Critics' Voices

BOOKS

MILES: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe (Simon & Schuster; $21.95). An as-told-to memoir by a protean genius of modern jazz who played with Bird, Diz and countless other legends. With all the uglies -- drugs, booze, women betrayed -- writ large.

BIG SUGAR by Alec Wilkinson (Knopf; $18.95). Every winter, roughly 10,000 West Indian men go to harvest sugarcane by hand in South Florida. The author decided to see how these migrants earn their pay and came back with a story more bitter than sweet.

WARTIME by Paul Fussell (Oxford University; $19.95). Humankind, wrote T.S. Eliot, cannot bear very much reality. In this richly detailed historical study of American and British behavior during World War II, Fussell argues that the horror was of such magnitude that participants -- civilians as much as soldiers -- survived it only by reliance on euphemism and illusions: our lads were all brave heroes, for example, while theirs were sadistic thugs. Fussell has a sharp eye for the bawdry and the Catch-22 absurdities of combat. But hard to find in his barrages of withering contempt is much sense that this war, for all the bumbling incompetence of its captains, nonetheless had a just cause.

MUSIC

PETE TOWNSHEND: IRONMAN (Atlantic). A fabulistic -- if not fully fabulous -- rock musical based on an allegory by the poet Ted Hughes. The album may lack Tommy's delirium, but at its erratic best, it has more soul.

MARIA McKEE: MARIA McKEE (Geffen). Love songs like crystal, done with some fancy collaborators (including Richard Thompson and Robbie Robertson) by a vocalist who can soar just fine on her own.

HECTOR BERLIOZ: SYMPHONIE FANTASTIQUE (Angel/EMI). Lean, brisk and idiomatic: Roger Norrington leads the London Classical Players in Berlioz's Manichaean, virtuoso ear grabber.

CLINT BLACK: KILLIN' TIME (RCA). Real nice, unassuming, go-to-meeting country music by a new Nashville hotshot. Black sounds like Randy Travis with a few more years of book learning and a cozy way with a melody.

ART

MASTERWORKS OF LOUIS COMFORT TIFFANY, Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Washington. Some 65 of the renowned glassmaker's most vibrant lamps, vases and windows. The ultimate glass act! Sept. 29-March 4.

PICASSO AND BRAQUE: PIONEERING CUBISM, Museum of Modern Art, New York City. The title tells all: two giants, and the origins of a style that shook -- and shaped -- the rest of the century. Through Jan. 16.

MOVIES

SEA OF LOVE. An infusion of wit and imagination raises this police film above the rank and file. One of New York's finest (Al Pacino) pursues a serial killer who is stalking womanizers; the likeliest suspect (Ellen Barkin) is also the best bet to comfort our hero.

A DRY WHITE SEASON. A polite white liberal turns radical after confronting the brutality of South African racism. Drama that couples the pulse of popular fiction with a jolt of moral outrage.

TELEVISION

SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (NBC, Oct. 1, 9 p.m. EDT). Elizabeth Taylor stars as a fading movie star (no comments, please) who falls for a shady drifter (Mark Harmon) in Tennessee Williams' play.

TRAVELS (PBS, debuting Oct. 2, 8 p.m. on most stations). Worn out from the Days of Rage ruckus, PBS returns to more placid pleasures. This twelve-part series will follow different travelers on unusual journeys around the globe.

ART OF THE WESTERN WORLD (PBS, debuting Oct. 2, 9 p.m. on most stations). British historian Michael Wood is host for this coffee-table survey of the great works, with a stress on their cultural and historical context.

THEATER

LULU. Justine Bateman (airhead Mallory on TV's Family Ties) shifts gears to play, competently if without much shading or subtlety, the ultimate femme fatale in Frank Wedekind's expressionist classic, deftly adapted by Roger Downey, at California's Berkeley Rep.

LES MISERABLES. Tours often look tatty compared with the Broadway originals, but that's far from true of the glistening and passionate company now installed in Detroit. Notable among a solid cast are J. Mark McVey as Jean Valjean and the locally recruited children.

LOVE LETTERS. Colleen Dewhurst and Josef Sommer are this week's stars in the rotating off-Broadway cast of A.R. Gurney's deft, disarming tale of a half- century relationship lived out largely via pen and paper.