Hot Type

Hot enough for you? Strap on your canteens and embark on a 25-year sojourn into the strange and mystical land of the American Southwest with Vanity Fair contributing editor ALEX SHOUMATOFF'SLegends of the American Desert (Knopf), the final refuge of the alienated, the Biosphere-friendly, and the Mormons. Also this month: Speaking of bizarre national phenomena, PETER HARRY BROWN and PAT H. BROESKE love Elvis real tender in their exhaustive biography of the King, Down at the End of Lonely Street (Dutton). Memories of her parents' Holocaust experience haunt and inform a daughter's growth into womanhood in CHERYL PEARL SUCHER'S moving debut novel, The Rescue of Memory (Scribner). Art historian BRADLEY I. COLLINS puts the great Leonardo da Vinci on the couch and asks, "Does the painting explain the life, or the life explain the painting?," in Leonardo, Psychoanalysis, and Art History (Northwestern University). In the 1950s and 60s the oft picketed filmmaker STANLEY KRAMER made controversial flicks such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Judgment at Nuremberg, and The Defiant Ones; now Kramer, with the help of THOMAS M. COFFEY, lets loose in A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: A Life in Hollywood (Harcourt Brace). Nihilistic punk prince Sid Vicious embodied the punk-rock credo "Live fast and die young"; DAVID DALTON raises this mythic martyr from the dead in the audacious El Sid (St. Martin's). Humorist and V.F. contributor BRUCE McCALL recounts the exquisite horror of coming of age in Canada when one is not simply a social leper but an extraordinarily lousy ice-hockey player in his comic memoir, Thin Ice (Random House). From the revolutionaries who brought you bra-burning and "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" comes MARY THOM'SInside Ms. (Henry Holt), a glowing remembrance of the women's movement and 25 years of that grand old rag. ILYA PRIGOGINE, the king of chaos theory, explodes Einstein's contention that time is simply an illusion in The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the Laws of Nature (Free Press). In Carl Gustav Jung (St. Martin's), FRANK McLYNN analyzes the horny, right-wing, anti-

Semitic shrink's own collective unconscious. GRAHAM BOYNTON explores why white rule failed in Africa and what that foretells in Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland (Random House). The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (Norton) is poet and undertaker THOMAS LYNCH'S surprisingly wry and wise meditations on life's most enduring and familiar mystery. Editors HEINZ and B0D0 RASCH faithfully reproduce Gefesselter Blick, the (?6er-radical and highly influential 1930s journal that revolutionized commercial art design, in their book of the same name (Lars Muller/Princeton Architectural Press). NEELI CHERKOVSKI'S classic, Bukowski: A Life (Steerforth Press), revised since the great underground six-pack poetnovelist's death in 1994, is an affectionate recollection of the self-proclaimed "dirty old man" of American literature. BOB ADELMAN and RICHARD MERKIN pawed through the sexiest, smuttiest, and most satirical outlaw comics of the 30s through the 50s to compose the hilariously raunchy Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America's Forbidden Funnies (Simon & Schuster). And, finally, LAURENCE BERGREEN celebrates Satchmo, the ladykilling, pot-smoking, laxative-loving father of jazz, in Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (Broadway Books). As the ever lovin', ever misbehavin' musician would growl, "Take your shoes off, Lucy, and let's get JUICY!"

ELISSA SCHAPPELL