CAMPING WITH THE PRINCE AND OTHER TALES...

CAMPING WITH THE PRINCE AND OTHER TALES OF SCIENCE IN AFRICA by Thomas Bass (Penguin: $9.95). In this eminently readable travelogue, Bass wanders through Africa, especially the region of the Great Rift Valley, to study how science is helping--and hindering--development there. Many of the most ambitious aid programs designed by foreigners have proven disastrous because they failed to consider the idiosyncratic local conditions. Tractors have destroyed the friable soil in Mali, reducing once-fertile land to a glazed, virtually impenetrable surface. Damming the continent’s major rivers sounded good on paper, but the artificial lakes created by the dams provide an ideal breeding ground for the parasites that cause river blindness. Not all the news is bad: Bass describes an inexpensive insect trap in Kenya that controls tsetse flies more effectively than aerial spraying with DDT, and writes with contagious enthusiasm about the research being done on cilchid fish in Lake Malawi. An informative and often ironic view of the collision between the technocratic ideas of the industrialized nations and the particularist traditions of the Third World.

* AH, SWEET MYSTERY OF LIFE by Roald Dahl, illustrated by John Lawrence (Penguin: $4.95). This collection of tongue-in-cheek stories is based on the author’s experiences in rural England immediately after World War II. The genially low-life poachers and amateur dog racers that Dahl describes suggest a rustic version of Andy Capp, only funny. In the title story, a dairy farmer stumbles onto the secret of sexually selective cattle breeding, and his discoveries prove to be more all-encompassing than the narrator imagined. The village ne’er-do-well tries to follow the traditional family profession of poaching--and meets with a success that exceeds his dreams in the delightfully ironic “The Champion of the World.” In Dahl’s world, no bad deed goes unrewarded.

* WRITIN’ IS FIGHTIN’: Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper by Ishmael Reed (Antheneum: $9.95). The outspoken black writer assumes a pugnacious stance in this collection of miscellaneous essays: “Like the black bear and the North American wolf, the black male in the United States has been the subject of dangerous myths that often, as in the case of the bear and the wolf, lead people to shoot first and ask questions later.” Reed’s anger infuses his prose with a righteous eloquence when he excoriates the drug traffic that destroys once-pleasant neighborhoods--and the law-enforcement programs that fail to check what amounts to an occupying army of dealers, thugs and users. Reed compares himself to a boxer, but he sometimes swings wildly, e.g. attributing the notorious Salem witch hysteria to the Puritans’ “encounter with the calypso culture of Barbados.” His indictments of many aspects of life in contemporary America often are telling, but Reed sometimes seems a bit too eager to clean the clock of anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him.

* THE LIVING OCEAN: Understanding and Protecting Marine Biodiversity by Boyce Thorne-Miller and John Catena (Island Press: $10.95). Most recent ecological writing has focused on the problems of terrestrial environments, especially the destruction of the tropical rain forests. Thorne-Miller and Catena argue that the diverse marine environments that constitute nearly two-thirds of this watery planet are more fragile, more threatened and, in many ways, more vital to the survival of life. Relatively few ecological studies have been done on marine communities, many of which are exceedingly complex. (Although scientists have identified more terrestrial species of animals and plants, the oceans contain more kingdoms and phylla.) Overfishing, development of coastal regions and various forms of pollution already have taken a heavy toll in many areas. As marine environments tend to be relatively stable, the inhabitants adapt to external changes more slowly than their terrestrial counterparts: Thorne-Miller and Catena argue that “It is the rate of change we are inflicting, even more than the changes themselves, that will lead to biological devastation.” A disturbing, thought-provoking book.

* THE UMBRELLA TREE by Rose Zwi (Penguin: $6.95). This modest novel brings home the grim realities of life in Soweto during the 1976 protests over the quality and nature of the education that children were receiving. The eponymous Umbrella Tree, the lone element of beauty in a blighted region, grows in the yard of a kind and aged couple. Joseph, their grandson, sees his talent being wasted under apartheid, and hopes the revolution will bring him the freedom he needs to blossom as a writer. He views the wife and mother of a noted white anti-government activist with suspicion when they come to visit. But when the old Jewish woman begins to sing Yiddish songs of love and sorrow, the music forges a spontaneous bond between her and Joseph’s reclusive, embittered uncle. Joseph begins to realize that even in South Africa, enmity is a question of attitude, not color, and that the human soul can transcend even the cruelest repression. The revolution he will help to forge will have a nobler aim than vengeance.

* EXPATRIATE PARIS: A Cultural and Literary Guide to Paris of the 1920s by Arlen Hansen (Arcade: $11.95); PARIS PORTRAITS, RENOIR TO CHANEL: Walks on the Right Bank by Mary Ellen Jordan Haight (Gibbs-Smith: $12.95, illustrated); PARISWALKS by Alison and Sonia Landes (Henry Holt: $12.95, illustrated). If you feel that although you’ve seen a lot and heard a lot and learned a lot, you don’t know Paree, these three books can fill some of the gaps in your knowledge. Arlen Hansen’s specialized guide is sure to delight the tourist who wants to believe that Paris really was a moveable feast. In addition to such famous sites as Les Deux Magots, Shakespeare and Company and Michaud’s (where Hemingway and Fitzgerald reportedly visited the men’s room to discuss the “matter of measurements”), Hansen includes a number of more obscure addresses (e.g. the old American Chamber of Commerce at 32 rue Taitbout, where Walter Berry once presided). Mary Haight offers carefully detailed directions (“Walk just north around the corner of the rue d’Amsterdam to the first cafe across from the station”), but her discussions of the sights of Paris are superficial and often downright silly. At the residence of Jules Verne (18 boulevard Poissonniere), she refers to the film of “Around the World in 80 Days” and notes that the author often visited nearby brothels. Proust is described as “the effete snob author” who wrote on “Remembrances of Things Past”--presumably not long before Hemingway penned “A Farewell to Arm.” The mother-daughter team of Alison and Sonia Landes offer an informal, conversational guide to their favorite places in the pleasant, if not terribly deep, “Pariswalks.” However, none of these volumes can match Richard Wurman’s estimable “Paris Access.”