Can’t Put Down C-SPAN’s ‘Booknotes’ : Expect testimonials when TV’s only regular national books-and-authors show celebrates its 5th anniversary Sunday. The praise will be deserved.

Harry Truman’s idea of heaven was “a good, comfortable armchair and a good reading lamp and a stack of new history and biography that he wanted to read,” said David McCullough, author of “Truman,” a fat best-selling biography of the nation’s 33rd President.

McCullough didn’t say it to Letterman. He didn’t say it to Leno. He didn’t say it to Arsenio. He didn’t say it to Oprah or Sally Jessy Raphael or Regis and Kathie Lee.

As if they’d care in the first place.

He said it to Brian P. Lamb.

Lamb is not only chairman and chief executive officer of C-SPAN but also host of C-SPAN’s “Booknotes,” television’s only regular weekly national program devoted to authors and their books. The series marks its fifth birthday Sunday with a two-hour retrospective featuring excerpts from past shows and brief blurbs from Lamb, producer Sarah Trahern, authors and others. Expect the usual testimonials, all of them deserved.

Like a good book on a rainy day, Lamb’s program is a seductive hour of television that you can’t put down. It airs at 5 and 8 p.m. Sundays.

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The focus is nonfiction. The authors have ranged from lofty historian Daniel Boorstin to earthy ex-school principal Madeline Cartwright, the political tome from former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on the hard right to British-born Christopher Hitchens, a self-proclaimed “extreme leftist” who rarely has access to mainstream television.

Although Hitchens and the young Bill Clinton attended Oxford University simultaneously, their paths never crossed, convincing Hitchens that the President was, indeed, the college moderate he claimed to have been. “If he was a radical, I would have known him,” Hitchens told Lamb.

You’d think that coupling serious books and television would produce an oxymoronic hybrid. Usually the only books that get touted on TV are trendy psychobabble or the ghost-written tell-all tomes of Hollywood’s rickety and defamed. Yet these “Booknotes” interviews with authors--usually taped at C-SPAN’s Washington, D.C. studios with Lamb facing each subject against a pitch-black background--have a casual intimacy that fits the smallness of television. And they can be fascinating, tracing the threads of history while drawing you into a heady universe of words.

You frequently discover as much about the authors as their books. For example, when that positive thinker Cartwright (“For the Children”) learned that her unmarried college-freshman daughter was pregnant, did she let it get her down? No, sir, she told Lamb, recalling her message to her husband at the time: “For the same money, everybody got 15 credits. We got 15 credits and a rascal (child). Let’s take that rascal and go home with it.”

So they did. The daughter returned to class, Cartwright to her elementary school--toting her 2-month-old grandson to the office.

Lamb is especially absorbed by the process of writing. To Hitchens (“For the Sake of Argument”): “Where do you write?”

Hitchens: “I write on a table, alone, in longhand.”

To David Halberstam (“The Fifties”): “Where do you write?”

In a room that he regards almost as a dungeon, Halberstam replies. “The pressure of writing and being in that room is so great that when it’s over, I don’t want to be in that room.” Halberstam’s joy is research: “Five hours in the library. It’s such an adventure. It’s like eating salted peanuts. You never know what you’re going to get next.”

The amazing thing about Lamb--and this is something so bizarre, so outrageous, so against type for TV interviewers that you won’t believe it--is that he’s always reads the book of the author he’s interviewing.

No wonder, then, that his questions are so precise. To Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist (“Grand Inquests”): “What do you look for in a lawyer? And do you ever see justices ridiculing them? And if you do, what do you do about it?”

Just as often Lamb elicits a response merely by reading a quote from the work.

To Halberstam: “ ‘Bigots, racists, reactionaries and sheer buffoons.’ Who were you talking about?”

To Peggy Noonan (“What I Saw at the Revolution”): “You write in the middle of your second epilogue at the back, ‘Don’t fall in love with politicians; they are all a disappointment--they can’t help it, they just are.’ What did you mean?”

To Lewis H. Lapham (“The Wish for Kings”): “ ‘The television and publishing media awarded Alan Dershowitz the reputation of an incomparable trial lawyer in homage to his talent for publicity rather in recognition of his record in appeals cases, which as of the summer of 1992 stood at nine wins and 39 losses.’ ”

Unlike the tweedy, baggy-pants, bow-tied set that one might associate with such a program, Lamb is utterly without pretense, casting himself almost as the blue collar of literati. To “Truman” author McCullough: “You write on page 949--by the way, what does this thing cost?”

McCullough: “Thirty bucks.”

In fact, Lamb’s questions are sometimes so basic--designed to make “Booknotes” accessible to even the lowest-brow political hack--that you do a double take. When Forrest McDonald (“The American Presidency”) rejected the mantle of “neo-rightist” and instead referred to himself as a “paleo-conservative,” Lamb asked him what that meant.

“Very old,” replied McDonald.

To an author who mentioned Lenin: “Who is Lenin?” To an author who mentioned red-scare demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy: “Who is Joe McCarthy?” You have the feeling that if someone mentioned Abe Lincoln, Lamb would ask who he was, too.

The “Booknotes” host also stands alone as someone who asks authors to explain their opening dedications: “ ‘For Len, Sara, Paul and Annie.’ Who are they?” Or their book covers . Some of his questions also have a jolting directness. To Rehnquist: “What do you get from publishing these two books?”

Rehnquist: “You mean outside the royalties?”

Lamb may be the purest journalist on U.S. airwaves. Without a doubt, he has one of the straightest faces. Aware that “Booknotes” viewers are much less curious about his views than those of the authors, he maintains a refreshing BBC-style dispassion. The interviewer rarely reacts to the interviewee. Once Lamb asks a question, he’s invisible until the author stops speaking and it’s time for another question. Only rarely does unflappability give way to skepticism, as when Lamb pressed Hitchens about including the sainted Mother Teresa in his “rogues gallery” of public figures. Alluding to the title given a Hitchens piece about Mother Teresa allegedly cozying up to bad people and causes, Lamb asked with incredulity: “And you call this ‘The Ghoul of Calcutta’?” Hitchens responded with an even broader condemnation of Mother Teresa, displaying the sharp tongue that gets him blacklisted.

“Booknotes.” To some, an idea of heaven.

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LESS HEAVENLY: Dropping all pretense of objectivity, KNBC-TV Channel 4 anchorman Paul Moyer let loose near the end of his 11 p.m. newscast Wednesday and called Jim Rome a “smart-mouthed little twerp.” Moyer was wrong.

Rome is a smart-mouthed little cretin . And come to think of it, there’s nothing smart about him either.

It was smirking ESPN2 talk-show host Rome who ridiculed and taunted former Rams quarterback Jim Everett in front of the camera Wednesday night by repeatedly labeling his in-studio guest “Chris Evert,” a reference to the female tennis great and an attack on Everett’s manliness for not playing the game up to Dim Rome’s macho standards. This was not the first time that Dim Rome had publicly called Everett “Chris.”

Egged on by Dim Rome--who is obviously more than a little low on wattage above the neck--Everett finally had enough and shoved a table into Dim Rome, knocking him over.

You have to credit Dim Rome with hanging in there and taking the sack he accused Everett of being afraid to take, but not with much else. Although no punches were thrown, Dim Rome may indeed have taken a savage blow to the head, for later he shocked everyone by uttering a three-syllable word, saying Everett seemed “remorseful.”

What does Everett have to be remorseful about except for not breaking Dim Rome’s lips? It was Dim Rome who should have been remorseful.

No chance, though, because TV stations everywhere played the tape of the encounter, probably furthering Dim Rome’s reputation as a sports guy who won’t take “smack” from anyone, even his own guests. Why, if he had Chris Evert on the show, he’d probably call her “Jim.”

Wednesday night’s spectacle should have gotten him fired, but instead the notoriety will probably give his career a big boost.