WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR The Marcoses and...

WALTZING WITH A DICTATOR The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy by Raymond Bonner (Vintage Books: $9.95) This is the remarkable and appalling story of the rule of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the Philippines and the collusion of the United States in dismantling a democracy. Raymond Bonner, formerly the correspondent for the New York Times, has assembled a formidable and infuriating testament to the failure of an American foreign policy that supports any regime so long as its rhetoric is anti-communist, regardless how tyrannical, abusive and cruel. Five U.S. Presidents supported the Marcoses, endorsed his rule and were shamelessly manipulated by him, knowing full well the extent of his corruption.

Richly documented, relying heavily on U.S. Embassy officials, CIA operatives and Filipinos themselves, “Waltzing With a Dictator” is also the story of a triumph of those U.S. officials in Manila who saw Marcos as the enemy of democracy that he was and who fought, desperately and for years, to reverse U.S. policy in order to allow the Filipino people to topple him. In the end, it is impossible not to feel that the story of “Waltzing With a Dictator” is as damning to America’s leaders--from Kennedy to Reagan--as it is to Marcos.

A BIGAMIST’S DAUGHTER by Alice McDermott (Perennial Library/ Harper & Row: $7.95) The story of Elizabeth Connelly, “Editor in Chief” of Vista Books, a vanity publisher where dreams of literary fame come true, packaged and sold--at the authors’ expense. She is a facilitator in her writers’ hopes, their unbounded optimism and their credibility. “Now I know why these things happened,” they tell her, “why I was lonely, hurt, why my child died, my husband left me, why I lost, missed out, messed up: So I could write about it. “

The core of the novel is Elizabeth’s love affair with the author of an uncompleted manuscript: Its main character, a bigamist, reawakens memories of Elizabeth’s own father. Absent for long periods of time and returning unexpectedly, she had asked him as a child what kind of job he had. His answer, in jest, was that he was a gigolo. His amended answer, after the nuns at school told her to ask again, was that he worked for the government, though this was never confirmed.

During the course of the novel, alternately told in the third person and with flashbacks in the first person, Elizabeth makes disturbing discoveries about herself: that the cynical distancing that her job demands is second nature to her and that the lies that she tells her authors every day reflect the lies and fantasies she unknowingly invents for herself. The authorial voice is occluded at times in this first novel, and the self-discoveries are belabored.

THAT NIGHT by Alice McDermott (Perennial Library/ Harper & Row: $6.95) A finalist last year for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the category of fiction, “That Night” is the bittersweet story, told by a 10-year-old girl, of a pair of teen-age lovers wrenched apart by a protective mother. When Sherry’s mother discovers she’s pregnant the daughter is sent away; her boyfriend comes with his friends to claim her, all carrying chains, but he’ll never see her again. Richard Eder wrote in his review that “McDermott has balanced her book finely between the truth and the sadness of reality.”

BLOOD AND GRITS by Harry Crews (Perennial Library/ Harper & Row: $6.95) A collection of essays by the novelist and author of “A Feast of Snakes” and “A Childhood: The Biography of a Place.” Crews is as much the center of these essays as are his ostensible subjects--camping, the South, L. L. Bean, life in a carnival, Winnebago parks, profiles of Charles Bronson and Robert Blake. In some instances, the authorial prejudice intrudes itself too often, as in the essay on Blake, where a reader will learn more about Crews’ childhood, Crews’ artistic struggles, and where Blake is reduced to little more than a touchstone.

But, in the best of these consistently well-muscled, well-written essays, Crews guides us into new worlds, unexplored by any contemporary journalist. His essay on carnival life alone is worth the price of this collection. Crews brings an insider’s knowledge and a sympathy for the outlaw and the grotesque, and produces an extraordinary portrait of the life among itinerant freak shows, hanky-panky and alibis.

(Other works by Harry Crews just released by Perennial Library are his first novel, “The Gospel Singer” and the novel, “All We Need of Hell.”)

WHERE IS NICARAGUA? by Peter Davis (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster: $8.95) A subjective yet fair-minded account of contemporary Nicaragua, mixing reportage and history to reveal the shifting sands and multistrata of Nicaraguan society and U.S.-Nicaraguan relations. “(Unlike) most visitors who arrive, tour and leave Nicaragua with their preconceptions intact,” Marjorie Miller wrote in these pages, “Davis captures the subtleties and contradictions of the revolution.”