Recherche

BEETHOVEN AND HIS NEPHEW, by Editha Sferba and Richard Sferba (351 pp.; Pantheon; $5). The authors are concerned with the vulnerable man, not the venerable musician, and apparently are out to demonstrate, largely using Beethoven's own words against him. that the great composer was insufferable. He was slovenly, sadistic, puritanical, suspicious, demanding, uncontrolled, domineering, violent. After he became guardian of his nephew Karl (the boy's father had died), Beethoven tried to own his life com pletely, eventually drove him to an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Freudians Richard and Editha Sterba charge Beethoven with an "unconscious homosexual" relationship with both his brothers; they imply the same sort of thing in regard to his nephew and. in addition, insist that Beethoven felt toward him not like an uncle but like a very maternal mother. But the documents seem to indicate only that Beethoven had the feelings of an adoring if tyrannical relative for his nephew and that he hammered his Promethean will at the boy's head like a full orchestra attacking the opening bars of the Fifth Symphony. Too much of the book's argument springs from unproved assumptions and pounces upon unverified conclusions. Nonetheless, leaving aside some of the Freudian interpretations, it is an illuminating book that focuses on Beethoven with a cold lens and catches him in a fresh if unflattering light.

SONG OF THE SKY (438 pp.; Houghton Mifflin; $5), might have been titled Real Gone With the Wind. Author Guy Murchie Jr., 47, is an ex-wild-blue-yonder boy who navigated cargo planes across the Atlantic in World War II and ferried supplies from San Francisco to Tokyo during the Korean War. Along the line, he acquired an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that moves in what he calls the "ocean of the sky." Though his book sometimes reads like an airborne Information Please, it offers engaging proof that scientific fact can be at least as strange as science fiction. Is there any meaning to the expression "light as air"? Nonsense, says Murchie, the air surrounding the earth really weighs more than 5 quadrillion tons. Anyone lost at sea? Butterflies offer directions-in-reverse to the nearest coast because their flights over water are generally suicidal--away from land. Trying to make conversation in Tibet? Better stop talking by midmorning. because after that the wind sets up a "howling, skin-blasting roar." Along with such recherche lore. Author Murchie offers straightforward tips on air navigation to those who may feel the need of them. At his infrequent but embarrassing worst, he plays the Whitman-cum-Thomas Wolfe of the skyways: "I winnow the meager facts, seeking to construct truth only from the clean kernels. I am a human lodestone-the homing pigeon of mankind." The Book-of-the-Month Club judges have un-cooped him for December.

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