MAKING SENSE <i> by Ellen Goodman (Penguin: $9.95)</i>

Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellen Goodman struggles to make sense of the follies and fads of contemporary American culture in this collection of her syndicated columns. She reflects on the confusion over gender roles, the shifting definition of what constitutes a good life and the ever-changing crazes in food and nutrition. Goodman writes with intelligence and exceptional clarity, but with a strong liberal bias. She makes no bones about her loathing of the “pro-life” rhetoric of anti-abortionists, especially when they place the “rights” of the fetus before those of the mother, and lampoons the incongruity of the federal government simultaneously subsidizing the price of tobacco and declaring war on drugs. The weakness in these pungent essays is a feminism that causes Goodman to describe every woman (except Mayflower Madam Sydney Biddle Barrows) as a victim, rather than a perpetrator of criminal and/or stupid behavior. Hedda Nussbaum, Jessica Hahn and Fawn Hall hardly seem to qualify as victims.