The Well-Read Reveler : Writers and Editors Describe the Agony and the Ecstasy of Book-Giving and Make a Few Suggestions : Editor’s Choice

Magazinedom is a tumultuous middle ground in the world of ideas. Weekly, monthly, and quarterly periodicals swat at intellectual concerns as they ascend from the day-to-day hoopla of television, radio and newspapers toward the loftier realm of books. Then, as the ideas trickle back down in hardcover, magazines review, profile, excerpt and essay themselves into a joyous frenzy.

As gatekeepers, editors at magazines from Life to Microcontamination are deluged by ideas. New books crash over them like waves. Here are some that embedded themselves in these editors’ brains.

* Nancy Evans, editor of Family Life, the new Rolling Stone sibling:

“Childhood’s Future” by Richard Louv (Anchor Books). “Louv makes a lively and persuasive case that the next great movement will be the family liberation movement.”

“A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle and “Stuart Little” by E.B. White. “Read one of your favorite childhood books and return to the wonder of being a kid.”

* Lisa Palac, editor of the slickly erotic Future Sex:

“Two Girls Fat & Thin” by Mary Gaitskill. “I’m so tired of everything having to do with sexuality or eroticism being happy-go-lucky. This (novel) is intense. Raw. Angry. And full of the mystery of the soul. It had a darkness and an edge to it, that’s missing from so much eroticism.”

“A Natural History of the Senses” by Diane Ackerman. “I’d never read anything about our sensual history anywhere. Ackerman had a lot to say about smell--not only about our sexual chemistry, but about how we relate sensually to the world on a day-to-day basis. We get so much of our sense of the world from smell.”

* Marcia Ann Gillespie, editor of Ms.

“The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War” by Cynthia Enloe. “It provides an extremely important feminist analysis of how the world is being reshaped according to the same old militaristic model. What she’s really speaking about are the attempts women are making to have real input into a humanistic approach to international relations.”

“Fire With Fire--The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century” by Naomi Wolf. “I think of it as an extraordinarily optimistic book. One issue feminists need to address is why so many women are locked into that stance, ‘I’m not a feminist but . . .?’ It’s a discussion that needs to be held and needed to be aired by a feminist.”

* Tina Brown, editor of the New Yorker. “Case Closed” by Gerald Posner. “A gripping and original portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald, debunking the conspiracy theories.”

“Lenin’s Tomb--The Last Days of the Soviet Empire” by David Remnick. “Vivid and fresh--the best examination of Russia and a revolution since 10 Days that Shook the World.”

“A Violent Act” by Alec Wilkinson. “It’s a haunting and sensitive account of the tragic aftermath of a crime.”

* T.H. Watkins, editor of the Wilderness Society’s journal Wilderness.

“The Book of the Month Club asked me to write an introduction for a compilation: Wallace Stegner’s ‘Wolf Willow,’ Wright Morris’ ‘Will’s Boy,’ and Ivan Doig’s ‘This House of Sky,’ and I fell in love with the books again.

“The triumph of these books is not just that they give us a measure of truth about living in the West, it’s that by doing so they transcend regionalism. They tell us not just about childhood in the middle of a challenging landscape, but about childhood as a function of life--of all the strands of love, resentment, hatred, compassion, hope and despair that bind a child to that often tortured biological unit called a family.”

* Henry Louis Gates, Jr., editor of the quarterly international journal Transition.

“Keeping Faith” by Cornel West. “It shows a razor-sharp mind ranging across so many topics and disciplines. Even though it hasn’t gotten the sort of popular attention that his best-selling ‘Race Matters’ has received, it better represents the breadth of his intellectual contributions on the subject of philosophy, race and power in America.”

“Cultural Capital” by John Guillory. “Rips the lid off the ‘canon’ debates as far as I’m concerned.”

* Jeffrey Klein, editor of the rabble-rousing Mother Jones.

“Preparing for the 21st Century” by Paul Kennedy and “The Passion of the Western Mind” by Richard Tarnas. “They’re both lucid survey books, both comprehensive and apocalyptic. The Paul Kennedy book analyzes the problems facing our planet, most notably the dismal global consequences of population growth.

“The Tarnas book shows how the Western mind has been forced, under duress, to enlarge its understanding of the world . . . it shows that human intellect can evolve. So it’s a good tonic to Kennedy’s Malthusian gloom.”

* Jeffrey Kittay, editor of Lingua Franca, a journal that makes academia fun.

“French Lessons: A Memoir” by Alice Kaplan. “It consists of autobiographical sketches by a professor of romance studies at Duke University, who gets a sense of herself by means of the particular set of intellectual concerns she’s chosen to pursue. Along the way of remembering, she discovers how much of the negotiation between the personal and the scholarly has been below the level of her consciousness.”

* Kevin Kelly, editor of Wired, a chronicle of the computer culture.

“Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson. “It’s a zany look at the future, taking it beyond Bill Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer.’ Instead of cyberspace, people dip in and out of the metaverse, the virtual world you enter into with goggles and gloves. Everyone works for the Mafia . . . It contains great ideas about America as a franchise: Highways banks, prisons, the police are all franchised out to companies.”

“Virtual Communities” by Howard Rheingold. “This is nonfiction, a sketch of the emerging network culture--the emerging digital landscape of various kinds of social relations connecting everybody to everybody electronically.”