Bookends

HAMMER

by Armand Hammer with Neil Lyndon

Putnam; 544 pages; $22.95

Armand Hammer's memoir of his 88 tumultuous years begins near the end, with accounts of his part in 1986 negotiations to clear the way for U.S. physicians to help Chernobyl's victims, and then in freeing hostage U.S. Journalist Nicholas Daniloff and a would-be Soviet emigre, Geneticist David Goldfarb. These incidents demonstrate his unusual role as a back-channel conduit between U.S. and Soviet officials. They also reflect the pragmatic approach Hammer takes toward the Soviets, his business partners on and off since the early 1920s. Readers will search in vain for indignation about the Soviet record on human rights. They will find instead a cuddly Lenin, a reasonable Gorbachev and a host of other blandly invoked leaders. Hammer calls himself an ardent capitalist; apparently this customer is always right.

Although Hammer has been accused of inflating his role in some events, on its own terms his is a fascinating story. There are peephole glimpses at the famous (he bargained with the Shah of Iran, visited with Jean Paul Getty and oversaw the sale of William Randolph Hearst's fabled art collection) and family tragedies, including a jail term for his Communist father, his own messy divorces, and manslaughter charges deflected by his son, who pleaded self-defense. In blunt and trenchantly funny prose, Hammer portrays himself as a bumbling breeder of prize cattle, an accidental oil millionaire -- yet, always, a consummate wheeler-dealer, which nobody can deny.

GLORY DAYS

by Dave Marsh

Pantheon; 478 pages; $18.95

How did Bruce Springsteen become America's rockin' role model? Critic Dave Marsh, a member of Springsteen's inner circle, suggests that he was driven to it by two haunting figures, Elvis Presley and Ronald Reagan. One a hero gone wrong, the other an antagonist, both taught the Boss a lesson about the hazards of being isolated and uninformed. After Reagan was elected, the Boss traded romantic fantasy for a gritty populism and gave birth to Born in the U.S.A., his heavyweight album about everything from Viet Nam to dying hometowns. In this overlong account, Marsh purveys no dressing-room scandal -- apparently the Boss's only vices are driving fast and staying up late -- but discloses that when Manager Jon Landau suggested during the making of Born that none of the 70 songs Springsteen had written were good enough for a smash single, the Boss snarled, "You want another one, you write it." Then he sat down on his bed, guitar in hand, and composed Dancing in the Dark. No book could possibly capture the emotional peaks of a Springsteen concert, but this one gives Bossmaniacs plenty more reasons to believe.

SPHERE

By Michael Crichton

Knopf; 385 pages; $17.95

This is a beguiling remake of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, complete with a thoroughly nasty giant squid, whose eye is "about 15 inches across, the size of a big dinner plate." Troubling questions -- such as "Why is that dinner plate winking at us?" -- arise when Psychologist Norman Johnson is flown to an air-crash site in the South Pacific. It turns out that the downed flying machine, resting 1,000 ft. under the sea, is a huge spaceship that crashed at least 300 years ago, judging from the coral growth that surrounds it. A satisfactory degree of Hmm? and a judicious measure of Eeek! are involved when the hero and several dispensable colleagues submerge to investigate. Crichton (The Andromeda Strain) employs just enough sci-fi technobabble to justify his ingenious puzzle. The solution involves psychology, a discipline that in the author's depiction is something between a soft science and a firm seafood quiche.

SERENISSIMA

by Erica Jong

Houghton Mifflin; 225 pages; $17.95

Shakespeare was not really gay. When required by his sadistic patron, the Earl of Southampton, to engage in homosexual acts, Will just shut his eyes and thought of . . . Well, actually he thought of Jessica Pruitt, a 20th century American screen star whom he met in Venice when she was on a time trip back to the 1590s. The Bard thought she was another Jessica, the daughter of a Jewish moneylender whose name begins with S. The beautiful Pruitt knew she was on an out-of-body voyage, fleeing 1980s-style problems familiar to anyone who reads commercial fiction: approaching middle age; botched marriages; lost custody of her child. Beside such threadbare cliches, Jong offers a doggedly authentic Venice setting, a fair amount of brushed-up Shakespeare and a few genuinely silly moments: Will speaking mostly in famous lines from his works, Jessica facing a new moral quandary -- should she tell the world how Shakespeare was in bed?