The Man Who Changed the World, by Gail Sheehy (HarperPerennial, $10.95). Sheehy`s ninth book is not so much a biography of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev as the story of her efforts to write one, beginning with her earliest attempts to get into the Soviet Union to do the book, her bullying of Soviet officials to permit her to visit Gorbachev`s home village, her coming to understand that the KGB was never far away and taking notes on her every move.
She does track down a number of persons who knew Gorbachev well in the various stages of his rise to power. As the author of ”Passages,” Sheehy not surprisingly discerns that Gorbachev has passed through six lives, the last of which leaves him with the stalled and disspirited mess of the Soviet Union today. She ends the book by noting that Gorbachev ”probably would be remembered after his political death in riddles of contradiction: Mikhail Gorbachev-the last romantic communist, who put communism on the trash heap of history. Mikhail Gorbachev-the man who changed the world and lost his country.”
– – – Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley (Pocket Books, $3.95). First novelist Mosley, according to the sketch at the end of the book, was born in Los Angeles in 1952, the setting of this novel plus five years. He has been a poet, it goes on, and that confirmed my suspicion, after relishing the rhythm of his prose, the startling originality of his imagery, delivered an unself-conscious ease that may well have led Mosley to name his narrator and protagonist Easy Rawlins. Nevertheless, this is a novel in the hard-boiled tradition of Hammett and Chandler, taking Rawlins down L.A.`s meanest streets.
Rawlins is not a detective but a black who left the segregation and poverty of the Houston ghetto to fight in World War II and came out with a fine sense of being equal to whites and no stranger to seeing men die. The story starts when he`s fired from his job at an aircraft plant and needs money to pay the mortgage. He`s sitting in a bar when an imposing white man comes in and offers him $100 to locate a mysterious blonde woman known to frequent the after-hours spots in Watts. As they tend to do in such cases, things promptly get complicated and nasty. The blurbs inside and on the back cover speak of wanting to read more of Mosley and Easy Rawlins. That`s for sure.
