THE BEST BOOKS OF 1993

NON-FICTION

1 President Kennedy by Richard Reeves. We knew he was no saint. Now we have 800 carefully researched pages to tell us that J.F.K. was more Hollywood than Harvard, a gifted politician who relied on his charm rather than deep understanding and conviction. He was often ''careless and dangerously disorganized.'' The image of vigor was also an illusion: hormone shots compensated for failing adrenal glands and amphetamines perked him up. Reeves' dose of reality is a needed antidote to the cloying hagiographies that have marked the 30th anniversary of J.F.K.'s death.

2 Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire by David Remnick. What do good journalists do when they find themselves in the middle of the story of a lifetime? Dig till they drop and type like hell. Remnick covered thousands of miles for hundreds of interviews to explain who did what to whom when the Kremlin came tumbling down. The result is history still hot from the crucible.

3 W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race by David Levering Lewis. The first of a planned two parts, this volume tracks the controversial black intellectual from his middle-class roots in Massachusetts to Paris for the 1918 Pan-African Congress. Lewis reveals the crusading editor and author of The Souls of Black Folk to be an aloof thinker struggling with contradictory ideas about racial inclusion and separatism.

4 Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir by Leni Riefenstahl. At 91, the former actress and filmmaker has a lot to remember. Her Late Romantic style won raves from Hitler and invitations to his mountain lair. She glorified the New Order with striking films about the 1934 Nazi Party Congress and the 1936 Olympic Games. Whether one regards her as indomitable or abominable, Riefenstahl has written a vivid memoir of intimacies in an amoral time.

5 A History of Warfare by John Keegan. Casting a cold eye over 4,000 years of mortal combat convinces this British historian that making war is basically a bad habit. Unromantic about the profession of arms but nevertheless sympathetic to the warrior class, Keegan conveys the grim details of warmaking operations with a stoic clarity that blurs all flags and levels all battlefields.

...And the Worst

The Last Brother by Joe McGinniss. Craven in concept and as suspect as late homework, this so-called biography has done what Ted Kennedy's handlers could never manage: turned the Senator into a sympathetic victim of shoddy journalism and rendered his life so absurdly that Kennedy's excesses and bad judgments seem totally unbelievable.

FICTION

1 Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Hoeg. Denmark's exploitation of Greenland's mineral resources seems an unlikely background for a detective thriller about the mysterious death of a six-year-old Inuit boy. Unlikely too is the investigator, Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen, a woman caught between the native Greenland culture of her hunter-tracker mother and the well-appointed world of her Danish father, a physician and scientist. Like Ross Macdonald in his Lew Archer novels of darkest California, Hoeg creates an unfamiliar but palpable world that steadily envelops the reader.

2 Operation Shylock by Philip Roth. The uncontested master of comic irony comes up with another ticklish situation: a writer named Philip Roth journeys to Israel to confront a Philip Roth imposter who is trying to persuade Jews to go back to Europe and re-establish Yiddish culture. This new Diaspora aims to avert an Arab-engineered Holocaust by returning Israelis to the countries of their ancestors. Seriously funny about Middle East madness, Roth riffs with an abandon not seen since Portnoy's Complaint.

3 Remembering Babylon by David Malouf. A celebrated Australian novelist reimagines his country's pioneer past with a haunting tale of a white man raised by Aborigines. It is the mid-19th century, and the struggling Queensland settlers are homesick for Britain and afraid of the natives. Malouf works the themes of culture clash and racial fears into a seamless narrative that amounts to a national contraepic.

4 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. Winner of this year's National Book Award, Proulx's rambunctious second novel zeroes in on a coastal Newfoundland community coming apart economically and socially when the fishing and seal hunting industries fail. The author has a sharp ear for regional speech and a barbed and quirky style that can be both startling and humorous.

5 The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones. This collection of short stories about damaged men poses important questions: Is courage a virtue, or is it simply testosterone poisoning? Is God just a neurochemical event, part of the tantalizing aura that precedes an epileptic fit? Jones is an ex-Marine and former amateur prizefighter who puts a wallop in his prose.

...And the Worst

The Last Brother by Joe McGinnis. Who is this character with a famous name and a mind marinated in platitudes? Certainly not pure fiction, which might have been convincing, but a lifeless creature born out of New Journalism and the checkout-counter culture. Bad novel and bad biography, The Last Brother gives twice as little for the money.