PERESTROIKANew Thinking for Our Country and the...

PERESTROIKA

New Thinking for Our Country and the World by Mikhail Gorbachev (A Cornelia and Michael Bessie Book / Harper & Row: $8.95)

Mikhail Gorbachev’s remarkable manifesto “Perestroika” (or restructuring ) criticizes the “hard legacy of stagnation” of the Soviet economy.

“Parallel with the democratization of society, radical economic reform is the groundwork of our entire perestroika,” reads the Resolution of the 19th All-Union Conference of the CPSU included in this new edition. “New democratic methods of leadership, openness and glasnost find it hard to make their way, coming up against conservatism, inertia and dogmatism in thinking and society.”

Furthermore, “there can be no revolutionary restructuring without invigorating in every way the intellectual and cultural potential of society.”

One of the dictums in this edition’s “On Combating Bureaucracy” takes independent thinking to new limits: “Satire, as a weapon against . . . manifestations of bureaucratic attitudes, . . . should be used to full measure.”

BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM

The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson (Ballantine Books: $14.95) Drawing directly from the official records of the Union and Confederate armies as well as the diaries of leaders and soldiers published more than a century ago, James M. McPherson vividly recaptures a soldier’s thoughts during the Civil War as well as extensively delineating the war’s numerous “dynamic transformations.”

“We heard all through the war that the army ‘was eager to be led against the enemy,’ ” a Union soldier wrote about the fighting at Antietam. “The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shots are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion . . . of the average man is to get out of the way.”

Most compelling is McPherson’s well-supported thesis that “at numerous critical points during the war things might have gone altogether differently.” Even as late as 1864, the North came to the brink of peace negotiations--that is, until the capture of Atlanta and the destruction of the South’s army in the Shenandoah Valley “clinched matters for the North.”

THE IMMORTAL BARTFUSS

by Aharon Appelfeld; translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green (Perennial Library / Harper & Row: $7.95) A Holocaust survivor and now a moneylender in Jaffa, Bartfuss has little patience for words or conversation; he avoids or ignores old acquaintances, and is unable to sleep. He even hates his own wife, a fellow survivor of the death camps, for her voluble reaffirmation of life.

But his solitary life is shaken when real illness strikes him.

Only then does Bartfuss begin to show some emotion: He apologizes to a man whom he had beaten physically; he genuinely mourns the death of a lover. But his sexuality takes an unhealthy turn when he grows attracted to his own retarded daughter.

Aharon Appelfeld writes sparingly, obliquely in this brief novel, justly rendering the shell of a damaged man who regains in the end some semblance of humanity.

MAYER AND THALBERG

The Make-Believe Saints by Samuel Marx (Samuel French: $12.95) Introductions like Samuel Marx’s into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios generally only happen on the movie screen. Marx accidentally ran into Irving Thalberg, whom he had known at Universal Pictures, on 54th Street in New York. Thalberg was now production head of MGM and said in passing, “Why don’t you try screen writing? . . . Come to the coast.” A few months later Marx did just that.

“If you’d shown up yesterday, I’d have given you an assignment and forgotten about you. If you’d arrived tomorrow, the position would have been filled,” Thalberg tells Marx when the studio guard finally lets him through. The story editor at MGM had just resigned and Marx was to take his place.

Marx was story editor from 1930 to 1936, then a producer, working for MGM on and off for 13 years.

Of Louis B. Mayer, Marx writes: “The truth about Mayer doesn’t come easily. Without doubt he was violent when roused, ruthless when crossed, a battler often without pity. . . . But he had another dimension.” Marx’s treatment of Thalberg, a younger man with whose death at 36 the book concludes, is equally balanced.

As Wayne Warga wrote in his review for The Times in 1975, “Marx substitutes reportage for veneration and he gets right to the point. That he also is candid is simply an added benefit of this carefully written history.”

CHATTERTON

by Peter Ackroyd (Ballantine Books: $8.95)

The brief, tragic life of Thomas Chatterton was the inspiration for works by such Romantic poets as Keats and Wordsworth. Best known for a literary hoax (Chatterton counterfeited a series of poems by an imaginary 15th-Century monk), Chatterton’s own writings never found a publisher, and at 18 he killed himself.

Chatterton and his forgery haunt Peter Ackroyd’s novel as well. The opening section is set in contemporary London, where Charles Wychwood discovers that Chatterton had forged his own death and in fact lived on to write the poems attributed to William Blake and others. Another portion of the book tells of a different kind of forgery, as George Wallis paints “The Death of Chatterton” using the poet George Meredith as his model.

“At the heart of Ackroyd’s novel is a deeply serious concern with art, its relationship to the artist and to ‘reality,’ ” Paul D. Sheats wrote in these pages.