Bookends

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE

by Carrie Fisher

Simon & Schuster; 221 pages; $15.95

"It struck me today that the people that have had an impact on me are the people who didn't make it. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, Lenny Bruce, Janis Joplin, John Belushi . . . In our culture these people are heroes . . . It's the one thing I cling to in here: Wow, I'm hip now, like the dead people." So writes Actress Suzanne Vale, 29, whose diary of her 30 days in a Los Angeles drug rehabilitation clinic forms the strongest part of this feisty, refreshing first novel. Suzanne's journal is counterpoint to the strident monologue of a fellow patient, Alex Daniels, also 29, who bottomed out at a Ramada Inn on a half-ounce of cocaine, six Long Island iced teas, two Smirnoffs, a hamburger, French fries and cake.

Author Carrie Fisher, the actress daughter of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, has been through drug problems of her own and gives her protagonist the kind of humor born from pain, anger and a strong will to live. The narrative voice is a bit like Holden Caulfield playing the Borscht Belt: "I'm a flash and the world is my pan." And: "I guess that's how guys are thoughtful in the '80s -- they accompany girls to their abortions." Postcards, which is really five connected vignettes, loses its bite when it strays from its emotional base in the clinic. But not before Fisher, who once expected to be remembered only as Star Wars' Princess Leia, proves that the pen is mightier than the light-saber.

STORMING THE MAGIC KINGDOM

by John Taylor

Knopf; 261 pages; $18.95

Think of it as an animated cartoon. Imagine the corporation as a sheepfold, its shepherds stupefied by years of prosperity and innocent of the ways of wickedness in far-off Wall Street. Now imagine a pack of wolves peering over the fence and judging that the assets gamboling behind it are tantalizingly undervalued by the marketplace.

John Taylor recounts the 1984 assaults on Walt Disney Productions by corporate raiders in a manner the founder would have approved: brisk narrative colored in primary emotional tones. The takeover artists are sometimes attractively shrewd but heedlessly greedy -- for action as much as for power and money. The company's executives, ponderously led by President Ron Miller, are brave but inept in their resistance. Meanwhile, Walt's nephew Roy and the other heirs squabble among themselves. In the end, all concerned muddle their way to a bright new management team -- imported from Paramount and Warner Bros. -- that will restore the company's fortunes. But this seems more luck than foresight. Reality omits two things that old Walt would never have left out of a cartoon: an unambiguous hero and a clear-cut moral.

BRANDO: THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

by Charles Higham

New American Library

330 pages; $18.95

A few years ago, Biographer Charles Higham made a sensation with his assertions that Errol Flynn was a bisexual Nazi spy. So one comes to this book with high expectations of the lowest sort. It was Marlon Brando, after all, whose predatory sexuality, postarticulate pathos and screw-the-system belligerence helped define modern acting. He has also starred in tabloid headlines and the show-biz gossip mill for the 40 years since A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway. Could Higham not shed a little light on Brando's balky genius while dishing some dirt about his rambunctious private life? No. The familiar facts are here, but few new ones, and little of the actor's threatening charm. And because Higham writes with neither zest nor malice, Brando lacks the sine qua non for a bio worth taking to the beach: redeeming prurient interest.

FAST FORWARD

by James Lardner

Norton; 344 pages; $18.95

In 1976 Sidney Sheinberg, president of Universal Pictures, was introduced to a newfangled machine called the Betamax. He saw the device as a serious threat to his business and set in motion a furious legal, political and public relations battle against the new technology, a fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. (Private taping, the court concluded, did not violate copyright laws.) James Lardner gives a lucid, well-researched account of that battle, with helpful detours into such related matters as the history of VCR technology and the ins and outs of Washington lobbying. At times his dogged accretion of detail can drift into monotony: on the eve of a key Supreme Court hearing, we learn, Sony's chief attorney ate a dinner of steak, orange juice and ice cream. The reader can fast-forward through passages like these; Lardner could have helped more by hitting the pause button occasionally for some rumination on the big picture.