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JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY ... AS WE REMEMBER HIM (2 LPs; Columbia). Woven into a long narration along with fragments from a dozen of his speeches are short, taped reminiscences about Kennedy as a child and as a man, by his mother, his brother Bobby, his teachers, fellow politicians and friends. Upstaging the records, however, is the accompanying, handsomely illustrated book of the same title, published by Atheneum and also available separately.
THE BEST OF MIKE NICHOLS & ELAINE MAY (Mercury), a bit of memorabilia now that the team is split, consists of eight skits ranging from merely humorous to wildly hilarious. The conversation between the telephone operator and an anxious information seeker who has just deposited his last dime is a classic chapter in man's never-ending bout with the machine. Zanier is the jealous love scene between a surgeon and a nurse during an operation; between his commands for gauze and sponges, they argue tensely over her infidelity. Bach to Bach is the musings of two symphonic sophisticates in bed: "I never can believe that Bartok died on Central Park West."
CINEMA
DOCTOR ZHIVAGO. Romance and revolution flourish against eye-filling vistas of Mother Russia in Director David Lean's literate, old-fashioned love story based on Pasternak's novel, with Omar Sharif as Zhivago, Julie Christie as his Lara.
THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD. Director Martin Ritt (Hud) has made John le Carre's novel into a masterly thriller, with Richard Burton giving his best movie performance as the worn-out British intelligence hack on a fateful mission.
VIVA MARIA! An alluring pair of strip queens (Brigitte Bardot, Jeanne Moreau) carry on a Central American revolution rather haphazardly devised by Director Louis Malle (The Lovers), but France's master Cinematographer Henri Decae catches their act and turns a frail farce into a thing of beauty.
THUNDERBALL. In his fourth film outing James Bond (Sean Connery) claims his quota of girls, gadgets and bogus glamour while hunting for stolen atom bombs in the Bahamas.
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS. The inner life of a bourgeois matron (Giulietta Masina) becomes a psychic three-ring circus as Director Federico Fellini (La Dolce Vita, 8½) puts milady's past, present and future through the hoops in flamboyant style.
THE LEATHER BOYS. In this lively but poignant British drama, Rita Tushingham, Colin Campbell and Dudley Sutton flesh out an unholy triangle about a teen-aged slattern who nearly loses her young husband to a homosexual in hood's clothing.
DARLING. Director John Schlesinger views the jet set through a glass brightly, focusing mainly on Julie Christie's shimmering performance as a go-go playgirl who finds scruples a handicap for big-league fun-and-games.
TO DIE IN MADRID. A passionate elegy for the victims of Spain's tragic civil war of 1936-39, pictured in vintage newsreels and charged with poetry by such distinguished narrators as John Gielgud and Irene Worth.
BOOKS
Best Reading
THE PROUD TOWER, by Barbara W. Tuchman. Two years after the appearance of her Guns of August, a bestselling account of World War I, Historian Tuchman uses the same cool wit and warm understanding to examine the political and social undercurrents that shaped the world that went to war in 1914.