THE SUNDAY EASTER EGG HUNT

The Easter Bunny, who hides his treasured eggs in the most unlikely places, has learned this skill by hunting for the Book Review in our fine Times.

EARL SCOTT, CHATSWORTH

Editor’s note: We have been bouncing around a bit. Earthquake damage to The Times’ Chatsworth plant affected the paper’s printing schedule for a few days. Sunday, Jan. 23, Book Review was printed upside down inside the Calendar Section, but we’re back to our regular place with the Travel section. Thanks for bearing with us.

A QUITE ACCEPTABLE PREFECT

I would suspect that “the passion of the little scrubby schoolboy” (“Daphne Du Maurier,” Dec. 26) was probably for a sixth-form prefect . . . perfect or not.

LEE MENDELL, CAMARILLO

It has been almost 50 years since I was a British schoolgirl. If my memory serves me correctly after all these years, a pupil in the sixth form was in the final year before leaving (secondary grammar) for university. Being a prefect meant one was a pupil in charge of other pupils (a monitor). To be a head prefect as a sixth-former was an honor indeed. Having had a few schoolgirl crushes on a handsome sixth-former or two, it therefore stood out like a sore thumb to read the, presumably, typographical error in your review of “Daphne Du Maurier”. The word perfect should have read prefect in the quoted remark, “I was like a little scrubby schoolboy with a passion for a sixth-form perfect. . . .”

JACQUELINE STERN, LOS ANGELES

TONY WHO?

Who is this “Tony Kensington” fellow, anyway? The Jan. 9, 1994, review of “Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell” mentions that “Bell relocated . . . from Tony Kensington to bustling Bloomsbury.” None of the other works about the Bloomsbury group even mention this man. Is this a new literary find, or have the illiteracy gremlins been at work on the Book Review presses again?

LEONORA HOLDER, LONG BEACH

TURNING THE TABLES AROUND

I really enjoyed both the scathing review of Michael Crichton’s new novel, “Disclosure” (Jan. 16), but especially Patt Morrison’s. How well she puts it: It’s a case of Man Bites Dog (or Woman Bites Man) and it’s always the exception rather than the rule that becomes popular in our culture. The shame of it all is that in the coffee-houses and bookstores of Los Angeles, feminist writers and poets are reading their personal accounts of harassment and other persecutions and nobody is offering them three-and-a-half mil for the movie rights.

Or even the book rights.

LYNNE BRONSTEIN, SANTA MONICA

Occasionally, in “The Book Review,” critics describe a character in a book as a nymphomaniac. (Chris Goodrich describing Anais Nin in a book by Noel Riley Fitch reviewed on Dec. 26, 1993). I’m intrigued. What would a male be called with the same characteristics? A rogue? A sex addict? There’s something derogative, out of control, unable to satisfy, implied in the word nymphomaniac. Perhaps people using that term are sexists.

DONNA M. WILSON, LOS ANGELES

GANGSTERS WITH CONSCIENCE

Greg Donaldson writes (“The Ville,” Book Review, Jan. 16) that in the ‘20s and ‘30s Brownsville was dangerous and an area that Jews labored to leave. We who lived there in the ‘20s and ‘30s can safely say we didn’t know what crime was. True, Murder, Inc. was there, but they never bothered the people who lived there, and I don’t know of any family that moved from that area in those years.

SIDNEY LAZAROW, ORANGE

WESTERN WARFARE

Regarding your review of “A Case for the Warrior Culture” by William Broyles (Dec. 19).

Whoa, whoa is the state of American intellectualism when writers like Broyles abuse the readability of your publication with such blithe misstatements as citing the Arab Revolt, the Little Big Horn and Isandhlwana as “victories” of primitive warfare techniques over Western techniques. All three of Broyles’ example of victories were achieved by primitive cultures using Western techniques of concentration of mass, battle to annihilation and superior fire power. Also, these were victories that the Zulu at Isandhlwana and the Sioux and Cheyenne at Little Big Horn never recovered from.

Perhaps the example that Broyles was seeking was the military history of the Apache; they never adopted Western warfare techniques (indeed, they never had enough manpower to do so) and they were among the last to offer organized resistance to the Western culture that encroached on them.

The question is, why did Broyles choose examples that obviously run counter to his argument?

ROBERT J. CANTOR, HERMOSA BEACH

LOST IN THE TRANSLATION

Books written originally in another language don’t turn into English by themselves. Gregory Rabassa, translator of Jorge Amado’s “The War of the Saints,” is identified above the review (Book Review Jan. 2), but nobody (apparently) translated Italo Calvino’s “The Road to San Giovanni” reviewed in the same issue (In Brief).

ALICE CAMPBELL ROMANO, LOS ANGELES

Tim Parks translated Italo Calvino’s “The Road to San Giovanni” from the Italian.

NOT A PERSONALITY CONTEST

Regarding the comments made by John Yau in his Dec. 26, 1993, review of “The Persistence of Memory: A Biography of Dali” by Meredith Etherington-Smith: If the screening criteria for being an artist (according to Yau) are not having the characteristics of being entertaining, obnoxious, self-serving and opportunistic, then most of the museum halls would be empty. Similarly, there may be relatively few art critics!

DON H. BUCK, WESTLAKE VILLAGE

STUDDED WITH SUPERLATIVES

Thank you for the well considered review of William Gaddis’ “A Frolic of His Own” by Richard Eder (The Book Review, Jan. 9, 1994). However, I think that Eder is being intellectually dishonest and shallow by ending his review on a carping note rather than coming out and saying that this novel is among the best American novels published in the last 25 years.

While the sports page and entertainment sections of your paper are studded with superlatives (“The wonders of football’s most enigmatic quarterback never cease.” “Cracker-jack visceral filmmaking.’) why can’t one of your best book reviewers drop his pretensions for a moment and honestly enthuse “A Frolic of His Own” is a magnificent, extraordinary novel, a 10-Plus on anyone’s scale?

TIM CONLEY, MONTEREY PARK

INFORMATION SOUGHT

For a book I am writing on the making of “Hercules in New York,” which was Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first film, I would appreciate hearing from any cast, crew members, production company and others involved, whom I have not yet interviewed, who would be willing to share their experience and anecdotes with me, its associate/line producer.

WILLARD (BILL) GOODMAN, 6200 VISTA DEL MAR, PLAYA DEL REY CA. 90293

Attention, women of World War II! I want your wartime memories, your joys, sorrows and experiences for a book written about the women who experienced this war from around the world. Please send recollections, copies of wartime correspondence and photographs. These cannot be returned.

E. L. SHEPARD, 3435 OCEAN PARK BLVD., SUITE 206, SANTA MONICA 90405