Bookends: May 19, 1986

BESS W. TRUMAN

by Margaret Truman

Macmillan; 445 pages; $19.95

One day in 1955, ex-President Harry S. Truman found his wife before the fireplace, burning their letters. "Bess," he protested. "Think of history." She replied, "I have." Fortunately, most of Harry's letters home were spared, thereby enhancing his legacy and helping his daughter Margaret write a gentle, warmhearted biography of the addressee. Harry had to chase Bess, a spirited child of a prominent Independence, Mo., family, for almost three decades before she would marry him. By the time he entered the White House in 1945, she was, he wrote her, "the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value." Bess was more modest. "A woman's place in public," she told a friend, "is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight." Bess did read the Congressional Record, but she let Harry hog the headlines and cringed at his public references to her as "the Boss." For him, though, she was. She died in 1982, nearly ten years after Harry, and was buried beside him in Independence. "I like the idea," he once told the Boss, "because I may just want to get up some day and stroll into my office. And I can hear you saying, 'Harry--you oughtn't!' "

SPIRIT OF SURVIVAL

by Gail Sheehy

Morrow; 400 pages; $17.95

As a "new" or participatory journalist, Gail Sheehy makes news almost as often as she reports it. She has been widely criticized for writing nonfiction with composite characters and compressed time. Ten years ago, she made an out- of-court settlement in a plagiarism suit involving her best-selling book Passages. Spirit of Survival is practically all Sheehy, and that is an even bigger problem. Her effort to popularize a psychology of survival is hopelessly muddled by her need to dramatize herself. Sheehy, a middle-aged single mother and the companion of Magazine Editor Clay Felker, jets off to Thailand to write a story about Cambodian child refugees. There she meets Phat Mohm, 12, an orphaned survivor of Pol Pot's death marches and work camps. Arrangements are made to bring Mohm to the U.S., where she lives with Sheehy, learns to be an American and attends Gail's wedding to Clay.

There is a poignant story here, but Sheehy cannot tell it. Her banal prose and feeble attempts at social science reduce experience to jargon. Alternating her own trendy problems with accounts of Cambodian genocide seems bizarre, to say the least. An apt subtitle for this book might be The Lotus and the Narcissus.

ENTER TALKING

by Joan Rivers with Richard Meryman

Delacorte; 398 pages; $17.95

Theatrical Agent Tony Rivers came right to the point: "I can't send you out as Joan Molinsky. You've got to change your name." The struggling nightclub comic did not waste a second: "Okay, I'll be Joan Rivers." The single-minded doctor's daughter from Larchmont, N.Y., helped herself to her agent's name, competitors' jokes, employers' postage stamps and free hotel rooms until her big break came on the Tonight show in 1965.