Books: Leisure reading

`Family Man'

By Calvin Trillin;

Farrar, Strau & Giroux; $20.

Here, in the 16 funny essays composing "Family Man," is Calvin Trillin, the humorist, on the subjects of raising children and staying married. His advice is succinct. On children: "Try to get one that doesn't spit up. Otherwise you're on your own." On finding a long-term wife: "Wander into the right party."

Beyond that, "Handing out advice on family matters is not my game," he writes. "For most people, the process of rearing children is so all-encompassing that there isn't any way to adhere to any policy that doesn't coincide with their natural way of doing things."

Instead of giving advice, Trillin uses these essays to knit together his many anecdotes and routines on the subject of family, some of which have appeared in different form in The New Yorker and other magazines. These subjects touch on, for instance, using your family as material for your writing. His rules here are: not during the sensitive teenage years and no embarrassing stuff unless you're sure you're Dostoyevsky.

Trillin's secret, besides his command of prose, is that he knows exactly who he is.

- By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

New York Times News Service.

`Gary Cooper: American Hero'

By Jeffrey Meyers; Morrow; $26.

He was, in the beginning, just a handsome cowboy from Montana.

That changed when he got to Hollywood.

Cooper was shy, but as his friend Richard Widmark noted, he also was "catnip to the ladies." Other people put it more crudely (we really, really wish we could tell you Clara Bow's exact words on the subject), but the bottom line is that he got around and had a good time. His long series of mistresses included the ribald Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard, Tallulah Bankhead, Patricia Neal, Grace Kelly and Ingrid Bergman.

Between conquests, he made movies, got married, had a much-loved daughter, converted to Catholicism and became friends with the likes of Ernest Hemingway. Read about it in this amiable, if not terribly deep, biography.

- By Anne Stephenson

The Arizona Republic.

`The Eleventh Commandment'

By Jeffrey Archer; HarperCollins; $26.

As usual, Jeffrey Archer delivers a first-rate, well-crafted and very readable international thriller.

Connor Fitzgerald is almost too good to be true - college football star, Congressional Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam, devoted father and husband, and a negotiator for an insurance company specializing in international kidnappings and ransoms. And for the past 25 years, Fitzgerald has been the CIA's top assassin and followed the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not get caught. But if you are, deny absolutely that you have anything to do with the CIA. Don't worry - the Company will always take care of you.

Suddenly he is being forced into retirement by his boss, CIA Director Helen Dexter, who will do anything to keep her job. The president wants her out, so she sets up Fitzgerald, who believes the president himself has asked him to go to Russia and take out one of the leading presidential candidates. Fitzgerald, of course, is caught before he can carry out the assassination.

Archer is a master at building political intrigue and crafting interesting and multilayered characters. His plot rings true and moves along at a satisfying pace. And best of all, he doesn't give away the ending.

- Bobbie Hess

San Francisco Examiner