Bookends

BETTY: A GLAD AWAKENING

by Betty Ford with Chris Chase

Doubleday; 217 pages; $16.95

"We were up in Vail, where we'd always come for the holidays, there was a lot of good snow, we were together, and I had my pills." Betty Ford made the worst of them. In a confession marked by candor and salinity, the former First Lady traces the history of her chemical abuse. Lesser women might have slunk off to obscurity. But Ford had a saving grace: the ability to feel embarrassment. When her family intervened, she first replied, "You are all a bunch of monsters. Get out of here and never come back. " They refused to get out of her life, and she was forced to face the mirror and the facts.

Her battle with substance abuse was fought more than a decade ago, and she made sure that the cure was contagious. "Sometimes," she says, "I'm almost sorry for people who haven't been alcoholic, because I know things that a person who's never been sick doesn't know." In 1982 a clinic was established in her name, and she offers a series of case histories of the famous and the obscure who entered the place as emotional basket cases and emerged as feisty, drug-free graduates. There are no miracles here, but there is a collective refusal to succumb to the temptations of self-pity or despair. Betty and Gerald Ford have witnessed some extraordinary changes in life and in politics, and the sounds that now emanate from the Betty Ford Center may be the cheery clatter of the last laugh.

HOLD ON, MR. PRESIDENT

by Sam Donaldson

Random House; 272 pages; $17.95

Sam Donaldson is probably the nation's best-known political reporter and almost certainly the most controversial. His blunt phrasing of questions is exceeded only by his brash style of lobbing them like grenades, ambushing Presidents at every photo opportunity. Hold On, Mr. President -- a phrase that Donaldson says he has never actually used but that typifies his approach -- is in large part an attempt to justify his manner to readers who think him disrespectful. Although he offers plenty of eyewitness disclosures about Ronald Reagan fumbling over details and Jimmy Carter ruthlessly playing to win, he emphasizes the growing difficulty of breaking through White House image manipulation to get straight answers about U.S. policy, and has added timely passages about how isolation from press oversight contributed to the Iran-contra crisis. As tough on the page as on the screen, Donaldson prides himself on having written without a ghost, and the book's rambling, unpolished quality is more than offset by his anecdotal candor.

FINE THINGS

by Danielle Steel

Delacorte; 408 pages; $18.95

This time out, Danielle Steel offers her legion of dedicated followers a correspondence course in obstetrics. There is no graphic sex; in its place are / elaborate descriptions of childbirth, from Lamaze breathing to Braxton Hicks contractions, from ostentatiously difficult labor and major pushing to the parents' initial moments of joy. Alas, happiness is short-lived for Bernie Fine and the gallant young mother, Liz, a woman who in the excruciating last stages of her fatal illness can still turn out two pans of heart-shaped cupcakes. Bernie, the human version of a cocker spaniel, is kicked around by circumstance but remains loyal, patient and good, the classic example of what occurs when bad things happen to good dogs. Steel, who holds the Guinness record for most consecutive weeks on the best-seller lists, obviously knows what her audience wants. But in detailing Bernie's depressing and predictable struggles, she seems to be laboring a little too hard herself.

THE ROPESPINNER CONSPIRACY

by Michael M. Thomas

Warner; 433 pages; $18.95

Michael M. Thomas' financial-disaster fictions (Green Monday, Hard Money) are notable for blue chip prose, righteous indictments of greed and highly original plots. The Ropespinner Conspiracy introduces the best mixture to date. The novel's premise is that free enterprise perpetuates the means of its own destruction or, as Lenin said, "Capitalism will sell us the rope with which we hang it." In the Thomas version, the Soviets have two moles at the heart of the Wall Street establishment. Over the years, the pair conspire to wreck the U.S. economy by lending billions to insolvent Third World nations, promoting junk bonds, Government bailouts and such volatile stock-market gimmicks as program trading and index futures. In short, the U.S. financial world as we know and love it. Thomas, a former investment banker, handles his profit-of-doom scenario with such skill and confidence that one hopes he is not trading on insider information.

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DESCRIPTION: Color reproduction: Four book jackets: BETTY: A GLAD AWAKENING, HOLD ON, MR PRESIDENT, FINE THINGS, THE ROPESPINNER CONSPIRACY