OSCAR WILDE by Richard Ellmann (Vintage Books:...

OSCAR WILDE

by Richard Ellmann (Vintage Books: $11.95) At the height of Oscar Wilde’s career, when his satirical masterpiece “The Importance of Being Earnest” was being produced to wide acclaim on a London stage, a lawsuit brought him to disgrace: “What the law picturesquely calls sodomy was imputed to him. He was sentenced in the end to two years of hard labor for the lesser charge of indecent behavior with men. So much glory has rarely been followed by so much humiliation,” writes Richard Ellmann.

The product of nearly two decades of research and writing completed just before his death, Ellmann’s book is a fascinating, compassionate biography. He writes of Wilde’s childhood, his study of aestheticism, his decadence at Oxford, his custom of living beyond his means.

But it is Wilde’s “late Victorian love affair” with Lord Alfred Douglas and the litigious actions set in motion by Wilde against his lover’s father, which backlashed against Wilde himself, that makes the most compelling reading.

CONDEMNED TO REPETITION

The United States and Nicaragua

by Robert A. Pastor (Princeton University Press: $12.95) Director of Latin American and Caribbean Affairs on the National Security Council from 1977 to 1981, Robert Pastor is uniquely suited to analyze U.S.-Nicaraguan relations during the critical years under the Carter Administration--when dictator Anastasio Somoza was ousted and replaced by the Sandinistas.

Evenhanded in his treatment, Pastor relies on government documents and on interviews with key participants in addition to his own recollections as he describes why “the continuing crisis in Nicaragua” has been mismanaged.

The Carter Administration sought simply to improve human rights under Somoza; the country was not considered a security threat. What is most surprising is how little the United States knew about what was going on in Nicaragua. Even as the Sandinistas were on the verge of toppling Somoza, Pastor and other American officials believed Somoza would survive the violence. Only one member of the Foreign Service lobbied for a more aggressive role: The new Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Pete Vaky, “argued that the United States needed to get in front of events and assemble a coalition government.”

THE RETURN

by Sonia Levitin

(Fawcett Juniper/Ballantine: $2.95) Winner of the PEN Los Angeles Annual Award for Young Adult Fiction, this remarkable novel of a Jewish girl’s escape from her native Ethiopia to Jerusalem will engage readers both young and old.

A small minority in the Ethiopian populace, African Jews are the brunt of widespread prejudice and scorn, blamed for an outbreak of cholera. After three visitors tell Desta and her brother Joas that Jerusalem is not solely a holy city in the Torah but a physical reality and Israel a land “belonging to the Jewish people,” they leave their home for the promised land. “The Return” is the story, simply told, of their journey through Ethiopia to Sudan, of the bandits who kill Joas, of near starvation and dehydration, and perseverance. Once in the Sudan, however, Desta and her little sister become part of a rescue operation--Operation Moses, a secret airlift that removed 8,000 refugees between November, 1984, and January, 1985.

AN URCHIN IN THE STORM

Essays on Books and Ideas

by Stephen Jay Gould (W. W. Norton: $7.95) A brilliant collection of essays, informative and highly readable, on subjects as diverse as evolution and natural selection, biological determinism and the scientific study of time by the geologist and author of “The Panda’s Thumb.”

Using recently released books as the springboard for discussion, Gould writes of the giant panda’s “primary, unsurmountable dilemma of trying to eat bamboo with a carnivore’s digestive tract”; of sociobiology and its crucial difference from molecular biology. He discusses as well the path-breaking work of molecular geneticist Barbara McClintock, the extraordinary black biologist Ernest Everett Just, the “world’s greatest living ecologist” G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the physician Lewis Thomas.

HOLLYWOOD LEGENDS

The Golden Years of

the Hollywood Reporter

by Tichi Wilkerson and Marcia Borie (Tale Weaver Publishing: $14.95) This entertaining hodgepodge of essays, movie reviews and gossip traces the evolution of the studios in the 1930s to the big-screen-vs.-small-screen crisis and censorship in the form of the revised motion picture production code in the 1950s--with chapters titled “Hot Off the Press” providing headline events year by year. First-person accounts by the stars themselves are included as well.

The Reporter rarely criticized its parent industry, although editor William R. Wilkerson “led the crusade” against communism in Hollywood in the 1950s--often to his detriment.