Notable

THE LAW OF DELAY by C. Northcote Parkinson. 128 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

In his eighth book, Cyril Northcote Parkinson continues to tell people--especially businessmen--what they already know. This time he offers the Law of Delay, which holds that "delay is the deadliest form of denial." Let the man who never postponed a decision until too late cast the first stone.

There are other flashes of crisp satire in this collection of essays. In a modern version of the Christmas carol Good King Wenceslas, the king's good intentions get lost in a bureaucratic maze. When Parkinson analyzes beards through history and finds them to be a sure indicator of lack of civilization (a thicket behind which older men could hide their uncertainties), he is at his bluff best. But the crotchety professor can also be dull. His strident common sense often sounds simply pompous; and his habit of describing imaginary conversations seems contrived. Parkinson's biggest problem is best described in another law as yet unelucidated by the master: iconoclasm amuses in direct proportion to its originality.

JOURNEY FROM THE NORTH by Storm Jameson. 792 pages. Harper & Row. $15.

In the past 50 years, Storm Jameson has published some 40 novels, ranging from expert entertainments to books worth reading twice. In this autobiography, she demonstrates once more her considerable talents for evoking place and time, as she sketches the literary and political scene in England and Europe since World War I. There are flashing glimpses of the famous--H.G. Wells, Walter de la Mare, Jan Masaryk--as well as of obscure middle-European writers fleeing Nazism whom she tried to help. There are the sights and sounds of cities in crisis--Munich, Prague, Vienna, Budapest--as well as the bare cliff tops and mute-hued moors of her native Yorkshire coast.

Out of it all, Miss Jameson has produced what may become a minor classic of feminism. She tracks the single-minded drive essential to a woman who insists on being more than a private person, even though she understands all too well the peculiar costs to herself and to those she loves. The slow flowering of the "necessary egoism" of the born writer gradually enabled Storm Jameson to avoid domesticity, slough off a first useless husband, sporadically put aside a much-loved child in favor of work, and deliberately miscarry another. Egoism mastered diffidence, countered improvidence with "confidence in my strength and cleverness," and channeled all energies into the prolific output of well-made novels.

Yet looking back at 80, Storm Jameson is aware of a continued fault. "Always the same failure," she writes, the failure "to love enough."

THE SCARLATTI INHERITANCE by Robert Ludlum. 358 pages. World. $6.95.

Robert Ludlum is an ex-actor whose first novel, The Scarlatti Inheritance, owes a large debt to histrionic melodrama. Its action encompasses the two World Wars. Its central figure--heir to the immense Scarlatti industrial fortune--is Ulster Scarlatti, a thoroughly bad seed who may be depraved but is certainly not deprived. Active duty as a younger scion in the U.S. Army during World War I infects him with a fondness for fascism. After the war, under the gullible noses of the family's financial advisers, he transfers huge sums of money to Europe. Then, poof! . . . he disappears, to reappear in Zurich as surgically deformed Heinrich Kroeger, intimate of the German high command, the center of an international backer's dozen of tycoons who are underwriting Hitler. U.S. intelligence, with help from his abandoned wife and widowed mother, pursues Scarlatti through the capitals of the world, encountering murder, madness and megalomania among the high and the mighty. The plot is pure kitsch, but does occasionally clutch, and the reader rests assured that the damned indeed are doomed.

WIZARD OF THE UPPER AMAZON by Manuel Cordova-Rios and F. Bruce Lamb. 203 pages. Atheneum. $6.95.

As a youth at the turn of the century, Manuel Cordova-Rios left Iquitos, Peru, to accompany a gang of rubber harvesters on a brief trip into the Upper Amazon. He returned home seven years later. In between, he lived in the jungle with the primitive Amahuaca Indians, first as a captive, finally as chief. Nine years ago, F. Bruce Lamb, a U.S. researcher in tropical flora, first met Cordova-Rios, then transcribed and translated the old man's astonishingly detailed, fascinating recollections.

With the Indians' help, Cordova-Rios quickly learned to move soundlessly through the underbrush, alert to the forest's early-warning system: the cries of startled birds, the fetid scent of the deadly fer-de-lance, the click-click of an enraged wild boar. Xumu, the old chief of the Amahuaca, also instructed him in jungle medicine. The stem of the paka nixpo plant, when chewed, prevented tooth decay for years; the extract of the ayahuasca vine was especially prized for producing visions that, Cordova-Rios says, actually enhance human intelligence. After many adventures--hunting, harvesting rubber, procuring arms for the tribe--Cordova-Rios eventually tired of the Indians' pettiness and "musky odor." He escaped to civilization, where he became renowned as a great healer.

Manuel Cordova-Rios is a simple man. He draws no moral from his experience; his descriptions of jungle cures and tribal society are tantalizing rather than complete. Still, he is a superb storyteller. His rich, supple prose re-creates the darkness of the rain forest--its dangers, omens and teeming, insistent life.

NOBODY KNEW THEY WERE THERE by Evan Hunter. 249 pages. Doubleday. $5.95.

The time: 1974, ". . . a decade before 1984." The protagonist seems to be just another middle-aged paid assassin. His contract is with three university professors. The plot: to blow up the Peace Train scheduled to pass through a university town two weeks hence, carrying "the man," along with the usual entourage of Government brass, Secret Service men and reporters.

In fact, Evan Hunter's apparently modest suspense tale is about quite a different sort of assassination plot. It works as well as it does because the academics he portrays are teasingly out of character in their commitment to violence, yet touched by an anger and frustration now frighteningly familiar. It would be unfair to Hunter and his readers to reveal his sleight-of-hand device. But the result is an intriguing handicapper's book, a second-guessing game of truth and its consequences.

HO by David Halberstam. 118 pages. Random House. $4.95.

While chatting about the details of his life with the late Bernard Fall in 1962, Ho Chi Minh said, "I like to hold on to my little mysteries. I'm sure you will understand." Now Ho is dead and the little mysteries are his forever.

Even larger ones are ours: Why did the U.S. become so deeply mired in Ho's country? Why is success so elusive? Those questions have tantalized David Halberstam since he returned in 1964 from 15 months in South Viet Nam as a New York Times reporter. The answer, essentially, is always the same: from John F. Kennedy to William Westmoreland to the freshest shavetail just off the jet at Bien Hoa, "They" underestimated Ho. That is to say, they failed to understand the Vietnamese, for in his own artfully complex personality, Ho was Viet Nam.

Halberstam's slender but tough book suffers from lack of biographic detail. Much of his data had to be cobbled together from existing works on Ho and Viet Nam--from Fall, Robert Shaplen, Jean Lacouture and the late Paul Mus, a French-born Yale professor who grew up in Viet Nam. Ho was awfully good at simply dropping out of sight. Too often, as a result, Halberstam has had to make mere chronology do the work of biography. Though he mercifully avoids the rah-rah, gung-Ho, Holy-Ho rhetoric of the New Left, Halberstam makes it clear that he admires his subject. The value of his book lies in the fact that it briskly enumerates Ho's strengths and U.S. weaknesses, Ho's sure manipulative grasp of Vietnamese xenophobia, his deceptive simplicity, as well as his complete dedication to the cause of an independent Viet Nam.

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