BOOKS

...Canadian cartographer Joni Seager offers this paperback packed with thirty-seven inventive full-color maps, fully documented and explained, that illustrate the social, political, and economic forces transforming the planet, mostly for the worse...

...And Soviet leaders publicly bemoan the inherent waste of an agricultural program that threatens to fritter away a quarter of this year's record harvest through theft, inadequate storage, and bad transport...

...Amid the cold winds of truth-telling in the glasnost era, we can detect an attempt to retrieve the "socialism with a human face" crushed by Soviet tanks in 1968 Prague...

...How long will the rest of the world go on allowing us to destroy the planet...

...His rival Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Republic, has no qualms about overcoming such Marxist inhibitions...

...They plump instead for a kind of reverse FDR—just as FDR "introduced socialist legislation to save capitalism in the 1930s," so Gorbachev is employing "capitalist measures to save some form of socialism in the Soviet Union...

...His advisers include too many lifelong party officials conditioned to think in Leninist formulas from the 1920s...

...The Gorbachev portrayed here is a creature of surprising contradictions: a believer in the "lightness of the socialist cause," yet a pragmatist ready to adopt any means that might induce farmers and workers to expend extra effort...

...In this book, Yeltsin's populist platform appears as pandering to the masses by a manipulative leader...

...Or is it necessary, when inculcating a sense of individual legal rights, to guarantee free expression for anyone...

...The reforms have been tied together by a common hostility to the overcentralized and dogmatic system erected by Stalin and maintained by Brezhnev...

...To take an example, the section on industry includes maps color-coded to show worldwide production of hazardous waste, the incidence of deadly industrial accidents (the Eastern half of the United States is buried in little colored dots...

...Two old Moscow hands, Dusko Doder of The Washington Post and Louise Branson of The Times of London, blend gleanings from the public record with an assortment of inside gossip and informed guesswork to fashion a convincing picture of the personalities and issues that have dominated the Soviet landscape during the past five years...

...than an "impressive idea salesman" and his later approval of him as a potential ally...

...Doder and Branson quote President George Bush's early putdown of Gorbachev as little more Harvey Fireside is a professor of politics at Ithaca College...

...The U.S...

...Would it be better to force such bigots back into their closets...

...Unlike the paper reforms of the Nineteenth Century, the renovations Gorbachev has imposed on basic institutions bring the citizenry into participatory relation to their government for the first time since Lenin dispersed the Constituent Assembly in January 1918...

...by Harvey Fireside This political biography of Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was rushed into print in time for the June summit meeting in Washington, D.C...

...The upsurge of concern in evidence last April on Earth Day was real enough...

...BOOKS BRIEFLY The Environment in Maps THE STATE OF THE EARTH ATLAS edited by Joni Seager Touchstone Books...

...Groups of maps deal with such topics as the global habitat—the greenhouse effect, the shrinking rainforest, and so forth—and then get more specific: food and water, shelter, energy, industry, defense, the consumer culture, and green politics...

...Determined to occupy the middle ground between critics from the left and right, Gorbachev seems to be losing direction...

...the closest thing Russia has ever seen to a U.S.-style politician who thrives on public acclaim but keeps taking political risks that have sent his popularity plummeting...

...Gorbachev has been accused of timidity in delaying reforms that would establish private property in the countryside...

...an apprentice to authoritarian bureaucrats who is evidently resolved to transform the Soviet Union into "a civil society based on law...

...No wonder the program draws the ire of apparatchiki stripped of their limousines and other perquisites of office...

...This little book is just the sort of thing they—and we— need...

...In the end, it may be the statesmanlike bearing of Gorbachev described here that has made him backtrack on vital economic initiatives...

...But further reforms, especially those scheduled for later this year, are bound to penetrate the economics of everyday life...

...so is much of Western Europe), the international trade in toxic waste (mostly from Us to Them, of course), and "holes in the sky"—or worldwide consumption of the chlorofluorocar-bons that are destroying the ozone layer (once again, the United States and Western Europe lead the pack...

...The authors also connect Gorbachev repeatedly to such tsars as Alexander II, who tried to launch a "revolution from above" only to be defeated by refractory bureaucrats and by subjects who refused to take responsibility for their collective future...

...And what a momentous five years it has been...

...Granted, as Doder and Branson argue, the benefits have so far not trickled down below the level of the professionals who are the chief consumers of unfettered films and novels, free travel and association...

...Piloting his country into the post-Communist era has been a most unlikely leader: a "country boy" from the village of Privolnoe in the steppes of southern Russia who, during thirty-four years of inching his way to the pinnacle of the Kremlin, gave few clues to the cataclysmic changes he would introduce...

...They are still committed to the hegemony of the Communist Party, though they want its power exercised not autocratically but in democratic competition with rival groups...

...Despite Doder and Branson's disparagement of Yeltsin as a lowbrow administrator, he seems to have grasped the essential nature of the ethnic crisis and responded to it more effectively than Gorbachev...

...A revealing anecdote tells of a factory director who cables his Moscow boss that he has implemented self-management a la perestroika and wants to know what his next orders are...

...127 pp...

...Yet such a reading misses the dialectic relation of Yeltsin to Gorbachev, for Yeltsin serves as a battering ram to overcome the ideologically encrusted officialdom opposed to Gorbachev...

...The heretical quality of Gorbachev was apparent in the "new thinking" of his first three years in office...

...Yet his recent truce with the Yeltsinites suggests that a synergistic force could emerge, letting him escape the impasse described in this book...

...13.95 We are constantly informed these days that the 1990s will be the decade of the environment...

...Much information is needed, the more accessible the better, to build a better movement...

...a lifelong model of political conformity who unloosed the whirlwind of popular discontent that swept away the entrenched despots of Eastern Europe...

...Not only did repressed writers get the chance to publish forbidden manuscripts, but so did nationalist zealots of the Pamyat ilk who went on anti-Semitic rampages...

...It is easy for Western observers to be Monday-morning quarterbacks blaming Gorbachev for the destructive forces that followed in the wake of his newly announced freedoms...

...If he is right, living standards will rebound from their critically low levels, while public services continue to subsidize health care, education, and welfare in ways alien to the capitalist ethos...

...While it thus shows traces of haste in its occasionally perfunctory judgments, it generally demonstrates Kremlinology of a high order...

...media, mirroring images from the White House, have shifted from a trivialized assessment of Gorbachev as a slick public-relations man to an exaggerated view of a Slavic superman single-handedly ending the Cold War...

...Doder and Branson conclude that he is not being elbowed aside at present primarily because no one else wants his job...

...While Gorbachev vacillates between threatening restive non-Russian nationalists into submission and promising them autonomy in a looser federation, Yeltsin accepts independent representatives of the other republics to hammer out mutually advantageous economic deals...

...The trouble with such a historicist approach is that it forces analogies on disparate circumstances...

...Television reports show us angry Russian shoppers shaking their fists at shoddy merchandise and empty shelves in government stores...

...Gorbachev's gamble is that such processes as worker self-management will cause ordinary folk to develop a proprietary stake in the system...

...As Doder and Branson chronicle the trials and errors of the Gorbachev years, they sometimes lose sight of the consistency behind the diverse policies...

...The wider we distribute evidence of what we've been up to, the sooner they will stop us...

...Whether the movement manages to get more serious, more radical, than the much-in-evidence individual efforts—recycle the newspapers, or take the bus instead of the car, or feed less precious water to well-manicured lawns—is still an open question, however...

...Families on collective farms have been offered long-term leases, but the lack of consumer goods gives them no incentive to produce beyond their immediate needs...