Bookends

I NEVER PLAYED THE GAME

by Howard Cosell

Morrow; 380 pages; $18.95

The adenoids are missing, but the tone is unmistakable ("Those halcyon days of yore are gone for good"). Through the booming names and assertions comes the clarion bleat of Howard Cosell blowing his own horn. In this $ autobiographical screed, the Mouth That Roared shows that in a 32-year career, no triumph was ever forgotten or insult overlooked. In the early 1980s, his Monday Night Football colleagues made the mistake of being "full of themselves, obviously convinced they could handle the telecasts as well without me." The broadcaster turned viewer chortled as the audience dwindled: "I barely made it through the half-time highlights before falling asleep . . . Hey, I'm only human. I'll not lie about it. Some small part of me, on a highly personal level, was gratified to witness the eroding ratings."

Although he walked away from boxing because of its brutality and racketeering, he manfully assumes his share of responsibility: "My public persona helped revitalize boxing's once flagging popularity." After leaving the confessional, Cosell offers a scrapbook of his favorable reviews in newspapers and magazines to counter the "literary pogrom against me." The sad fact is that this wheedling self-inflation is unnecessary. Cosell was a tough-minded and honest salesman who could persuade sports fans to buy just about anything. As his book proves, he just stayed too long in the toy department.

CONTACT

by Carl Sagan

Simon & Schuster; 432 pages; $18.95

With terrestrials like Carl Sagan, who needs extras? Five years ago, he brought the cosmos into your living room and became an instant star in the electronic firmament. The astronomer at Cornell now takes aim at the fiction best-seller charts. Contact, his first novel, dramatizes a pet theme: the possibility of unearthly life in the universe. Despite dialogue like "Holy Toledo. That's hundreds of janskys," the book is an engaging pastiche of science and speculation.

The protagonist is Eleanor Arroway, director of Project Argus, a Government- sponsored undertaking to comb the universe for alien messages. The time is 1999, when, in Sagan's irrepressibly progressive vision, the President of the U.S. is a woman, and the world's smartest man is a Nigerian. The aliens, however, are stereotypical. By the time their cosmic call is returned, it is clear they are vastly more intelligent and wiser than we are; among other things, they do not seem to have deregulated their telephone system.

TEXAS

by James A. Michener

Random House; 1,096 pages; $21.95

This mammoth chronicle is Michener's longest yet, and like so many of those before it, contains perfunctory characterization, arid prose and an authentic gift for conveying the mighty sweep of history. This time the locus is the Lone Star State. Michener begins his tale in the early 16th century, when Tejas was unexplored Mexican wasteland. In the kilopage fictification that follows, events and personalities pass in review: the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto, Comanche raids, cattle drives, oil, religion, high school football, superpatriotism and real estate dodges. Much of this is fascinating, but it is propelled by a strange device: Michener imagines a committee appointed by a Texas Governor to investigate the state's history. Every time the story begins to gallop, accounts of the get-togethers slow the narrative to a plod. Even in Super-America, apparently, the only dependable result of committee meetings is ennui.

THE SECRETS OF HARRY BRIGHT

by Joseph Wambaugh

Morrow; 345 pages; $17.95

In a gritty, wind-torn burg near Palm Springs, Calif., a college student is found in a canyon, burned and shot to death. Los Angeles Police Department Detective Sidney Blackpool bridles at taking a case far from his own turf, but he cannot resist the six-figure job promised by the boy's millionaire father, which would allow him to quit the force. As usual, ex-Policeman Joseph Wambaugh keeps the uniforms blue and the humor black. Blackpool has also lost a son, and the key witness is another graying officer, Harry Bright, who now lies in an apparently irreversible coma. Also hampering the investigation are a midget who hopes for intimate contact with large ladies, and a Palm Springs houseboy who scouts gay bars for murder suspects in his best butch outfit. Without a program, the bad guys are hard to separate from the good guys, and Blackpool has a lot of trouble finding and confronting the truth. The ultimate message is bitter, but for the first time in seven novels the author's badge carriers contemplate suicide only briefly. They are survivors transformed by suffering. It is good to have them, and Wambaugh, back on the case.