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In his latest book, ex-President Richard Nixon peers at the future as of 1999. In his latest, ex-President Jimmy Carter examines the past. Both men summon up better worlds, but in An Outdoor Journal Carter has hold of a sure thing. In spare and lyrical images, he recalls a Huckleberry childhood, boating down creeks and listening to the yarns of backwoodsmen: " 'Never heerd of anybody drowning in this here swamp. The 'gators always get them first.' " The affection for a "natural setting not much changed from the way He made it" never departs. Even during visits to China and Japan, the Chief Executive ransacks local streams. In this disarming memoir, politics intrudes only once, when Carter points out that one of his last legislative acts tripled the nation's wilderness acreage. "I can understand the feeling of Henry David Thoreau," he concludes justifiably: " 'The earth was the most glorious instrument, and I was audience to its strains.' "

TWILIGHT

by Elie Wiesel

Translated by Marion Wiesel

Summit; 217 pages; $17.95

In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann removed his characters to a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium to illustrate the spiritual and intellectual malaise of the West on the eve of World War I. Elie Wiesel's Twilight looks back at the chaos and savagery of World War II through the eyes of patients at a psychiatric clinic in upstate New York. Wiesel's madmen are Jews who have biblical hallucinations and share mystical yearnings and questions raised by the Holocaust. "Why so many victims? . . . Why the indifference of the Allies? And question of questions: why the silence of God?" The author, himself a survivor of Auschwitz and the recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, confronts the unanswerable by weaving together meditative stories and parables from the devastated Old World and the hopeful New. As in his previous books, Wiesel profoundly restates his themes, most notably the primacy of memory and the need to bear witness.