correspondence would last 5 1/2 years, through Churchill’s rise to prime minister and the Anglo-American alliance in war against Hitler, until Roosevelt’s death in April, 1945.

With his commentary and series of headnotes placing the letters within the broader historical context, Warren Kimball has set forth a fascinating “interpretive history” of Anglo-American strategy and diplomacy during World War II. In addition to their value as a historical resource, these three volumes reveal the personalities of the two great leaders as they swap informal stories from their respective years in the naval service, develop a series of inside jokes and establish “a tangible spirit of friendly trust” that brought Roosevelt to say to Churchill: “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.”

A SPORT OF NATURE by Nadine Gordimer (Penguin Books: $7.95) Although her mother ran off with a Portuguese dancer when she was 2 years old, Hillela was reared in all manner of propriety in the homes of her wealthy aunt, Olga, and of her politically active aunt, Pauline. But Hillela doesn’t seem to take to their careful training and indoctrination: A white, Jewish South African, she is caught visiting the home of a coloured boy in a township within Johannesburg and expelled from boarding school.

Her aunts blame themselves, but Nadine Gordimer has intentionally fashioned a character who exhibits “an abnormal variation or a departure from the stock or type . . . a spontaneous mutation”--the definition of the title’s “Sport of Nature.” Hillela has no sense of convention, and the South African laws based on “skin and hair, the relative thickness and thinness of lips” hold no meaning for her.

When the man she has married (a black revolutionary), and whose child she’s borne, is assassinated, her grief becomes the catalyst to her own political evolution. In the end, she takes the podium to speak to the assembled dignitaries from around the world “to mark the birth of an African nation.”

In “A Sport of Nature,” “Gordimer’s attitude toward Hillela--and the other characters--is detached, distant, sometimes bitterly ironic,” Merle Rubin wrote in her review. “Yet, she also takes a grim satisfaction in the story she has chosen to tell--the satisfaction of someone proud to have swallowed a harsh, unpalatable potion in the belief that it is the strong medicine required.”

LOOK HOMEWARD A Life of Thomas Wolfe by David Herbert Donald (Fawcett Columbine: $12.95) Based on private papers, Thomas Wolfe’s own correspondence, and fully integrating the life and the work, historian David Herbert Donald has written the most detailed, comprehensive biography we have of the author of “Look Homeward, Angel” and “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

Wolfe, perhaps more than modern American writers, depended on his editors: the great Maxwell Perkins of Scribner’s and later Edward Aswell of Harper & Row. Wolfe’s original manuscripts were wordy, overwritten, sprawling and raw. The works we know were as much the product of his editors’ scrutiny as they were Wolfe’s, and Donald is critical of the odd hybridization, particularly in the case of Aswell, who virtually rewrote entire sections of Wolfe’s “The Web and the Rock,” published posthumously.

“In this painfully judicious, minutely researched, contemplative and tough-minded new biography of Wolfe,” Charles Champlin wrote in these pages: “Donald brings the Wolfe of myth to Earth size.”

THE PANIC OF ’89 by Paul Erdman (Charter Books: $4.50)

The best-selling novel about economic apocalypse by the writer of financial harum-scarum. “Erdman knows how to arouse the wary imagination,” writes Paul Ritcher, “ ‘The Panic of ‘89’ is wildly fantastic, yet a fantasy extrapolated from real economic news that’s pretty incredible, too. Latin American leaders, mutinous under their multibillion-dollar debts, scheme with Shiite terrorists, Red Army Factioneers and thin-lipped Swiss bankers to set off a panic that will empty American bank vaults and enrich the long-suffering victims of American economic imperialism.”