'The Care and Feeding of Books Old and New'

By Margot Rosenberg and Bern Marcowitz

Thomas Dunne Books, $13.95

This interesting little paperback is a book-repair manual by two booksellers.

Margot Rosenberg and Bern Marcowitz have essentially written the book they couldn't find. They treat problems of storing, cleaning, fixing, shelving, mending, oiling, mailing, dusting, pasting, binding, gluing, debugging, deodorizing and otherwise providing for a long shelf-life for well-read books.

"Our emphasis is on common injuries that can be repaired by simple methods. . . . An old book . . . is truly a portion of the national history; we may imitate it and print it in facsimile, but we can never exactly reproduce it; and as an historical document, it should be carefully preserved." — Dennis Lythgoe

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'The Ticket Out'

By Michael Sokolove

Simon & Schuster, $24.95.

Michael Sokolove carefully examines the American Dream through sport — taking issue with the old American belief that athletic prowess provides a ticket to happiness and success.

The initial focus is on Darryl Strawberry, whose 1979 Crenshaw High School baseball team — an inner-city team in Los Angeles — consisted of gifted players, most of whom went on to play professional ball.

This a biography of a high school team, made up of players who stayed surprisingly close for most of their lives. That was both good and bad because every member of the team didn't fare equally in professional sports. Strawberry is the tragic figure in this story, an athlete who was called "beautiful, delicate, gifted, flawed, doomed."

According to Sokolove, "It's hard to say what is the greater marvel: that he laid waste to his career or that he managed to have one at all. Only his prodigious talent kept him in the game." — Dennis Lythgoe

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'The Heart of the Sound'

By Marybeth Holleman

University of Utah Press, $21.95.

The University of Utah Press, which ought to be churning out book after book about Utah and Mormonism, is involved with some very different themes instead.

Marybeth Holleman, a professor at the University of Alaska, has written a provocative book subtitled "An Alaskan Paradise Found and Nearly Lost." It looks at how nature helped fight off the devastating effects the Exxon Valdez, the tanker that spread millions of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in 1989.

Holleman writes about a woman who found her "Eden" in the fjords of Alaska, then almost lost it to an ecological tragedy. She tells of her despair after the accident. She writes beautifully, poetically, of the need to care for the Earth. It is an environmental masterpiece. — Dennis Lythgoe