(3 of 4)
MIDNIGHT COWBOY. With tour tie force performances by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, an improbable love story movingly comes to life.
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN. Though he bogs down in endless bungles, Coauthor, Director and Star Woody Allen manages to come through with a funny crime flick.
EASY RIDER is a major movie that follows two youths on their search for where it's at. Letting townspeople "rap" at will and drawing a top performance from Newcomer Jack Nicholson, Director-Actor Dennis Hopper has created a classic.
MEDIUM COOL. Using contemporary politics for a backdrop, and making the most of a cast of unkowns, Writer-Director Haskell Wexler explodes with a film that is dynamite.
THE BED SITTING ROOM. This unremittingly surrealistic attack on war makes Director Richard Lester's first film against the military (How I Won the War) look like child's play.
DOWNHILL RACER. Skiing has never before been filmed with quite the electricity that illumines this otherwise routine tale of an amateur athlete (Robert Redford) on the make.
BOOKS Best Reading
THE UNEXPECTED UNIVERSE, by Loren Eiseley. A paean to the possibilities of man in an age of the machine by the an-thropolater, humanist and author of The Immense Journey and The Mind as Nature.
FAKE!, by Clifford Irving. An exuberant account of the activities of one of the most successful and flamboyant art-forging rings in modern history.
COUNTING MY STEPS, by Jakov Lind. The author of Soul of Wood recalls his schizophrenic years in Nazi and postwar Europe, when his survival depended on how convincingly he could change his nationality, language and religion.
PRICKSONGS & DESCANTS, by Robert Coover. In a collection of clever, surreal, and sometimes repellent short stories, the author of The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop, plays a literary shell game with his readers.
THE FRENCH LIEUTENANT'S WOMAN, by John Fowles. A fascinating novel that uses the tricks and turns of Victorian fiction to pound home the thesis that freedom is the natural condition of man.
WHEN THE WAR IS OVER, by Stephen Becker. An excellent period morality tale about a Union Army officer who attempts to save the life of a teen-age Rebel who shot and wounded him during a Civil War skirmish.
PRESENT AT THE CREATION, by Dean Acheson. In these well-written memoirs, Harry Truman's Secretary of State recalls the formative years of the cold war with much wit, knowledge and insight.
BARNETT FRUMMER IS AN UNBLOOMED FLOWER, by Calvin Trillin. Soft implosions of mirthful satire that should trouble the social and political pretensions of those who would be with it.
POWER, by Adolf A. Berle. A former F.D.R. brain-truster and State Department official compellingly examines the sources and limitations of power and its relationship to ethics.
A SEA CHANGE, by J. R. Salamanca. Bitterness and tenderness are the alternating currents in this novel of the breakup of a marriage, by the author of The Lost Country and Lilith.
AMBASSADOR'S JOURNAL, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Kept during the author's two years as Ambassador to India, this diary is rare for both its first-rate prose and succinct, irreverent opinion ("The more underdeveloped the country, the more overdeveloped the women").