SUMMER READING; BOOKS FOR VACATION READING

This list has been selected from books reviewed since the December 1984 Christmas issue. It only suggests high points in the main fields of reader interest. Books are arranged alphabetically under subject headings. Quoted comments are from The Book Review.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY & BIOGRAPHY

AUGUST STRINDBERG. By Olof Lagercrantz. Translated by Anselm Hollo. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25.50.) ''A wonderful biography, worthy of a maddeningly foolish, wrong and presciently wise writer who was one of the prime inventors of our theater and our time,'' by a Swedish poet, critic and editor.

THE CHIEF: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons. By Lance Morrow. (Random House, $16.95.) The relationship between Lance Morrow, a successful journalist, and his father, Hugh, a top aide to Nelson Rockefeller, is explored with ''clear-eyed candor and writing skill that reveal both passion and confusion.''

A CLOAK OF LIGHT. By Wright Morris. (Harper & Row, $19.95.) In the third volume of the novelist's memoirs, ''we see the young man in 1934, returned from Europe, resuming his college education in California and hurling himself once again into the never-ending romance of American life.''

DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD: An Autobiography. By Zora Neale Hurston. (University of Illinois, Cloth, $22.95. Paper, $8.95.) Three chapters have been restored to this edition of the influential black novelist's 1942 autobiography, marked by its ''verdant language and twin voices.''

IVY: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett. By Hillary Spurling. (Knopf, $22.95.) Ivy Compton-Burnett, the reclusive British novelist, died in 1969, and this ''voluminous'' biography is ''intelligent, richly detailed, warm and sympathetic.''

LOUISE BOGAN: A Portrait. By Elizabeth Frank. (Knopf, $24.95.) A ''thoughtful'' examination of the life and work of Louise Bogan (1897-1970), ''a turbulent woman whom Auden in the 1940's considered 'the best critic in America' and one of its best poets.''

ONCE UPON A TIME: A True Story. By Gloria Vanderbilt. (Knopf, $16.95.) A ''series of deft verbal snapshots'' add up to Gloria Vanderbilt's ''immensely sad autobiography.''

THE PERIODIC TABLE. By Primo Levi. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. (Schocken, $16.95.) These reflections on life and society by the Italian writer and chemist constitute a ''work of healing, of tranquil, even buoyant imagination.''

RANDALL JARRELL'S LETTERS: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection. Edited by Mary Jarrell with Stuart Wright. (Houghton Mifflin, $29.95.) These letters ''give us the man behind the criticism, behind the poems and the novel 'Pictures From an Institution.' ''

THE SEVEN MOUNTAINS OF THOMAS MERTON. By Michael Mott. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.95.) An authorized biography of the influential monk and author written ''in clear and unpretentious and vigorous prose.''

THE TRUE CONFESSIONS OF AN ALBINO TERRORIST. By Breyten Breytenbach. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $18.95.) The political and literary memoirs of ''the pre-eminent living Afrikaans poet,'' who spent seven years in a South African prison.

T. S. ELIOT: A Life. By Peter Ackroyd. (Simon & Schuster, $24.95.) Given the fact that Peter Ackroyd was not allowed to quote from the poet's unpublished works and letters and was limited in what he could quote from Eliot's published works, this is ''as good a biography as we have any right to expect.''

A VIETCONG MEMOIR. By Truong Nhu Tang, with David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $17.95.) This memoir by a ''dedicated nationalist who was never a Communist but was willing to work with the Communists'' is about ''the death of a dream, a dream of an independent, peaceful and democratic Vietnam.''

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

BEYOND THE CHOCOLATE WAR. By Robert Cormier. (Knopf, $11.95.) ''Very much a sequel'' to ''The Chocolate War,'' ''a favorite with teen-age readers,'' this book takes up the story of events at the Trinity School, where terror reigns. (Ages 12 and up.) CAT & CANARY. Written and illustrated by Michael Foreman. (Dial Books/Dutton, $11.95.) This story of a cat's kite-borne adventures high above New York City is filled with ''charm and excitement.'' (Ages 4 to 8.) COME SING, JIMMY JO. By Katherine Paterson. (Lodestar/Dutton, $12.95.) ''An engaging fantasy'' about a boy in a family of country singers and what it might be like to become famous. (Ages 10 and up.) SARAH, PLAIN AND TALL. By Patricia MacLachlan. (Charlotte Zolotow/Harper & Row, $10.) ''An exquisite, sometimes painfully touching little tale of a lonely, widowed late 19th-century prairie dweller, his two children, and the laconic [woman] from Maine who comes to share their life.'' (Ages 8 to 10.) CRIME BRIARPATCH. By Ross Thomas. (Simon & Schuster, $16.95.) In his ''typical suave, sophisticated style,'' ''one of the best storytellers around'' sends a Government agent to a small Southern city where a car bomb has killed the agent's sister, a policewoman.

CODA. By Tom Topor. (Scribners, $13.95.) An elderly Jewish woman in New York insists she has seen her husband, thought dead in a concentration camp. Tom Topor's grim, action-filled story is the work of ''a good reporter and fine writer.''

THE DUTCH BLUE ERROR. By William G. Tapply. (Scribners, $12.95.) Brady Coyle, the Boston lawyer for the very rich, enters the world of philately in a ''smooth and sophisticated'' mystery that is ''a great deal of fun.''

MR. YESTERDAY. By Elliott Chaze. (Scribners, $12.95.) Two believable Alabamians - a newspaper editor and a washed-up reporter, Mr. Yesterday - investigate a murder tied to a nuclear waste dump. This often funny book ''achieves a bang-up ending.''

SWEET JUSTICE. By Jerry Oster. (Harper & Row, $13.95.) A would-be molester in New York's subways and a beautiful, unscrupulous television anchor are the first two victims in ''one of the most brilliant procedurals of the last few years.''

CURRENT AFFAIRS & SOCIAL COMMENT

BLACK BOX: KAL 007 and the Superpowers. By Alexander Dallin. (University of California, $14.95.) ''Through careful, nonideological analysis of the known facts,'' the author ''reaches the disturbing conclusion that mechanical or human error alone almost surely did not cause [Korean Air Lines flight 007] to stray'' over Soviet territory before it was shot down.

BREAKING WITH MOSCOW. By Arkady N. Shevchenko. (Knopf, $18.95.) The ''highest-level Soviet official ever to defect to the West'' offers ''some gems of history'' as he probes the nature of the Soviet Government and its leaders.

THE CANADIANS. By Andrew H. Malcolm. (Times Books, $17.95.) ''For many Americans,'' this book by The Times's former Toronto correspondent ''will be a helpful, timely and tightly packed introduction'' to our northern neighbors.

COAT OF MANY COLORS: Pages From Jewish Life. By Israel Shenker. (Doubleday, $19.95.) The themes of this ''carefully written book about Jewish survival and the hope of redemption'' move ''from God and the sacred texts through history . . . to the Promised land.''

DISTANT NEIGHBORS: A Portrait of the Mexicans. By Alan Riding. (Knopf, $18.95.) Those ''who wish to understand the 'many Mexicos' of wealth and poverty, of authoritarianism and democratic experimentation . . . might well begin'' with this book by a New York Times correspondent.

ECONOMICS IN THE REAL WORLD. By Leonard Silk. (Simon & Schuster, $16.95.) The economics columnist for The Times is ''very good on the interplay between politics and economics, on the way rational policy gets worn down by rubbing up against political rocks and hard places.''

THE EUDAEMONIC PIE. By Thomas A. Bass. (Houghton Mifflin, $15.95.) The compelling story of ''a group of young men and women associated with West Coast universities'' who, during the 1970's, devised a ''scheme to break the bank in Las Vegas.''

ILLITERATE AMERICA. By Jonathan Kozol. (Doubleday, $15.95.) A passionate yet ''carefully documented'' examination of the plight of ''60 million illiterate and semiliterate American adults.''

THE JEWS OF HOPE. By Martin Gilbert. (Elisabeth Sifton/Viking, $15.95.) In 1983 Martin Gilbert traveled in the Soviet Union and collected the personal stories of Jews who have been refused exit visas.

THE PENTAGON AND THE ART OF WAR: The Question of Military Reform. By Edward N. Luttwak. (Simon & Schuster, $17.95.) ''The author, a hawkish advocate of increased defense spending but nonetheless a severe critic of the military establishment, makes a very persuasive case for radical and fundamental reform'' of America's military.

WAITING: The Whites of South Africa. By Vincent Crapanzano. (Random House, $19.95.) This account of the anthropologist author's encounters with white South Africans in a small country town in 1980-81 is ''insightful into the processes of deception and self-deception.''

WITH ALL DISRESPECT: More Uncivil Liberties. By Calvin Trillin. (Ticknor & Fields, $14.95.) A collection of 45 of the author's ''very funny'' satirical pieces from The Nation and one from Vanity Fair.

ESSAYS & CRITICISM

A BOOK OF ONE'S OWN: People and Their Diaries. By Thomas Mallon. (Ticknor & Fields, $15.95.) A study of diaries and their authors that ''shuttles back and forth through the centuries, establishing bonds among all of those solitary figures at their journals.''

CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICAN WRITERS. By Charles Ruas. (Knopf, $17.95.) In these 14 interviews, Charles Ruas ''displays the essential qualities of any first-rate interviewer: a thorough knowledge of, an irrepressible curiosity about, a profound sympathy for,'' writers and their work.

THE FLOWER AND THE LEAF: A Contemporary Record of American Writing Since 1941. By Malcolm Cowley. (Viking, $25.) A ''splendid'' collection of literary essays and reminiscences.

THE FORCE OF POETRY. By Christopher Ricks. (Oxford, $29.95.) ''In this gathering of essays, the eminent English critic . . . looks at poetry over a considerable range [and] assures us through clarifying analysis of its power and force in our lives.''

HABITATIONS OF THE WORD: Essays. By William H. Gass. (Simon & Schuster, $17.95.) The philosopher-novelist William H. Gass's ''large reading and . . . intense, animated philosophical mind'' are on display in his first collection of essays in seven years.

HITCHCOCK: Revised Edition. By Francois Truffaut with Helen G. Scott. (Simon & Schuster, $19.95.) ''With Truffaut's own recent death, re-encountering this superb book,'' an interview originally published in 1967 and revised to cover the years up to Hitchcock's death in 1980, ''takes on the aspect of a melancholy privilege.''

MICROWORLDS: Writings on Science Fiction and Fantasy. By Stanislaw Lem. Edited by Franz Rottensteiner. (Helen & Kurt Wolff/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $14.95.) These essays by the Polish novelist, essayist and ''vigorous opponent of science fiction as currently practiced'' reveal ''a brilliant mind with a hearty appetite for science, philosophy and literature.''

OCCASIONAL PROSE. By Mary McCarthy. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $17.95.) ''Everywhere'' in these essays, reviews and reminiscences of writers and friends, written during the last 15 years, ''appear bracing opinions tartly expressed.''

PLAUSIBLE PREJUDICES: Essays on American Writing. By Joseph Epstein, (Norton, $17.95.) Irreverent essays from such periodicals as Commentary and The New Criterion contend that ''American literary culture is in bad shape.''

RHYTHM-A-NING: Jazz Tradition and Innovation in the '80s. By Gary Giddins. (Oxford, $17.95.) These essays by a writer for The Village Voice are marked by the author's ''graceful prose and the breadth and depth of his critical understanding.''

FICTION

ANNIE JOHN. By Jamaica Kincaid. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $11.95.) Jamaica Kincaid ''has packed a lot of valuable insight about the complex relationship between mothers and daughters into this slender novel of interrelated stories.''

THE BEANS OF EGYPT, MAINE. By Carolyn Chute. (Ticknor & Fields, Cloth, $15.95. Paper, $7.95.) A ''startling and original'' first novel about an incestuous family in rural Maine.

BETSEY BROWN. By Ntozake Shange. (St. Martin's, $12.95.) ''More straightforward and less idiosyncratic than [Ntozake] Shange's first novel, 'Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo,' 'Betsey Brown' creates a place that is both new and familiar, where both black and white readers will feel at home.''

BLACK ROBE. By Brian Moore. (William Abrahams/ Dutton, $15.95.) ''Part adventure story, part the life of a saint, part parable,'' this novel, ''set in the wilds of North America in the early 17th century,'' chronicles the rugged journey of two Frenchmen.

THE CALL. By John Hersey. (Knopf, $19.95.) In the story of ''a farm boy from upstate New York who . . . undergoes a religious conversion [and] dedicates his life to the task of winning China for Christ,'' John Hersey ''manages to strike universal notes.''

THE CIDER HOUSE RULES. By John Irving. (Morrow, $18.95.) ''By turns witty, tenderhearted, fervent and scarifying,'' this novel, about a New England abortionist who runs an orphanage, is ''an example, now rare, of the courage of imaginative ardor.''

CONTINENTAL DRIFT. By Russell Banks. (Harper & Row, $17.95.) A bleak novel that ''charts, in alternating chapters, the eventually intersecting paths of two people desperately on the move'' - a young man from New Hampshire and a Haitian woman.

DAVITA'S HARP. By Chaim Potok. (Knopf, $16.95.) In his ''bravest book,'' Chaim Potok portrays the lives of Communist Party members and religious Jews during the 1930's.

DO LORD REMEMBER ME. By Julius Lester. (Holt, $13.95.) The Rev. Joshua Smith, known to his followers ''as the Singing Evangelist and to one white newspaper reporter . . . as 'The Colored Billy Graham,' '' examines his life in this ''neatly balanced, well modulated'' novel.

THE ELEVEN MILLION MILE HIGH DANCER. By Carol Hill. (William Abrahams/Holt, $16.95.) A ''vivid'' fantasy involving ''an astronaut and her cat who, sucked into the alternative dimension ruled by the principles of quantum physics, save the earth from destruction and come to know the meaning of love.''

EQUAL DISTANCE. By Brad Leithauser. (Knopf, $17.95.) This first novel about three Americans in Japan ''is like an update of Hemingway's 'Sun Also Rises' - a revision of the expatriate theme that incorporates what we've learned in a half century's pursuit of disillusionment.''

THE FIFTH SON. By Elie Wiesel. (Summit, $15.95.) ''The experience of surviving the Holocaust falls like a curtain between father and son'' in this novel as the son ''attempts to break through his father's unmerciful emotional veil.''

THE FINISHING SCHOOL. By Gail Godwin. (Viking, $16.95.) In a ''finely nuanced, compassionte psychological novel'' about the friendship between an adolescent girl and a middle-aged woman, the author makes ''a wise contribution to the literature of growing up.''

FISKADORO. By Denis Johnson. (Knopf, $14.95.) This ''startlingly original book is an examination of the cataclysmic imagination, a parable of apocalypse that is always present and pre-cedes redemption in a cycle of death and birth, forgetting and remembering.''

FLAUBERT'S PARROT. By Julian Barnes. (Knopf, $13.95.) A ''splendid hybrid of a novel, part biography, part fiction, part literary criticism, the whole carried off with great brio.''

FORTUNE'S DAUGHTER. By Alice Hoffman. (Putnam, $15.95.) ''This novel's great strength lies in its two heroines, who both find themselves drawn, without plans, hopes or full understanding, into the inevitably mythological process of pregnancy and childbirth.''

GLITZ. By Elmore Leonard. (Arbor House, $14.95.) The adventures of a Miami policeman in Puerto Rico and Atlantic City come ''to a smashing and satisfying conclusion.''

HER FIRST AMERICAN. By Lore Segal. (Knopf, $15.95.) ''In her mix of history, memory and invention, and the ruthless honesty which has always characterized her work,'' Lore Segal ''shows us ourselves, and reveals herself.''

HOME TRUTHS: Sixteen Stories. By Mavis Gallant. (Random House, $17.95.) These ''powerful stories,'' set mostly in the 1930's and 40's, represent some of the ''best work'' by this Canadian writer, who spends much of her time in Paris.

HOTEL DU LAC. By Anita Brookner. (Pantheon, $13.95.) The author's ''most absorbing novel'' chronicles a single woman's vacation at a hotel on the shore of a Swiss lake.

THE HOUSE OF THE SPIRITS. By Isabel Allende. Translated by Magda Bogin. (Knopf, $17.95.) ''With this spectacular first novel,'' Isabel Allende becomes ''the first woman to approach on the same scale as [male Latin American writers] the tormented patriarchal world of traditional Hispanic society.''

IN CUSTODY. By Anita Desai. (Cornelia & Michael Bessie/ Harper & Row, $16.95.) ''Set in contemporary India and . . . the world of Urdu poetry,'' this novel ''is a deft, sometimes savage, comedy of the mutual appropriation of poet and disciple.''

THE INNER MAN. By Michael Walser. Translated by Leila Vennewitz. (Holt, $15.95.) ''A foreshortened, slightly caricatured but amply persuasive picture of post-postwar Germany'' by perhaps ''the one major German-language author least known in America.''

INSIDE, OUTSIDE. By Herman Wouk. (Little, Brown, $19.95.) This ''ambitious'' novel, the author's ninth, ''offers some hearty laughs, much valuable instruction about the Jewish religion and a nostalgic reminiscence of the 1930's.''

LANARK: A Life in 4 Books. By Alasdair Gray. (Braziller, $20.) First published in England in 1981, this Scottish writer's first novel is ''a quirky crypto-Calvinist 'Divine Comedy,' often harsh but never mean.''

LATER THE SAME DAY. By Grace Paley. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $13.95.) The author's third collection of short stories is marked by ''honesty and guilelessness'' and an ''artfully intricate prose style full of surprises.''

LINDEN HILLS. By Gloria Naylor. (Ticknor & Fields, $16.95.) In her ''provocative, iconoclastic'' second novel, Gloria Naylor has adapted Dante's ''Inferno'' for ''a tale of lost black souls trapped in the American dream.''

LOVE MEDICINE. By Louise Erdrich. (Holt, $13.95.) A Chippewa family and ''the enduring verities of loving and surviving'' are the subjects of this first novel, whose ''truths are revealed in a narrative that is an invigorating mixture of the comic and the tragic.''

MEN AND ANGELS. By Mary Gordon. (Random House, $16.95.) ''With subtlety and feeling,'' Mary Gordon contrasts ''a moral life, a religious life, an artistic life, a family life.'' These are ''at times mutually exclusive ways of being and of seeing.''

MONEY: A Suicide Note. By Martin Amis. (Viking, $16.95.) John Self, ''a half-American Brit,'' self-destructs in this comic escapade of ''trans-Atlantic urban show-biz patter and smart literary patterns.''

MUSEUM PIECES. By Elizabeth Tallent. (Knopf, $14.95.) An ''engrossing and beautifully expressed'' first novel that examines ''the debris of a marriage'' between an archeologist and a painter.

THE OLD FOREST: And Other Stories. By Peter Taylor. (Dial/Doubleday, $16.95.) These 14 stories, written during the last 40 years, are mostly concerned with Southern families; they are narrated in a voice that is ''measured, civilized and oddly affecting.''

THE ONLY DAUGHTER. By Jessica Anderson. (Viking, $15.95.) Set in Australia, this ''densely populated'' novel of manners ponders greed, love (''parental, filial, sibling, sexual'') and violence.

REASONS TO LIVE. By Amy Hempel. (Knopf, $11.95.) These ''conspicuously contemporary'' stories, ''more than half of which have never been published before,'' exhibit ''a kind of minimalism that robs us of nothing, that has room for the largest themes.''

SELF-HELP: Stories. By Lorrie Moore. (Knopf, $13.95.) A ''funny, cohesive and moving'' collection in which the author ''examines the idea that lives can be improved like golf swings and in so doing finds a distinctive, scalpel-sharp fictional voice that probes . . . the depths of our fears and yearnings.''

THE SICILIAN. By Mario Puzo. (Simon & Schuster, $17.95.) A ''fine, fast-paced novel about Sicily in the 1940's'' and the bandit-hero Salvatore Giuliano.

SLOW DANCING. By Elizabeth Benedict. (Knopf, $15.95.) A first novel whose ''strength is in its sympathetic portraits of three well-meaning people more comfortable in their public roles than in their private lives.''

SMALL WORLD: An Academic Romance. By David Lodge. (Macmillan, $15.95.) ''An exuberant, marvelously funny . . . tale of professors on the make'' that ''suggests that despite the depredations of critics, the capacity of art to give pleasure still endures.''

SOLSTICE. By Joyce Carol Oates. (Dutton, $15.95.) This story describing the friendship between two women by a novelist ''never squeamish about looking into the dark places of the soul'' will ''dispel a lot of comforting ideas about the nature of women.''

STANLEY ELKIN'S THE MAGIC KINGDOM. By Stanley Elkin. (Dutton, $16.95.) Seven British children with fatal diseases visit Walt Disney World, and the author ''strips away the sentimentality and replaces it with an honest look at the grotesque possibilities we all carry around and prefer not to see.''

THINGS INVISIBLE TO SEE. By Nancy Willard. (Knopf, $14.95.) In her first novel, Nancy Willard ''transforms reality into something endlessly magical'' as she ''creates a world in which there is a constant interplay between the living and the dead, between things visible and invisible.''

WHITE NOISE. By Don DeLillo. (Elisabeth Sifton/Viking, $16.95.) A small college town in the Middle West is threatened by an industrial accident in this ''timely and frightening'' novel, which ''succeeds so brilliantly'' in documenting modern-day America's ''epidemic evasiveness and apprehension.''

ZUCKERMAN BOUND: A Trilogy and Epilogue. By Philip Roth. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Cloth $22.50. Paper, $9.95.) ''The Ghost Writer,'' ''Zuckerman Unbound,'' ''The Anatomy Lesson,'' plus ''a wild short novel, 'The Prague Orgy,' which is at once the bleakest and the funniest writing Roth has done'' - all add up to ''the novelist's finest achievement to date.''

HISTORY

THE ABANDONMENT OF THE JEWS: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945. By David S. Wyman. (Pantheon, $19.95.) The author's indictment of America's indifference to the Holocaust is ''exemplary in its clarity and thoroughness.''

BRIBES. By John T. Noonan Jr. (Macmillan, $29.95.) This history of bribery from ancient times to the present is also concerned with ''morals, religious doctrine and literary criticism.''

THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN THE MIDDLE EAST 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism. By Wm. Roger Louis. (Oxford, $55.) ''Based on a staggering amount of recently released official and private papers,'' this ''magnificent and comprehensive'' book ''unravels with compelling detail the way in which the British 'official mind' engaged in [an] imperial and strategic juggling act, as it sought to preserve national interests.''

EAGLE AGAINST THE SUN: The American War With Japan. By Ronald H. Spector. (Free Press, $24.95.) Demonstrating ''depth, breadth and careful scholarship,'' this history is the ''most concise and comprehensive account so far of the Pacific war from the American point of view.''

EXODUS AND REVOLUTION. By Michael Walzer. (Basic Books, $15.95.) With ''care and clarity,'' a political philosopher ''makes the case for the story of Exodus as a continuing metaphor for revolution,'' including America's.

THE FALL OF SAIGON: Scenes From the Sudden End of a Long War. By David Butler. (Simon & Schuster, $17.95.) ''Imitating the format employed . . . in 'Is Paris Burning?' '' David Butler ''presents some extraordinary vignettes from what he aptly describes as the Fellini-like atmosphere'' of South Vietnam as the Communists took over in 1975.

GERMAN BIG BUSINESS AND THE RISE OF HITLER. By Henry Ashby Turner Jr. (Oxford, $25.) This ''absorbing'' account of ''the personal and financial links'' between German business and Nazism argues that ''big-business money was of marginal importance to the rapidly expanding Hitler movement.''

HEART OF EUROPE: A Short History of Poland. By Norman Davies. (Oxford, $35.) The author of ''God's Playground: A History of Poland'' has written a work with ''sweep, a rare analytical depth and a courageous display of . . . personal convictions.''

A HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE: Settings and Rituals. By Spiro Kostof. (Oxford, $45.) ''A magnificent guided tour through mankind's architecture from prehistoric caves to the extension of Harvard University's Fogg Museum.''

INVENTING THE DREAM: California Through the Progressive Era. By Kevin Starr. (Oxford, $19.95.) The second volume of a ''monumental history of California'' tells ''the story of how Americans of many kinds of background . . . found themselves in the ultimate Garden of the World . . . and then were changed by the myths they themselves had created.''

LAY BARE THE HEART: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement. By James Farmer. (Arbor House, $16.95.) The civil rights leader presents a ''candid and lively'' look at himself and the ''front-line aspects'' of the movement.

THE LOST SOUL OF AMERICAN POLITICS: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism. By John Patrick Diggins. (Basic Books, $23.95.) An ''often searing portrait'' that ''aspires to explain in historical terms the peculiar amalgam of self-interest and religion, of economic privatism and national patriotism . . . that marks our own ambiguous era.''

PSYCHOTHERAPY IN THE THIRD REICH: The Goring Institute. By Geoffrey Cocks. (Oxford, $24.95.) A ''valuable study'' of how psychoanalysis, the ''Jewish science,'' fared under the Nazis and Hermann Goring's cousin.

SON OF THE MORNING STAR. By Evan S. Connell. (North Point, $20.) This narrative of Custer's last stand is marked by ''elegant'' prose and ''dry wit.''

THE SOONG DYNASTY. By Sterling Seagrave. (Harper & Row, $22.50.) The lives and times of Charlie Soong's three sons and three daughters, who ''carved out a permanent niche in the steamy politics of the Chinese republic in the years from its founding in 1911 to its fall in 1949.''

THE SPOILS OF TIME: A World History From the Dawn of Civilization Through the Early Renaissance. By C. V. Wedgwood. (Doubleday, $19.95.) A fair-minded, ''scrupulous'' and ''straightforward account of how men and women moved from primitive savagery to the comparative sophistication of the Renaissance.''

POETRY

COLLECTED POEMS 1947-1980. By Allen Ginsberg. (Harper & Row, $27.50.) A complete collection of the poetry of the most celebrated Beat, gathered from the many small-press volumes and magazines in which they have appeared, with sometimes extraordinary notes by the poet.

THE LAMPLIT ANSWER. By Gjertrud Schnackenberg. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $12.95.) This poet has an ''intelligent, resonant, sometimes ravishing way with words,'' and her work ''shines throughout with a luminous craft and a wise reflective sense of culture and its claims on human feeling.''

PRAYING WRONG: New and Selected Poems 1957-1984. By Peter Davison. (Atheneum, $18.95.) Twenty new poems plus about three-quarters of those published in past books are here, ''chosen with a connoisseur's detachment. This will unquestionably be the Davison volume to own for a long time to come.''

STATION ISLAND. By Seamus Heaney. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $11.95.) ''A book of poems to be read through rather than dipped into. There is bone and sinew and song here, and an urgency that grabs you by the sleeve - sometimes by the throat - and makes your blood race.''

WHAT THE LIGHT WAS LIKE. By Amy Clampitt. (Knopf, $14.95.) ''Astute, moving and beautiful'' poems by a writer who defies mainstream tastes in favor of almost baroque profusion and a vocabulary that is ''a festival lexicon.''

SCIENCE & SOCIAL SCIENCE

BRAIN AND PSYCHE: The Biology of the Unconscious. By Jonathan Winson. (Anchor/Doubleday, $16.95.) ''A compelling and well-written book, intriguing both for its view of the brain in light of the computer revolution, and for its attempted revision of certain Freudian notions about the mind.''

CHANCING IT: Why We Take Risks. By Ralph Keyes. (Little, Brown, $15.95.) An ''entertaining writer with a light touch'' divides the risks we take into those involving physical danger and those involving ''commitment, intimacy and self-knowledge.''

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF CHARLES DARWIN. Volume One: 1821-1836. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt and Sydney Smith. (Cambridge, $37.50.) This ''landmark'' volume ''covers Darwin's life from his first letters to his brother Erasmus to his return from the Beagle voyage.''

HABITS OF THE HEART: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. By Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton. (University of California, $16.95.) In this ''well-written'' book, the authors conclude that middle-class Americans ''have largely lost the language they need to make moral sense out of their private and public lives.'' . . . THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH: A Political History of the Space Age. By Walter A. McDougall. (Basic Books, $25.95.) An ''exhaustively researched, brilliantly conceived and beautifully written'' account of space exploration by the United States and the Soviet Union.

THE NEW OUR BODIES, OURSELVES: A Book by and for Women. By the Boston Women's Health Collective. (Touchstone/ Simon & Schuster, Paper, $12.95.) This revised and expanded edition of a 1973 work ''remains an excellent source for a woman evaluating medical care.''

REFLECTIONS ON GENDER AND SCIENCE. By Evelyn Fox Keller. (Yale, $17.95.) In nine ''philosophical'' essays, the author ''analyzes the pervasiveness of gender ideology, investigates how it became established and how it still shapes the course of scientific theory and experimentation and speculates what science might be like if it were gender-free.''

REVOLUTION IN SCIENCE. By I. Bernard Cohen. (Harvard, $25.) A history of physical science from the 17th century to the present day ''carefully documented and told in a straightforward, comprehensive style.''

A SCIENTIST AT THE SEASHORE. By James Trefil. (Scribners, $16.95.) A physicist takes readers on ''a marvelous excursion from the beach to the ends of the solar system.''

SCIENCE FICTION

BROKEN SYMMETRIES. By Paul Preuss. (Pocket Books, Paper, $3.95.) Set in Hawaii, this ''lively, intelligent'' novel tells the story of ''an insider in the world of high-energy, highly competitive and highly expensive particle physics.''

FIRE WATCH. By Connie Willis. (Blue Jay, $14.95.) In her first collection of stories, the author ''deploys the apparatus of science fiction to illuminate character and relationships, and her writing is fresh, subtle and deeply moving.''

HELLICONIA WINTER. By Brian W. Aldiss. (Atheneum, $17.95.) The final volume of the author's ''masterful trilogy whose theme is nothing less than the interrelationship of all living (and nonliving) things.''

STARS IN MY POCKET LIKE GRAINS OF SAND. By Samuel R. Delany. (Bantam, $16.95.) A ''challenging and satisfying'' novel about ''a universe of the far future, which contains more than 6,000 inhabited worlds and a marvelously rich blend of cultures.''