Books: Notable

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HOW TO SURVIVE IN YOUR NATIVE LAND by James Herndon. 192 pages.

Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

"If you only work in order to change things, you will simply go nuts. I am an authority on it. The book is mostly about kites and dogs and lizards and salamanders and magic." That is James Herndon, reformed globetrotter turned public school teacher, describing his newest book and confronting in characteristic stance the lugubrious subject of U.S. public education. Everything Herndon observes takes place in the "Spanish Main" intermediate school in "Tierra Firma," a thinly disguised middle-class suburb of San Francisco, where Herndon has taught for years. He appears to have tried every kind of pedagogical method, from applying a full quota of "reading" workbooks in a backward class to running a mini-free school where kids could come and go as they pleased. The results, though touched by humor and humanity, are disheartening.

Basically Herndon is in desperate agreement with John Holt, George Dennison, Jonathan Kozol, Edgar Friedenburg, Charles Silberman & Co. that U.S. schools are too foolishly over-administered to successfully nurture either reading and writing or the ability to cope humanely with the complex choices of modern life. But unlike most apocalyptic critics, Herndon sees no easy solution. He proceeds, moreover, by meandering parable rather than polemic, and uses a ruefully genial tone of voice that might have come from Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut. As a result, he is just about the only education reformer alive whose writing could be (and should be) profitably and pleasurably read aloud at the family dinner table.

THE NATION KILLERS by Robert Conquest. 222 pages. Macmillan. $6.95.

One of Britain's foremost students of Russian affairs here describes the deportation from their homelands in the Caucasus of the entire populations of eight small nations. The Soviet pretext during World War II was that all those people were traitorous. By Conquest's calculation, about 1.6 million were uprooted and sent to the East. Of these, he estimates, 600,000 died as a result of the move.

The deportees were transported in cattle trucks over enormous distances without food. Many trains carrying them across the vast, empty eastern provinces seem to have been turned back after the deaths of most people aboard. It became Soviet policy, moreover, to pretend that the broken and scattered nations had never existed. The Volga Germans, descendants of settlers welcomed by Catherine the Great, were dispossessed not only of national existence but of their history—as were seven Asiatic nations, including Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingushi, Karachai, Balkars, Meskhetians and the Crimean Tatars. In the great reshuffling of borders and renaming of regions to obliterate old names, even the houses of the Crimean Tatars, Conquest writes, "were demolished and their vines and orchards allowed to become wild and overgrown. The Tatars' cemeteries were plowed up and their ancestors' remains torn out of the ground."