Notable

SUPERPEN by Edward Sorel Random House; $8.95

Objects for acidulous social criticism can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The hand belongs to Edward Sorel, a chiaroscuro cartoonist in the merciless tradition of Daumier and Thomas Nast. With a pen dipped in corrosive sublimate, Sorel uncovers the Presidents from Harry Truman as a Keystone Kop to Jimmy Carter in the throes of a scatological tantrum. No one is safe from Sorel: he skewers Arabs and Zionists, harpoons Cardinal Cooke and Billy Graham, lampoons the Jerry Lewis telethon: "Maybe some day science will find a cure for Multiple No-Talent." Sorel's style is best when it reveals the foibles of its subject graphically: Gloria Steinem as a knight in tarnished amour, Scoop Jackson as a sheriff with a beltful of missiles, Woody Allen as Satan. His critiques of the Watergaters lean too heavily on the obscene-- but then so did the malefactors.

RUSSIAN THINKERS by Isaiah Berlin Viking; 312 pages; $14.95 "The fox knows many things," the Greek poet Archilochus wrote in one of his fragments. "The hedgehog knows one big thing." Sir Isaiah Berlin the political philosopher, used that enigmatic formula as the framework for one of the most luminous essays of the century, The Hedgehog and the Fox, a study of Tolstoy first published in 1951. Berlin divided the world's writers and thinkers into two categories. The hedgehogs (men like Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche) are monists-they organize their universe into a central vision, one comprehensive principle The foxes (Shakespeare, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, for example) are pluralists pursuing many unrelated, even contradictory ends, moving simultaneously on many different levels.

The Hedgehog and the Fox is one of eleven articles and lectures collected in Russian Thinkers, the first of four projected volumes of his selected writings. Although the subjects (Tolstoy, Turgenev, Bakunin, Belinsky, Herzen) were creatures of the 19th century, Berlin's acute intellect addresses one of the most difficult questions of the 20th: Are men so hungry for deterministic Utopias, for the comfort of all-encompassing systems, that they reject the insecurities of the fox's diverse world for the awful predictability of totalitarian structures?

GREAT MOMENTS IN ARCHITECTURE by David Macaulay Houghton Mifflin; $11.95 After Sorel's frontal assaults, David Macaulay's Great Moments in Architecture seems gentility itself. But within its spiderweb style, a donnish whimsy examines the excesses of this and other centuries and finds them wanton. Archaeologists uncover the ruins of a rudimentary civilization: a partially excavated fast-food restaurant with the French fries still intact. An inflatable cathedral is invented for tourists who want a distinguished setting at a moment's notice. The secret of the Pyramids is revealed: the ancient Egyptians wanted to sharpen their giant razor blades. Macaulay, a prizewinning children's book author and illustrator, likes to turn things upside down--literally: his Arc de Defeat is only an arc de triomphe on its back. But his best work is a surreal anachronism that demands a double take, like the group of men on a plain puzzling over terrain and blueprints "Early Work," says the caption, "on the Grand Canyon."

A CONSIDERABLE TOWN by M.F.K. Fisher Knopf; 208 pages; $8.95

Not everyone loves Marseille, but to its aficionados it is one of the world's most beguiling cities: brutal, beautiful indestructible. M.F.K. Fisher, who first visited Marseille in 1929 and has been returning there as often as possible ever since, is haunted by the place. She calls the city insolite, an indefinable French word meaning, well, indefinable. Yet she does manage to catch the essential, elusive Marseille: its smells (mostly fish, wine and paint); its sounds (church bells, ships' sirens, the howl of the mistral); its institutions, terrain, architecture and people.

As befits one of America's most elegant writers about food, she has compiled loving evocations of great restaurants, memorable meals and, particularly, the briny-fresh seafood: sardines, sea urchins and shrimps that pass in mighty shoals each night through the city's venerable fish market. The author is also a shrewd observer of the turf, from the garish 1,000-year-old Canebiere, the broad boulevard known to generations of English-speaking sailors as the "Can o' Beer," to the Old Port and Notre Dame de la Garde, "the Old Gold Lady up on the hill." Fisher is at her wisest and most amusing as an observer of the Marseillais, those dark, stocky descendants of every Mediterranean race. Their women are among the most fascinating in the world, with their harsh, deep voices, tough yet utterly feminine manners and smooth, ageless skins. Their abiding strength and sensuality, Fisher speculates, may be the result of a lifelong diet of Provenc,al tomatoes and olive oil.

STAINED GLASS by William F. Buckley Jr.

Doubleday; 232 pages; $8.95

Journalist Bill Buckley likes it out in the cold, out where the Red menace blows. Novelist Buckley finds the world more ambiguous. His new espionage thriller stars the Buckley-like hero Blackford Oakes. He is the same CIA man of the author's previous novel, Saving the Queen. The time of Stained Glass is 1952, the place West Germany; the plot backlights Buckley's faith in Western culture and his embattled vision of its decline in an age of nuclear realism and detente.

Blacky's mission is an adventure in moral decision. He is sent to West Germany to assassinate Count Axel Wintergrin, a low-key Wagnerian hero who runs against Konrad Adenauer on a platform to reunite the two Germanys. Speaking "quietly about the genuine idealism of the German people," Wintergrin heads to victory.

The Russians are anxious, the Americans and their NATO allies terrified. If Wintergrin should win the election, they reason, Stalin might launch divisions against Berlin. So Blacky finds himself planted at Count Wintergrin's estate, ostensibly there as a U.S. Government engineer. He comes to respect the count, and bed a Russian woman who is his Soviet counterpart. He also must struggle to make a separate peace between his job and his conscience.

Oakes may echo the author's own views, but he is also a character strong enough to carry political freight through a well-paced entertainment. For his part, Buckley hefts an unfashionable yet still impressive sword of honor.

THE LAST CONVERTIBLE by Anton Myrer Putnam; 526 pages; $10.95

The girls are all golden, the young men bright and witty, the places and pleasures romantically patrician in a mode made familiar by Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise. The boys ride to their destinies from Fox Entry at Harvard in a green 1938 Packard convertible. One is a French aristocrat; another becomes a famous writer; a third accompanies J.F.K. to power. Myrer tells a good, melancholy, unabashedly nostalgic yarn about the World War II generation that became as lost as any Fitzgerald ever chronicled.

There is, however, nothing romantic about the battle sequences, staccato nightmares interrupting Myrer's peacetime prose; nothing patrician about the terror and tragedy of the polio epidemic of 1952. If the narrator waxes a little too lush about a girl they all loved ("seeing her you thought of sunlight dancing on water"), that's the way certain young men thought then. If he talks to his car, well, they did that too. Songs, as they have become for most Americans, are the group's Proustian madeleines, keys that unlock pertinent moments of the past ("clearings in the fog, on the high ground") that punctuate time. The radio is on, the top is down, the breeze is warm --and it is a nifty ride all the way.

STORIES by Doris Lessing

Knopf; 626 pages; $15

Doris Lessing's artistry is demonstrated over and over in this generous collection of 35 stories. Her celebrated equipment is on display: the painter's eye for telling visual detail--a kitchen calendar decorated with faded yellow roses, an old woman's room stuffed with bits of lace, embroidery and secondhand clothes. Her scene-setting affinity for nature rivals Colette's: "The birds, dodging plentiful cats, snapped off each new blade of grass as it appeared, and slashed the crocuses with their beaks."

Lessing, whose more than 15 novels and collections of short stories include the incomparable Golden Notebook and the Children of Violence series, is at her best charting the ironic, labyrinthine turns in human relations. Judith, the spinsterish scholar of Our Friend Judith, masks a classic beauty in drab, baggy cords; she "does not smoke or drink, and eats very little, from preference, not self-discipline." The working-class heroine of The Other Woman, imbued with the notion that "women should be independent," spurns a lover to stay with her widowed father: "The tears were pouring down her face, but she wiped them impatiently away and bent to the oven." Lessing's cast includes an English couple on holiday in Germany, a famous journalist undergoing a crisis, a mother of four craving total, inviolable anonymity, a 16-year-old boy navigating the treacherous crossing from childhood to adulthood. All possess a riveting presence, shaded by stoicism, hysteria, fortitude and a range of human responses; each is captured and illuminated in her supple, evocative prose.

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