Books

Book critic Stephen Schiff calls John Cheever, the subject of a new biography by Scott Donaldson, "the saddest man I ever met." The story of the author's life is brutal, told skillfully, but with prose that could't hope to match Cheever's.

Newsweek photojournalist William Gentile. Gentile covered the Nicaraguan revolution for UPI ten years ago, and he's the only foreign correspondent from that time still working in Nicaragua. Gentile's new book, Nicaragua, contrasts the violence of the Contra war with the natural beauty of Nicaragua and the lives of everyday people there.

Sportswriter Phil Berger. Berger covers boxing for The New York Times and has written a new book about heavyweight champ Mike Tyson called Blood Season.

Newsweek correspondent Sylvester Monroe. He recently returned to the ghetto housing project in Chicago where he was raised for a reunion with his boyhood friends. He chronicles their successful and failed attempts to escape the ghetto and ghetto culture in his book Brothers.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews the latest installment of the Spencer detective series, the novel Crimson Joy by Robert Parker.

David Martin, Pentagon correspondent for CBS News and co-author of The Best Laid Plans, an account of America's flawed war against international terrorism.

Astronaut Michael Collins. He controlled the Apollo 11 command module that circled the moon while Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on its' surface. Collins has written a history of the space program titled Liftoff.

Lawrence Weschler, staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He writes about politics and art, and his profiles are gathered in a new book, Shapinsky's Karma, Bogg's Bill and Other True Tales.

Estelle Freedman co-author of Intimate Matters, A History of Sexuality in America. Among the principal observations Freedman makes in her book is that sexual puritanism was never as all-encompassing as most historians state when chronicling the mores of the 19th and early 20th Century. The book charts the liberalization of sex as value in itself, independent of reproduction. Freedman is a professor of history at Stanford University.

Book Critic John Leonard reviews Women in A River Landscape, the last novel by the late German author Heinrich Boll.