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SMART WOMEN/FOOLISH CHOICES by Dr. Connell Cowan and Dr. Melvyn Kinder Clarkson N. Potter; 204 pages; $13.95 A man may be a "wolf in sheep's clothing." This insight, which should be carbon-dated for year of origin, is offered as fresh material by two doctors whose degrees are not in medicine. The Ph.D.s dispense many prescriptions to a constituency they obviously assume is female, desperate and born yesterday. Smart women, they advise, are "willing to forgo short-term thrills in favor of the long-term satisfactions." As for the quarry, ideally he is vulnerable. After all, "the truth is that most men don't want to be tough all the time." The doctors warn that there are men out there who prey upon innocent, lonely women, then amplify the statement with some profiles of the malefactors. They omit clinical psychologists who practice in Beverly Hills and peddle bromides in cloth covers.
JUBAL SACKETT by Louis L' Amour Bantam; 375 pages; $16.95 Keokotah, Kickapoo Indian, speak like no man on earth. That is because he is in Jubal Sackett by Louis L' Amour. The author's white men talk deliberately, like John Wayne in a Bible picture: "I knew I would not see them again even as both my father and I had known his time was near, for we were of the blood of Nial, who had the Gift."
Indians have no money and precious few verbs: "One leg no good." Never mind. L'Amour is the real hero of this book. He has verbs, and he has energy. So much that he has written 92 books, 18 of them about the Sackett clan. This is the latest novel of the English family in the New World and of their migration west. As before, there are fights, deaths, acts of cowardice and bravery, all of them from L' Amour's Frontier Factory. More than 160 million copies of the author's works are in print. That is more than enough for every adult Kickapoo and white settler now in the Great Plains. They can read the book or wait for the mini-series. It should be along any minute. Given L' Amour's rate of production, so should the next novel.