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THE SURVIVAL OF THE BARK CANOE

by JOHN McPHEE 114 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $7.95.

John McPhee has written whole, albeit slim books on oranges, the New Jersey pine barrens, Scottish weavers, an exotic flying machine called the Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, and the proliferation of that ultimate Saturday-night special, the cheap nuclear device. McPhee's The Levels of the Game is still the best book on tennis, in the same meticulous and quietly passionate way that makes A.J. Leibling's The Sweet Science the best book on boxing.

It is safe to say that The Survival of the Bark Canoe is the best book on bark canoes. It is part shop manual, part history, and part unforgettable-character sketch. The book also contains an account of a trip to the Maine woods that provides a dryly witty antidote to James Dickey's soggy macho saga Deliverance.

To McPhee, a fine birchbark is a marvel of craft and complex preindustrial technology that took centuries to perfect. "Their ribs, thwarts and planking suggested cabinetwork," he notes. "Their authenticity seemed built in, sewed in, lashed in, undeniable."

The authenticity of the canoe builder is also undeniable. Henri Armand Vaillancourt is a 25-year-old bachelor who lives in Greenville, N.H., and thinks and talks exclusively about canoes. Refreshingly un-Thoreauvian, he prefers Tang to spring water when eating his homemade beef jerky. Vaillancourt is one of the last men in North America to make canoes the way the Eastern forest Indians made them. He is not only the keeper of an art but also an endangered species of American. In his " own beautifully crafted work, McPhee | treats both man and boat with all the respect and admiration their precarious I presence commands.

OUTSIDER IN AMSTERDAM

by JANWILLEM VAN DE WETERING 245 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95.

A few years ago, Dutch Author van de Wetering won wide praise for The Empty Mirror, a fascinating account of his experiences as a novice monk in a Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery (TIME, Feb. 11,1974). Now he mixes his Western upbringing and Eastern training to emerge as, of all things, a superlative mystery writer. This first novel starts in standard fashion: a man is found hanged, slowly turning on the rope, because "bodies suspended by the neck are never quite still." What follows is hardly conventional.

Take the sleuths on the case. Sergeant De Grier and Adjutant Grijpstra cannot claim the instinct for violence or the deductive brilliance that makes for popular detectives. But the two plainclothesmen on the Amsterdam police force are far from plain. As they doggedly pursue their "eternal search" for "who knows something," they find sweetness in old whores, humor in dachshunds, beauty in drab streets.