THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT by Joe...

THE SELLING OF THE PRESIDENT by Joe McGinniss (Penguin Books: $7.95) McGinniss was a 25-year-old reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer when he began the research for the landmark study of presidential politics and big media--specifically the advertising campaign for Richard Nixon’s run for President in 1968.

Almost by accident (the result of an ingenious phone call to Harry Treleavan, the ad man who ran the Nixon account), McGinniss gained access to every strategy session in which the public image of the candidate was shaped. The result is a devastating, fly-on-the-wall critique of politics as con game, where “policies are products to be sold to the public--this one today, that one tomorrow, depending on the . . . state of the market.”

Nixon’s advisers--Treleavan (who managed George Bush’s congressional campaign in 1966), the lawyer Len Garment, Frank Shakespeare and PR man Roger Ailes--ran their media game with undeviating cynicism, concocting TV spots, staging media events, or rallying celebrities like Jackie Gleason to tout their candidate.

“The Selling of the President” was a shocking best seller when first published. What is so disturbing now, after eight years of Ronald Reagan’s media-generated presidency, is how much what was once shocking is common and acceptable practice 20 years later.

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS by Joyce Carol Oates (Perennial Library/Harper & Row: $8.95) This powerful novel of sex, obsession and boxing, tells of a love affair between 15-year-old Enid Maria Stevick and her father’s younger brother Felix, a former middleweight boxing champion twice Enid’s age.

The novel opens as Enid, having been seduced and then abandoned by Felix (“ ‘Look, you know I was drunk up there, I told you. . . . You led me on, acting the way you did fooling around the way you did.’ ”), attempts suicide by swallowing 47 aspirin, leaving behind a note. (“She hid her face in her hands, crying like a small child. So ashamed, so ashamed.”) The attempt fails but Felix returns, and for the next four years their affair continues, savagely, disastrously.

THE MAYOR OF CASTRO STREET The Life and Times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts (St. Martin’s Press: $10.95) On Nov. 27, 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey B. Milk, along with Mayor George Moscone, was shot and killed by former Supervisor Dan White.

White had resigned from his post after Proposition 6 was defeated (a bill that would have denied employment to gay schoolteachers), fully expecting the mayor to reinstate him. But the mayor failed to do so, at Milk’s bidding. Randy Shilts, author of “And the Band Played On: Politics, People and the AIDS Epidemic,” tells the story of Harvey Milk, from his youth in New York City to his assassination in San Francisco, through White’s trial, which concluded with two verdicts of voluntary manslaughter and subsequent riots in outrage and protest.

Based on nearly 140 interviews conducted with people from all walks of Milk’s life, Shilts has compiled a compelling, balanced portrait not only of Harvey Milk but of the evolution of the gay community in the 1970s.

TIME’S ARROW, TIME’S CYCLE

Myth and Metaphor in the

Discovery of Geological Time

by Stephen Jay Gould (Harvard University Press: $8.95) Stephen Jay Gould explores the coexistence of two dichotomous conceptions of time--the linear (time’s arrow) and circular (time’s cycle)--in what is in fact a radical revaluation of the works of three geologist greats, Thomas Burnet, James Hutton and Charles Lyell. In Gould’s view, “Burnet was not the foolish religionist that he is usually portrayed to be,” Lee Dembart wrote in these pages, “and Hutton and Lyell were not the champions of the scientific method and architects of modern geology, as they are normally caricatured.”

While the writing is not as accessible as are, for example, Gould’s articles for Natural History magazine, the book is still, in Dembart’s words, “fascinating, challenging and provocative.”

OUTSIDE Selected Writings by Marguerite Duras; translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Beacon Press, Boston: $9.95) Marguerite Duras is perhaps best known in this country for the extraordinary novel-cum-memoir “The Lover,” which won the Prix Goncourt and the Ritz Paris Hemingway Award in her native France. But Duras is an exceptional journalist, as well as a screenwriter (she authored Alain Resnais’ “Hiroshima, Mon Amour”).

This miscellany of her newspaper articles, interviews, even record jacket liner notes written over the last 30 years, displays the prodigious span of Duras’ enthusiasms. We read of Brigitte Bardot, of a small-time hoodlum, of artists she admires, and she even meditates on the virtues of leek soup. As Lynn Bundesen wrote in her review, “As Ernest Hemingway set the style for journalists in his time with his book, ‘By Line,’ so Duras sets the tone for journalism in our times.”