Notable

THE MEMOIRS OF CHIEF RED FOX edited by Cash Asher. 208 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

Indians have become all the rage--at Washington hearings, in fashions, on the screen (Little Big Man) and even on bestseller lists (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee). Now comes a book worthy of being another bestseller: the diary of a charming and extraordinary red man who is pushing 101. Chief Red Fox is a nephew of Crazy Horse. He has lived through both Custer's last stand and Alan Shepard's attempt to play golf on the moon. Somehow he manages a genuine appreciation for the cultures that produced both events.

The book owes a heavy debt to Editor Asher, who reorganized the chief's verbal and written memories. Yet starting with Red Fox's recollection of learning as a child "to make a fishhook from the rib of a field mouse," the reader will rarely be aware of any white man's intruding hand. "I am not sentimental," says Red Fox, "but memories haunt me as I review scenes from the days before I was old enough to understand that all Indian things would pass away."

The first half of his book traces the passing. It includes a chilling reconstruction of Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn and the apparently retaliatory slaughter of starving Indians at Wounded Knee 14 years later. At ten, in 1880, Red Fox was sent to the Carlisle Indian School where he began moving into the white world. Thereafter he went to sea briefly ("It was like viewing eternity in motion"), and at 23 joined Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. On opening night in London in 1905, part of his act was to chase a careering stagecoach and "tomahawk" a paleface, who turned out to be none other than King Edward VII out on a lark. There were other shows and later movies where he did war-dance bits and attacked wagon trains. "I am not ungrateful for what the white man has given me," says Chief Red Fox, "but the ghosts of my ancestors stalk me at times in the dark and congregate around me when I meditate in solitude."

HOSTAGE IN PEKING by Anthony Grey. 365 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

On Nov. 26, 1968, two British diplomats paid a brief official call on imprisoned Reuters Correspondent Anthony Grey in Peking. At that point, Grey had spent 466 days in isolation as a hostage. His visitors left, deeply shaken by his apparent despair. Said one, afterward: "He lives in a void."

Not quite. Grey was driven terrifyingly close to breakdown on occasions, as this moving account indicates. But he did contrive to keep a secret journal (on which the book is based), and he evolved other ways of keeping mind and body together. Locked up in his own home, forbidden by his guards to have anything but a change of clothing and a few books, he devised his own crossword puzzles, invented games and immersed himself in self-taught yoga. By the end of his 806-day confinement, Grey had also managed to teach himself enough Chinese to read the slogans smeared across his walls by the screaming Red Guards who had first invaded his home to lock him up in August 1967. Grey's imprisonment had been carefully planned--the Peking government was intent on holding him until Britain released all 13 Communist Chinese newsworkers imprisoned in Hong Kong for their roles in the riots that had shaken the British colony that summer. The British government refused to bargain. Both nations were intent on saving face. Grey was caught in the middle. His story of the wretched time he endured before the last Hong Kong prisoner was freed and he was released is bitter and compelling.

PARADISE by Patrick Dennis. 336 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $6.95.

Auntie Mame would feel like a stranger in her creator's Paradise, Patrick Dennis' latest novel. The charisma, cheerful talent and canny sense of the absurd that brought fame to Mame are conspicuously absent this time. Too bad, because Dennis has invented a situation with comic possibilities. At the start of the tourist season an earthquake transforms an Acapulco resort into an island rocked by storms. Both amenities and necessities swiftly disappear. As Dennis' caricatures try to cope with life in the raw, long-distance television cameras grind away from the shore, picking up every grisly move. The show, a modified Candid Camera, grows more and more popular as the castaways become more and more degraded. But the author, like the cameras, does not know when to stop. The only palatable personality in Dennis' dreary bunch is a middle-aged alcoholic, and she has the sense to drink her way through the tasteless carryings-on.

THE TENTH MONTH by Laura Z. Hobson. 286 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

Twenty-four years ago Gentleman's Agreement became a bestseller by dealing directly and dramatically with a real problem: the smooth but insidiously pervasive anti-Semitism still practiced in the U.S. shortly after World War II. Now, in The Tenth Month, Laura Z. Hobson pretends to take on the problem of the unwed mother. Much anguish is possible in such a situation, but Dori, Miss Hobson's heroine, just doesn't seem all that unfortunate. At 40 she is a beautiful divorcee with a successful career and no lack of lovers--in short, a thoroughly modish lady-magazine heroine. Years after a botched abortion has left her supposedly unable to conceive again, she suddenly finds herself with child. Although she no longer cares for the father and her current lover cannot bring himself to marry her, she discovers that it is motherhood, not marriage, that she really wants. So with all the courage of a woman with money, understanding friends and an unbelievably helpful obstetrician, she has her baby. Does Dori find happiness as an unwed mother? The reader won't believe Hobson's choice. It's just too untrue to be good.

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