Wednesday, July 16

APOLLO 11 (ABC, CBS, NBC). Hugh Downs and David Brinkley will start off NBC's coverage from Cape Kennedy at 6 a.m.,* with ABC's Frank Reynolds and Jules Bergman joining in at 7 and CBS, with Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra, at 8. The networks will be going all out in presenting the zenith event of the space program, and plan to spend two days in continuous coverage (Sunday, July 20-Monday, July 21), when the descent to the moon's surface is scheduled. A camera in the lunar module will transmit, live, man's first step on the moon, and Astronauts Aldrin and Armstrong as they collect rock samples. Later, the timetable calls for progress reports on re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific. A final summation of the nine-day journey will be broadcast on each of the three networks on Thursday, July 24, in prime time.

DARWIN (NET, 9-10 p.m.). One hundred and thirty-four years after the Beagle's original voyage to the Galapagos Islands, a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. crew follows Evolutionist Charles Darwin's route and discovers many of the same flora and fauna he found in this "living laboratory of evolution." Repeat.

Thursday, July 17 ANIMAL WORLD (CBS, 7:30-8 p.m.). Beasts of the Week are beautiful killer cats, pho tographed in their natural surroundings.

DEAN MARTIN PRESENTS THE GOLDDIGGERS (NBC, 10-11 p.m.). Leu Rawls, hero of rhythm-and-blues fans, is joined by Gail Martin (Dino's daughter) and Paul Lynde for another summer with the singing, dancing Golddiggers. Premiere.

Saturday, July 19 A.A.U. TRACK AND FIELD MEET (CBS, 4:30-6 p.m.). The U.S., U.S.S.R. and British Commonwealth compete at the Los Angeles Coliseum.

WIDE WORLD OF SPORTS (ABC, 5-6:30 p.m.). The Trenton "200" Indianapolis car race.

MISS UNIVERSE BEAUTY PAGEANT (CBS, 10-11:30 p.m.). Monique Van Vooren, Earl Wilson and nine other students of form will choose this year's winner.

Sunday, July 20 SOUNDS OF SUMMER (NET, 8-10 p.m.). Arthur Fiedler conducts the Boston Pops in a George Gershwin concert, including An American in Paris, Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra (with Pianist Earl Wild) and selections from Porgy and Bess.

Monday, July 21 NET JOURNAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). "A Plague on Your Children" explores man's limitless ability to devise his own destruction-- this time, through chemical and biological warfare. Repeat.

Tuesday, July 22 1969 ALL-STAR BASEBALL GAME (NBC, 7:30 p.m. to conclusion). A centennial salute to the national sport from Robert F. Kennedy Stadium in Washington, with pre-game cheers offered by Curt Gowdy, Tony Kubek and Mickey Mantle.

THEATER

For those who like thought-provoking theater, summer stages offer a few productions to counterpoint the staple fare of sugar-coated musical comedies:

HUNGER AND THIRST is a new play by Eugene lonesco in its U.S. premiere at the Berkshire Theater Festival, Stockbridge, Mass. (July 16-26). A complex work in three episodes that traces a man's lifelong search for joy and truth, it is also a spectacular that includes music by Richard Peaslee (Marat/Sade), elements of choreography by Julie Arenal (Hair), monumental sets by William Pitkin and a cast of 35, including James Patterson, Ruth Ford, William Prince and Virginia Kiser. Ionesco is in residence to give Director Arthur Storch the benefit of his own interpretation.

OTHELLO, Shakespeare's valiant Moor, is played by Errol Hill and directed by Rod Alexander, and THE ROYAL HUNT OF THE SUN, Peter Shaffer's drama about the confrontation of an aging, existentialist Pizarro and the proud Peruvian Incas stars Rod Alexander and is directed by Errol Hill. The switch indicates the balanced nature of the Dartmouth Summer Repertory Theater Company, which is staging the two plays in Hanover, N.H., between July 17 and Aug. 30.

MOTHER COURAGE, Bertolt Brecht's treatise portraying common man as war's much-buffeted victim, will be modernized for its presentation in the bucolic setting of Castleton College, Castleton, Vt. (July 15-26). George Tabori directs a cast that includes Wife Viveca Lindfors as Mother, Sam Schacht, Rudy Bond, Julie Garfield and Pat Suzuki as the whore, Yvette.

JOE EGG is a comedy built around the unlikely subject of a spastic child who, as the focus of her parents' attention, holds their marriage together. Peter Nichols' play is performed by the new Madison Civic Repertory, Madison, Wis., on several dates between July 23 and Aug. 16.

THE HOMECOMING, Harold Pinter's study of a family's control and betrayal of each other, represents the Minnesota Theater Company's first foray into the bleak world of the British playwright. Joseph Anthony (Mary, Mary) directs, Lee Richardson and Robin Gammell star, and the play will be performed in repertory through Sept. 20.

RHINOCEROS, an Ionesco parable about a man's isolation, will be performed by A Contemporary Theater, Seattle, Wash. (July 22-Aug. 2). Robert Loper will brave it out as Berenger, the man who manages to resist conformity, Arne Zaslove will direct, and film projections will take the place of props to provide the scenery.

CINEMA

THE WILD BUNCH. The script is only another chapter in the legend of the West. But Sam Peckinpah's triumphant direction places him with the best of the newer generation of American film makers and makes the film a raucous, extremely violent classic of its genre.

THE FOOL KILLER and THE BOYS OF PAUL STREET. In The Fool Killer, a runaway twelve-year-old orphan comes to the beginning of maturity through a series of picaresque adventures. The call to action in The Boys of Paul Street is a dispute over the last vacant lot in town. Both films are tragicomedies that are focused on --and for--youth.

THE FIXER. Alan Bates, Ian Holm and Dirk Bogarde perform with passionate conviction in this movie based on Bernard Vlalamud's novel in which a 20th century lob survives the plague of prejudice and degradation in Czarist Russia.

MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN and RING OF BRIGHT WATER. Both films deal with happy obsessions. The first revolves around a Canadian youth's fascination with the solitude of the Laurentian mountains. The second concerns a Londoner's affection for an otter. Both are children's films, but adults will also find them charming.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Director Larry Peerce has produced some rare moments of social criticism in this film, but he frequently slips into burlesque. Nevertheless, Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw are always around to save the show with skillful performances.

WINNING. In this melodrama of the Indianapolis 500, Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman sometimes flash their celebrated force and conviction. For the most part, the action (like the race) merely goes in circles.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. A Texas drifter and a Bronx loner provide the nucleus of an unusual moving picture about love among the loveless. John Schlesinger (Darling) directs Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman with a restraint that is often missing from the script.

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK. Anna Karina (an usherette) is the taunting, haunting object pursued by a wealthy blind Englishman (Nicol Williamson). The script was carefully adapted from Nabokov's exploration of jet-black humor.

POPI. The plight of the poor is told with humor and bite in this surprisingly successful comedy. Alan Arkin is magnificent as a Puerto Rican widower with three jobs, struggling to get his children out of a New York ghetto.

TRUE GRIT. John Wayne, 62, gallops off into his sunset years as Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed federal marshal with an indiscriminate passion for justice, bullets and booze. The rest of the cast are only props to support The Duke in his best performance in a decade.

PEOPLE MEET AND SWEET MUSIC FILLS THE HEART. There is welcome relief in this bizarre Danish film satirizing all that explicit cinematic sexuality.

THE LOVES OF ISADORA is distinguished only by Vanessa Redgrave's graceful and majestic performance. The truncated scenario is essentially true to events but essentially false to Isadora, who made them happen.

BOOKS

Best Reading

TIME OUT OF HAND: REVOLUTION AND REACTION IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, by Robert Shaplen. Using flashbacks into history and probes into the future, The New Yorker's veteran correspondent in Asia views present dangers there with well-measured judgment.

THE YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS, by Stephen Spender. Mingling on the barricades with American and European student radicals, the Old Left poet and veteran of Spanish Civil War politics reports humanely on New Left ideals and spirit.

SONS OF DARKNESS, SONS OF LIGHT, by John A. Williams. In this novel set in 1973, a normally reasonable Negro civil rights leader hires a gunman to avenge the death of an unarmed black boy shot by a white New York City policeman. The result evokes the tragedy of a sleepwalking American society that can only be awakened by violence.

THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER, by Gay Talese. A former New York Times staffer takes his readers far behind the bylines for a gossipy analysis of the workings and power struggles within the nation's most influential newspaper.

CRAZY OVER HORSES, by Sam Toperoff. "Horses, horses, horses, crazy over horses," the old song goes. Less repetitive but equally obsessed, the author has transformed a lifelong weakness for the ponies into an oddly winning novel-memoir.

WHAT I'M GOING TO DO, I THINK, by L. Woiwode. A young couple expecting a baby embark on a honeymoon in the Michigan woods and discover terror in paradise. A remarkable first novel.

THE ECONOMY OF CITIES, by Jane Jacobs. With a love of cities that overshadows mere statistics, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities explores the financial aspects of growth and decay in urban centers.

THE RUINED MAP, by Kobo Abe. In this psychological whodunit by one of Japan's best novelists (The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another), a detective turns a search for a missing husband into a metaphysical quest for his own identity.

ADA, by Vladimir Nabokov. A long, lyric fairy tale about time, memory and the 83-year-long love affair of a half-sister and half-brother by the finest living writer of English fiction.

PICTURES OF FIDELMAN, by Bernard Malamud. Yet another shlemiel, but this one is canonized by Malamud's compassionate talent.

BULLET PARK, by John Cheever. In his usual setting of uncomfortably comfortable suburbia, Cheever stages the struggle of two men--one mild and monogamous, the other tormented and libertine--over the fate of a boy.

THE LONDON NOVELS OF COLIN MaclNNES (CITY OF SPADES, ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS, MR. LOVE AND JUSTICE). Icy observations and poetic perceptions of the back alleys and subcultures in that pungent city on the Thames.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Love Machine, Susann (1 last week) 2. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (2) 3. Ada, Nabokov (3) 4. The Godfather, Puzo (4) 5. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut (6) 6. Except for Me and Thee, West (7) 7. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (8) 8. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald 9. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (5) 10. Bullet Park, Cheever (9)

NONFICTION

1. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (4) 2. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (2) 3. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (6) 4. Jennie, Martin (1) 5. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (3) 6. The 900 Days, Salisbury (5) 7. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman 8. Robert Kennedy: A Memoir, Newfield 9. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (10) 10. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester

* All times E.D.T.

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