A random sampling of current books received at this magazine

Ruth Farris, from the jacket of Down East Maine

The Tao of Spycraft: Intelligence Theory and Practice in Traditional China, by Ralph D. Sawyer, A.M. '70 (Westview, $35). A 617-page history of spies, sexual subversion, and intrigue in China.

Down East Maine: A World Apart, photographs and text by Frank Van Riper, Nf '79 (Down East Books, $29.95). In 86 black-and-white photographs and accompanying prose, Van Riper goes way beyond quaint or picturesque to produce a powerful portrait of the people who live along one of the nation's coastal frontiers.

Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism, by Steven Watson (Random House, $35). Virgil Thomson '22, D.Mus. '82, and Gertrude Stein, A.B. 1898, wrote the opera Four Saints in Three Acts, a huge hit in 1934. It would not have been produced--with its elusive text ("pigeons on the grass alas"), music laced with Protestant hymns, cellophane sets, and an all-black cast--without the efforts of "a constellation of young men, all graduates of Harvard in the late 1920s, who became America's promoters of modernism," writes Watson. They included Alfred Barr, A. Everett "Chick" Austin Jr., Henry-Russell Hitchcock Jr., Kirk Askew Jr., Lincoln Kirstein, Philip Johnson, and Julien Levy, all of whom are portrayed in this lively cultural history. ("Harvard was an unlikely spawning ground for modernism," Watson notes. "Flee introspection," advised 92-year-old former president Charles W. Eliot in his welcoming remarks to the freshman class in 1926. Freshman Lincoln Kirstein, cofounder in 1927 of the modernist magazine Hound & Horn and later master of the dance, fortunately misheard this injunction as "free introspection.")

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth, by Paul Hoff-man '78 (Hyperion, $22.95). A delightful, funny profile of an eccentric mathematician and some of his friends. The author, who is publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica and the former editor-in-chief of Discover magazine, manages to teach even a phobic reader a certain amount about math.

A Café on the Nile, by Bartle Bull '60, LL.B. '64 (Carroll & Graf, $26). A high-voltage adventure novel set in Egypt and Ethiopia in 1935.

Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham, J.D. '88 (HarperCollins, $25). An account of the institutions and preoccupations of the black elite and of its history of thriving in the awkward position between two worlds.

Rituals of Blood: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries, by Orlando Patterson, Cowles professor of sociology (Civitas/ Counterpoint, $28). In the first of three essays, Patterson contends that relations between Afro-American men and women, and thus their marital and familial relations, have always been in crisis and that "this crisis is the major internal source of the wider problems of Afro-Americans." The second essay concerns lynching as ritual sacrifice. The third takes a look at the images of Afro-American males portrayed in the media.

What We Owe to Each Other, by T.M. Scanlon, Ph.D. '68, Alford professor of natural religion, moral philosophy, and civil polity (Harvard University Press, $35). In Scanlon's contractualist view, "thinking about right and wrong is thinking about what we do in terms that could be justified to others and that they could not reasonably reject."

Brother Blue COURTESY SOUNDS TRUE

Indiana Gothic: A Story of Adultery and Murder in an American Family, by Pope Brock '71 (Doubleday, $24.95). Journalist Brock takes a novelist's approach to telling the circumstances surrounding the death of his actual great-grandfather Ham Dillon, an ambitious, charismatic politician in Indiana. Ham was shot dead in 1908 by his depressive brother-in-law, Link, whose wife, Allie, Ham's wife's sister, restive in a joyless marriage, had just borne Ham a child.

The Face of the Deep, by Thomas Farber '65 (Mercury House, $14.95, paper). Stephen Greenblatt, Levin professor of literature, calls this "a marvelous, poetic achievement, the best book on diving that I have ever read, a remarkable meditation on the polysemous richness of the sea, and a fascinating log of a risky voyage of self-discovery."

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Brother Blue: True-life Adventure Stories, spoken by Brother Blue, a.k.a. Hugh Morgan Hill '48, G '50, Div '70 (Shambhala Lion Editions/ Sounds True, $10.95). Here's an 80-minute cassette in which the roaming storyteller, great-grandson of a slave and a slave owner, spins his tales of struggle and hope.