BOOK REVIEW : Traveling Through the American Dream : A SENSE OF PLACE: Listening to Americans, <i> by David Lamb</i> , Times Books $22, 290 pages

David Lamb is a foreign correspondent who has filed dispatches from some of the most exotic datelines around the world, mostly as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. His new book, however, is a homecoming, a kind of state-of-the-union address that comes from the American heartland--and the heart.

“A Sense of Place” is a memoir fashioned out of sketches and profiles that reflect two decades of thoughtful wandering over the back roads and backwaters of the American landscape.

Lamb seems to have gone in search of the mythic figures of our culture--the cowboy, the baseball player, the hobo--but what he found is the flesh-and-blood reality of American life in the late 20th Century.

Lamb views the American landscape with a sophisticated eye. He likens the vast stretches of the American West to “The Empty Quarter” of Saudi Arabia, and a town in Alaska reminded him “more of the Third World than it did the United States.”

As a seasoned observer of foreign intrigue, he is sensitive to the politics of ordinary life: “If people aren’t ‘like-minded,’ ” he remarks during a visit to a hamlet in rural Maine, “small towns can be cruel.” And he points out that Alaska, the last remnant of the American frontier, is dominated by an aristocracy of grizzled old-timers:

“If prestige is equated with money in Los Angeles, with political power in Washington, D.C., and with family heritage in Boston, what counts in Alaska is longevity.”

Lamb may be a serious student of American folkways--he invokes Tocqueville and Twain, Kerouac and Steinbeck, L’Amour and Didion--but he does not lack a sense of humor.

For example, Lamb moseys out to Tombstone, Ariz., to find the lawman who wears the badge and the gun in town nowadays. The tourists may flock to the OK Corral, as Lamb discovered, but it’s soft duty for the latter-day frontier marshal: the dispatcher quits at 1 a.m., and the town hasn’t seen a shooting since two men got into a drunken brawl a couple of years back.

“A Sense of Place” puts us back in touch with some of the most familiar themes and settings of our history and culture. But now and then, Lamb comes up with a story that is truly startling precisely because it draws on some unsuspected vein of American experience.

At Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., for example, he comes across the graves of 14 German prisoners-of-war who were hanged shortly after the end of War World II--and he introduces us to an otherwise ordinary fellow who has made it his life’s work to call attention to how these men became the only prisoners of war ever executed in the United States.

Only rarely does Lamb encounter someone whose name you will already know. He reveals the curious fate of Glenn Yarborough, a man who made a fortune as a folk singer and then gave it away in order to pursue a life on the high seas. And he finds his way to one of his childhood heroes--Hurricane Bob Hazle, a slugger for the Milwaukee Braves during the 1950s--whom we meet as an aging traveling salesman peddling whiskey on the back roads of South Carolina.

“You know what’s hot now?” reflects the bemused ballplayer in disgust. “Peach schnapps.”

Lamb does not ignore the miseries of the American experience in the late 20th Century. He introduces us to a support group in Colorado for friends and relations who have lost a loved one to suicide. He finds his way to a physician in Alaska who specializes in treating “SAD”--Seasonal Affective Disorder, a peculiar form of melancholy that strikes during the long, dark winter. And he allows us to hear the complaints of a hard-bitten Montana cattle rancher for whom nouvelle cuisine is a matter of economic hardship.

“For a while, every paper you picked up, someone was figuring beef caused this and beef caused that,” says the rancher. “You wondered if people were going to plumb stop eating beef.”

Lamb is passionate on the subject of baseball and he draws on his earlier travels on the minor-league circuit to show us the most American of pastimes from an odd angle. For example, he travels to Florida for spring training in the company of a man who sells the mud used to take the shine off a new baseball.

“Don’t think I’m going to talk about how the mud’s made,” the wary old man warns him, “because I’m not.”

At the end of his travels in search of America, Lamb declares us to be in better spiritual health than his fellow journalists may suspect. “The American character,” he insists, is defined “not by language or color or opinions but by sharing a dream.” And the dream, Lamb insists, is still strong.

“I have seen it on the battlefields of Vietnam and the Middle East, in the prairie towns of the Dakotas and along the long, lonely byways that cut through the heartland of a great nation,” he writes. “From all these places I came away convinced that, however wrenching our problems, the America of the 1990s is an achievement to be celebrated, not lamented.”