WHEN CHILDREN WANT CHILDREN : The Urban Crisis of Childbearing <i> by Leon Dash (William Morrow: $18.95) </i>

Many poor black kids in America have perfected a tough street demeanor to hide--from themselves and society--the fact that they are actually among our nation’s most alienated and disenfranchised citizens. “When Children Want Children” provides a rare opportunity to look behind this facade of violence (often the only aspect of ghetto life to make the nightly news) and witness a drama more telling, and thus more poignant, than that played out in the streets.

For several months Washington Post reporter Leon Dash lived in a roach-infested apartment in one of Washington D.C.’s poorest neighborhoods, talking informally with several families about problems of violence, loneliness and sexual abuse. Most affecting is Dash’s portrait of the children of Lillian Williams. Charlie III, for instance, traces his ever-present anger back to the day when he graduated from sixth grade. He waited patiently for his mother to congratulate him while she consoled his sister Theresa, who was in tears after finding out that she had failed her year in school. Instead of praising him, though, his mother told his sister, “Don’t worry Theresa, Charlie will fail, too.” (Charlie did just that in the seventh grade, dropping out of school by the time he was 16.)

While Dash writes less about the urban crisis of childbearing than about the panoply of obstacles ensnaring young black Americans (from cycles of cruelty in which the abused become abusers to a widespread lack of self-esteem), he does discover a surprising fact about teen-age childbearing. The women he met were not, as many of us might have suspected, ignorant or careless about birth control; they intentionally became pregnant, Dash writes, because they saw a baby as “a tangible achievement in an otherwise dreary and empty future. It is one way of announcing: ‘I am a woman.’ ”

“When Children Want Children” ends, unfortunately, without suggesting how we might reverse the alarming social trends reported here, such as the threefold increase from 1960-83 in the number of infants born yearly to unmarried teen-agers (from 91,700 to 270,076). In particular one wishes Dash would have investigated whether the U.S. social services cut drastically in recent years might have mitigated these urban ills. This book remains quite powerful, though, calling attention to problems that this “kinder, gentler nation” cannot afford to ignore.

THE EVOLUTION OF SEX edited by George Stevens and Robert Bellig (Harper & Row: $19.95) More demanding than most popular science texts, this book, based on a 1987 Nobel Conference in Minnesota, will compel non-specialists to leaf through the book’s glossary for explanations of terms such as Gnetales and propagule . But in return, “The Evolution of Sex,” bereft of the dreamy philosophizing that dilutes many popular science books, will give readers a first-hand account of how visionary anthropologists and biologists attempt to unravel the many remaining mysteries of the natural world.

The sex of the title is not the safe sex, sexual abuse and sex offenders of the news media, but the sexual reproduction that helps an organism ensure the survival of its genes. Sexual reproduction is hardly the most efficient way for an organism to do this, British biologist John Maynard Smith writes in a seminal essay, for sex taints the purity of an organism’s genes by mixing them with those of the opposite sex. And yet if sex didn’t have at least some advantages over asexual reproduction (where organisms usually produce offspring genetically identical to themselves), then natural selection long ago would have eliminated it. Smith thus sets out to target these advantages, from the well-known (Sexual reproduction may be nature’s way of responding to a changing environment by getting rid of deleterious genes that would have been passed on in asexual reproduction) to the more controversial (Sex might help repair damaged DNA molecule strands).

This book’s liveliest section features a panel debate between science theologian Philip Hefner and his atheistic colleagues, who sense that he is arguing, as Katharine Hepburn did, that “Nature is what we are put in this world to rise above.” Biology professor Lynn Margulis offers a more cynical view of humanity’s role in evolution, likening people to “great mammalian weeds, in the sense that our human populations grow quickly and alter the environment beyond recognition by anything but cockroaches, rats, Coke bottles, and beer cans . . . If you want to laud human culture for these ‘achievements,’ then we are in big trouble.” Hefner persuasively counters Margulis, however, arguing that human culture, like human biology, has its own “entropic randomization,” evolving through the clash of ideas about “how society should be maintained, how slave and free, Jew and Greek, men and women, should interrelate.”

PHOTOJOURNALISM/13 Newspaper and Magazine Pictures of the Year edited by Bob Lynn (Running Press Book Publishers, 125 S. 22nd St., Philadelphia, PA 19103: $16.95, paper) This collection of often powerful visual art suggests that even in an an era when reality is conveyed through high-resolution stereo TV, the still photograph can more than hold its own as a viable documentary form. As the pace of modern life becomes more frantic, in fact, thoughtful photographs can give us a rare opportunity to stop and study a moment in events that usually pass in a blur. Not all of the award-winning photos collected here by the National Press Photographers Assn. and the University of Missouri School of Journalism are telling or original. Some photos chronicle violence without evoking pathos and others seem to do little more than gratify the worst of our voyeuristic impulses: a series of three photographs, for example, chronicles the handgun suicide of Pennsylvania State Treasurer R. Budd Dwyer. Most of these photos, however, lend a sense of immediacy to the stories they accompany, and a few suggest ineffable truths of their own: In one, for instance, a toddler looks up in awe at a dozen TV monitors projecting the same image of Oliver North.

JERUSALEM ON EARTH People, Passions and Politics in the Holy City by Abraham Rabinovich (The Free Press: $19.95) It is no wonder that loyal Israeli writers such as Abraham Rabinovich are now looking to Jerusalem for inspiration, for the city illustrates, at a time when tensions in the occupied territories are at an all-time high, that Israel has had at least some success in managing relations between Arabs and Jews. Rabinovich, a staff writer at the Jerusalem Post, lyrically depicts the delicate balances that “creatively modulate tension” in the holy city: Jerusalem offers residents a degree of safety unmatched in most world cities, for instance, but the possibility of terrorism or war is something the authorities prepare for as they prepare for rain runoff or the outbreak of a fire. Guns are everywhere (inside banks, one can see civilians with automatic rifles waiting in line at a teller’s window without drawing a glance from the guard), and yet the city’s per capita rate of gun-related deaths is dramatically lower than that of Los Angeles.

Rabinovich offers colorful profiles of the often eccentric Israeli officials responsible for maintaining Jerusalem’s equilibrium, but most moving is his account of the friendship in the late 1960s between an Arab and Jewish family who settled on different sides of the barbed wire and military blockhouses that once divided Jerusalem into Arab and Jewish sectors. After the two families have silently observed each other for weeks, the mother of the Jewish family asks Abu, the Arab father, for a few of the “pretty anemones” he is picking. Abu reaches through the barbed wire and hands her a bouquet. By the time the barrier is removed following Israel’s Six Day War with Egypt, the two families have become close, baking bread for each other and going to the movies together.

Rabinovich begins and ends “Jerusalem on Earth” with this story, using its moral (as the Jewish father says, “We’re all human beings”) to suggest that this spirit of peaceful co-existence should continue. Sadly, though, Rabinovich’s conclusion underestimates the intractability of Jerusalem’s problems. Rabinovich reports that Arabs and Jews find themselves laughing at the same jokes and thinking in remarkably similar ways in Hebrew language classes and other occasions where religion and politics are set aside. Most of the time, however, despite Rabinovich’s eloquent and symbolically charged depiction of the removal of the wall separating Jerusalem, the city remains divided in spirit. Rabinovich himself only covers his side of the city, not profiling Arabs with much intimacy and writing in prose that subtly reflects the official Israeli point of view: “The Knesset . . . annexed former Jordanian territory,” he says, for example, when in fact it was Jordanian territory, not “former Jordanian territory,” that had been taken.