RACHEL AND HER CHILDREN Homeless Families in...

RACHEL AND HER CHILDREN Homeless Families in America by Jonathan Kozol (Fawcett Columbine: $8.95)

According to Jonathan Kozol, in New York City in 1986 there were reportedly 28,000 homeless people in emergency shelters, with an estimated additional 40,000 unsheltered citywide. Many of the families with whom Kozol spoke do not fit the expected stereotype: Many had been evicted from their homes for not meeting mortgage payments because of layoffs or bankruptcy from extensive medical costs.

“We have no hope . . . nowhere to go,” the Rachel of the title told Kozol. “Can you let the government know that we exist?”

Beyond the heart-rending personal testimony of families stationed in shelters or hotels, the book is an indictment of the government’s neglect of the growing crisis, as it cut “virtually all funds to build or rehabilitate low-income housing.”

“We’re getting out of the housing business. Period,” said a Housing and Urban Development deputy assistant secretary in 1985.

“If (Kozol) is supremely lucky,” Times reviewer Garry Abrams wrote, “the book will prove strong enough to become . . . what Michael Harrington’s ‘The Other America’ was more than 20 years ago--a call to conscience that stimulated new national policies and helped kick off a new era.”

PRATER VIOLET A Novel by Christopher Isherwood (Michael di Capua Books/ Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $5.95)

Ostensibly autobiographical (Christopher Isherwood narrates, with characteristic amusement and charm), “Prater Violet” tells the story of a young British screenwriter’s induction into the chaotic and often hilarious world of film making (specifically, adapting a musical, the title’s “Prater Violet,” into a full-length motion picture vehicle for a tempestuous Austrian director).

Isherwood is the classic naif, all-seeing, eminently agreeable as he is pushed, pulled and alternately ignored as the film script he has composed lurches into production.

In the end, the movie will be a success; the director, the stars move on to other enterprises. Isherwood, fortunately for us, returns to prose fiction and memoir, and, when “Prater Violet” comes to a nearby theater, he cannot bring himself to see it.

(Several of Isherwood’s other works, including “My Guru and His Disciple,” “Christopher and His Kind” and “The Memorial,” have been reissued by Noonday / Michael di Capua / Farrar, Straus & Giroux.)

THE STRANGE NATION OF RAFAEL MENDES by Moacyr Scliar (Ballantine Books: $4.95)

Rafael Mendes awakens one morning in Sao Paolo dreading to hear reports exposing the near-failure of his finance company.

What he discovers instead is a package delivered to him containing yellowing notebooks and clothes that belonged to his estranged father, now dead, which leads him to a genealogist and the revelation that his family is actually Jewish--having become “New Christians” during the Spanish Inquisition.

Soon, strange dreams begin, featuring the faces and histories of ancestors such as the biblical prophet Jonah, the Spanish physician Maimonides and a slew of Rafael Mendeses.

“Reading ‘The Strange Nation of Rafael Mendes’ is like riding with a friend who drives recklessly,” Mark R. Day wrote in these pages. “The novel lurches forward unexpectedly . . . dangerously skirting precipices separating the plausible from the absurd.” It’s frustrating at times, “but exhilarating and ultimately rewarding.”

MONTESSORI A Modern Approach by Paula Polk Lillard (Schocken Books: $8.95)

Education, as defined by turn-of-the-century educator Maria Montessori, means “a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and . . . acquired not by listening to words but by experiences.”

Paula Polk Lillard’s “Montessori,” first published in 1973, is particularly relevant today in view of many parents’ ambitious and often counterproductive expectations for their children. The once-controversial Montessori philosophy appears far more reasonable: “It takes into account the child’s instinct and legitimate need for purposeful activity,” not permitting adults to exploit the child’s talents.

TELL ME A RIDDLE by Tillie Olsen (Delta / Seymour Lawrence: $7.95)

Tillie Olsen’s excellence lies particularly in her ability to capture the modes of speech of characters of all ages. In this collection of short fiction, Olsen eloquently portrays the destitution and struggle of the Depression years in a mother’s thoughts of her daughter’s childhood (“She was a child seldom smiled at . . . a child of anxious, not proud, love”); the slurred speech of a sailor on shore leave (“Wha’s it so quiet for? Hey, hit the tune box . . . wha time’s it anyway?”) or the words of 12-year-old Parrie about her favorite teacher (“She’s my most, wish I could get her but she only teaches ‘celerated”).

Most evocative of all is the title novella, the final bout between a couple married 47 years (“Vinegar he poured on me all his life; I am well marinated; how can I be honey now?”), which won the O. Henry Award in 1961.