TO TIME's Manhattan wire room from Washington last week came a 4,500-word file datelined "Garfield Hospital Annex." It was signed by Correspondent George Bookman, who had spent days poking around the far-flung empire of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. While awaiting a final interview with Teamsters' President Dave Beck, Bookman doubled over in pain, next evening underwent an appendectomy. He came out of the sodium pentathol with a bad case of hiccups, but nonetheless dictated to his wife Janet, a former United Press reporter. His file arrived in New York apace with those of Washington Correspondents Marshall Berger and James Truitt, Seattle Bureau Chief Robert Schulman and Seattle Correspondent Russell Sackett. All, and much other information, went into the making of this week's cover story in NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Dave & the Green Stuff.

QBVIOUSLY a sure-fire collection of self-help topics," said Publishers' Weekly in announcing the new book to the trade. The book: a new edition of Ovid's The Art of Love, including The Remedies of Love, The Art of Beauty, etc. The great Roman poet's famed work, combining amatory advice with a rake's recollections, scandalized Emperor Augustus when it first appeared about 1 B.C. Never had the Loves read as well in English as in the new translation by Rolfe Humphries, longtime Latin teacher and poet, who combines current lingo and idiom with a keen sense for the classic, a roguish twinkle with catholic taste. For a review, see BOOKS, Latin Without Tears.

THERE was a Renaissance count named Frederick of Montefeltro who was blind in one eye. This made him nervous, since he was unable to see what was happening on his blind side--his Borgia-minded dinner guests, for instance, might easily drop some poison in his soup. So he had a surgeon cut a notch in his nose for good peripheral vision. This incident is used by Sir Harold Delf Gillies, Britain's famed and famously light-hearted plastic surgeon, to illustrate the infinite challenges to the imagination that are found in his difficult surgical specialty. A massive new study now tells how Sir Harold and his colleagues treat human flesh as if it were sculptor's clay and reports on the latest heroic operations which restore mutilated bodies to human shape. For a full account, see MEDICINE, Flap Happy?

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