Books: Notable: May 25, 1981

NAKED AT THE FEAST by Lynn Haney Dodd, Mead; 338 pages; $17.95

At eight, the St. Louis waif was farmed out as a servant. At 13, after hanging around a local theater, she signed on to the vaudeville circuit and made two discoveries: she could hold a note, and she could hold an audience.

Josephine Baker parlayed that talent into a strange career. As Biographer Lynn Haney recounts, Baker badgered her way onto Broadway when she was 16, but it was in Paris three years later that she found true recognition. As in a '30s melodrama, Baker's professional life roared on while the person behind the spangles was racked with insecurity. The crucial difference between Baker and her Hollywood contemporaries was that the star was black, and consequently was barred from many roles in her native land.

So Josephine became La Bakaire and stayed on in Europe, a chanteuse who was, according to another expatriate named Ernest Hemingway, "the most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will." In middle age, she turned from entertainment to graver concerns, working for the French Resistance and, later, speaking out against discrimination in the U.S. The tourist center on her Dordogne estate ran up debts of $400,000. Still, she supported her twelve adopted children, a "rainbow tribe" of races, religions, nationalities. "If children can live together in harmony," Baker announced, "grownups can too."

The philosophy was ingenuous, but the spirit indomitable. After influencing two generations of singers, she was still performing in the U.S., in Europe, in Israel. In 1975, celebrating her 50 years in show business, Josephine, 68, danced on a nightclub table until 3 a.m. Two days later she was dead. The official medical cause was cerebral hemorrhage. But a producer was probably more accurate when he said, "In my opinion, she died of joy." It is a measure of Baker's spirit that so much joy still reverberates in this belated tribute.

SINGLED OUT by Richard Schickel Viking; 115 pages; $8.95

Afflicted with long silences, they talk too volubly about their wounds. Long out of practice, they are uneasy on a date and uncomfortable when left alone. They are, in the words of TIME Contributor Richard Schickel, those middle-aged men who have suddenly been Singled Out.

In this refreshing manual, Schickel manages to avoid every classic bromide. The divorcee is not seen as muggee or neglected saint, older women are consistently praised, and the references to sex are free of cant and prurience: "There are still people in this world who like to think things over, and they often turn out to be very good people indeed ... If she doesn't want to, she doesn't want to. So be a good sport about it, for God's sake."

Schickel displays a fine mix of poignance and candor. He sifts through the fallout of his own 15-year marriage. Conclusions: children's affection "is the love that endures forever, if you give it half a chance. You can count on it as you can count on little else in this life."