Bookends

BEVERLY

by Beverly Sills and Lawrence

Linderman; Bantam; 356 pages; $19.95

Her backstage friends call her Bubbles, and by now everyone knows why. The effervescent soprano made her arias appear effortless; the years of striving before she became an overnight star at 37, the tribulations and ironies of raising a deaf daughter, the difficulties of administering the New York City Opera were kept in the wings. All the public saw was a golden diva with a smile they could pour on a waffle. But Beverly Sills is 57, as she is the first to admit, and in her twinkling autobiography she is ready for revelations. She brings back the days of doing Progresso commercials on TV, catalogs the hilarities and humiliations of auditions, repeats Arthur Godfrey's introduction on Talent Scouts ("Vickie Lynn ((her stage name then)) is a beautiful girl with mounds of auburn hair and two of everything she needs"), recalls the anti-Semitism of her husband's friends, and displays some heated ego in an exchange with Sir Rudolf Bing, who had prevented her appearance at the Metropolitan Opera. Bing: "Not every great singer can sing at the Met." Bubbles: "Not every great singer wants to." Nor can every great singer walk away from $7.5 million worth of bookings in order to retire, then take over a troubled opera company and make it lively and profitable. Sills concludes with an odd admission: "Unemployment still scares the daylights out of me." It is a state she is never likely to experience.

INDIAN COUNTRY

by Philip Caputo

Bantam; 419 pages; $18.95

Chris Starkmann went to Viet Nam as innocent as the narrator of Platoon. In this powerful novel, the veteran bitterly recalls the death wish of Ulysses: "Would God I, too, had died there . . . I should have had a soldier's burial and praise." Instead, the madness acquired 14 years earlier has been carried home, slowly eroding his marriage, his job and his life. A soldier is most vulnerable when he feels safest, he drunkenly repeats, and in the rough country of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where people have "no possibilities, no place to go," Chris comes to believe he has stumbled onto enemy ground. He turns his property into a deadly perimeter, rigging it like a minefield for a final conflagration that will burn away his nightmares. In his fourth book, Pulitzer-prizewinning Journalist Philip Caputo, a Marine veteran of the Viet Nam War, conveys the bare emotions of a soldier fallen out of season with himself, as well as the harshness of life in America's northern wilderness. There, even nature offers litle solace; the aurora borealis, a ghostly disturbance flickering in the sky, appears as a "mock sun" that offers light but no heat.

A LIFE IN MOVIES

by Michael Powell

Knopf; 705 pages; $24.95

Michael Powell has not directed a feature film in almost 20 years. Today he is known chiefly to buffs, although his varied oeuvre with longtime Collaborator Emeric Pressburger includes the beloved ballet movie The Red Shoes; a wry Highlands romance, I Know Where I'm Going; and sophisticated war dramas like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. His career spanned a half-century from the silents to the Hollywood of Francis Coppola, at whose studios he wrote much of A Life in Movies. Powell, 81, has aptly described the autobiography as "Proustian": one anecdote or observation inevitably reminds him of another, often decades distant, and he tumbles headlong after each. But this book is slyly and densely constructed, not just chatty. Whether Powell is recalling boyhood horsemanship or explaining how to "double" for an absent leading man through six weeks of exterior shooting, he proves a natural storyteller -- vivid, instructive and, above all, charming.

THE ANNOTATED INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN

Edited by Martin Gardner

Oxford; 274 pages; $18.95

Today's clerical sleuths, from snooping vicars to rabbis who slept late, all tumble from the cassock of Father Brown, G.K. Chesterton's droll, squinting priest who first bumbled onto the scene of the crime almost 80 years ago. The clergyman's enduring appeal lies in an outward innocence and, thanks to the confessional, a profound familiarity with the crooks and nannies of human depravity. The stories remain as wise and engaging as the day they were created. But many references were obscure until this delightful annotation by Science Writer Martin Gardner, who clarifies "The Ethics of Elfland" and explains the uses of Hartlepool, Gladstone collars, towel horses. En route he entertains an intriguing theory. Sherlock Holmes, according to Doyle's canon, performed vital secret tasks for the Vatican. There must have been a go- between . . . Is it possible Gardner has revealed Father Brown's greatest secret?