Notable

AMERICAN GENESIS by Jeffrey Goodman Summit; 285 pages; $11.95

Anthropological dogma holds that modern man, ancestor of all people living today, appeared rather suddenly in Europe 35,000 years ago, spread south ward into Africa and eastward into Asia, and finally, no more than 12,000 years ago, crossed the Bering land bridge to America. Now an anthropological heretic offers another theory. Modern man, says Jeffrey Goodman, has actually been in America for at least 50,000 years. He crossed the Bering bridge the other way, bringing his culture to Europe and Asia.

"The proverbial Garden of Eden may have been in ... southern California," writes Goodman in American Genesis.

"From this Garden the first fully modern men may have ventured forth bearing cultural and technological gifts to the rest of the world."

The author, who holds a doctorate in anthropology and degrees in both geological engineering and archaeology, ad vances his thesis with layman's language and expert's knowledge. Citing archaeological discoveries (both his own and those of others), he offers evidence that toolmaking men resided in the Americas more than 38,000 years ago, points out similarities between the shamanistic cul ture of the Cro-Magnons and that of the American Indians and provides convincing arguments that the prehistoric migration could just as easily have gone from the Americas as come to them. Few of Goodman's colleagues will subscribe to his theory; many still find his evidence in complete. Fewer still will be able simply to dismiss it.

A MAN by Oriana Fallaci

Translated by William Weaver

Simon & Schuster; 463 pages; $14.95

Fifty years ago, Critic D.B. Wyndham Lewis compiled an anthology of hilariously (and unintentionally) bad verse entitled The Stuffed Owl. Today an enterprising editor could produce a companion Owl stuffed with bad prose. High on the list should be selections from Oriana Fallaci's nonfiction novel A Man. The title is the last instance of unmannered writing to be encountered until the reader emerges at the other end, covered with tropes.

Fallaci has shown strengths as the grand inquisitor of such disparate leaders as Henry Kissinger and the Ayatullah Khomeini. Here she assumes her customary tone of moral outrage, but the hero, a deceased Greek revolutionary, is as unpromising in death as he was thwarted in life. The owlish collector of excesses is soon faced with an embarrassment of riches--and sometimes just with an embarrassment. For connoisseurs of melodrama there is the first meeting of narrator and martyr: "You were to have many faces, many names ... you were a Vietcong girl... You told me about a god with a yellow beard whom they call Jesus Christ and he has wings and flies over the clouds and dies like a Vietcong partisan ... then your name was Padre Tito de Alencar Lima ... Captain Mauricio said to you, 'Now you will know the local office of hell.' " Those who prefer the unexamined aphorism may choose: "The bitter discovery that God does not exist has destroyed the concept of fate" or "Death is a thief that never turns up by surprise." Devotees of the mixed metaphor will prize: "Riding on this illusion you hurled yourself against the windmills of your chosen dragon." Although Fallaci's junta villains are as gross as editorial cartoons, it is difficult to separate dragon, windmills and Quixote. For throughout this catalogue of misery, Fallaci never makes the right choice. When the account needs historical analysis she offers tantrums; when suffering cries out for a tragic spirit she substitutes bathos.

The author is fond of spelling power with a capital P. Yet for all her bluster, she has produced only a lower-case history.

POPE, PREMIER, PRESIDENT by Roland Flamini Macmillan; 227 pages; $10.95

There is a peculiar contemporaneity in this careful reconstruction of the Vatican's historic opening to the Soviet bloc under Popes John XXIII and Paul VI. As a Rome correspondent for TIME, Roland Flamini covered the papal elections of 1978. When he began this book the year before that, Flamini could not have foreseen a Polish Pope and Soviet divisions poised on Poland's borders.

The general tale of Vatican Ostpolitik has been told before, of course, in Norman Cousins' 1972 memoir and numerous other writings. Flamini draws on interviews with insiders and previously classified documents of the Vatican and the U.S.

Government. He discovers a Khrushchev more friendly to the Pope than to John Kennedy; John XXIII maneuvering behind the backs of the Vatican Curia's professional antiCommunists; and CIA Director John McCone, a Catholic, warning his Pontiff that he is going too far. This is a valuable history for anyone attracted to modern diplomacy and Vatican intrigue.

Flamini writes with a lack of the sanctimonious, overripe prose and soft facts found in many books on the Holy See.

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