NONFICTION - June 6, 1993

FROM WHERE WE STAND by Deborah Tall (Knopf: $22; 238 pp.). Deborah Tall’s Jewish grandparents fled Russia and Eastern Europe. Her parents, reacting to their forced nomadic existence, chose the aggressive stability of the suburbs--which left Tall to search for some place that seemed like a real home. She and her husband traveled to upstate New York to teach at a college there, and settled at the edge of one of the finger lakes, in a depressed area where a car engine hangs from a front yard tree, “eerily resembling a deer carcass from afar, except it doesn’t rot and stays there for more than a year.” They decide to have children, and, two daughters later, move closer to civilization. The journey is a fascinating one, meandering stubbornly at its own pace, wandering from Tall’s own observations to historical passages about the place, to researched musings on the significance of the physical setting in which we choose to live our lives. She finds wonderful factoids: In 1976, the man who ran McDonald’s in Japan predicted, “If we eat hamburgers for a thousand years we will become blond. And when we become blond, we can conquer the world.” Where have we heard that before?