By Reason of Insanity, by James Neal Harvey (St. Martins, $5.99). Here we have something new in the serial rapist- mutilator-murderer genre: a yuppie marketing man, one Peter Barrows, who works for a pharmaceutical company and who would be scum even if he were not a psychopath. We first see him at the office, right after watching him clean up his loft after his latest atrocity, kissing any available backside even as we read his chilling inner monologue of rage and contempt. By that time, though, the story already has taken hold. We have seen him arranging the body of his third victim to photograph her as a work of art. We see New York City Police Lt. Ben Tolliver start work on this latest murder, and we learn that he has seen ”something like” these killings before and is obsessed with the crimes. Author Harvey did his homework on the police work and on the psychopathology of serial killers, and he writes with a swift simplicity that urges the reader through an entirely plausible nightmare.
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The Whole Pop Catalog, by the Berkeley Pop Culture Project (Avon $20). Name it-anything from advertising, airplanes, Americana or Amusements Parks to ”The Wizard of Oz,” wrestling and the junk sports or Yo-Yos-and you`ll find sources of more information, facts and figures, icons, short quizzes and hundreds of black-and-white photos. The publisher calls it the ”ultimate chronicle of all things pop,” and the editor in chief asserts that ”pop culture is our true culture.” The first assertion is undeniably true, despite whole forests having been felled to produce similar volumes, and the second is made plausible by the sheer mass of nostalgia and trivia this book holds for anyone who has been alive since, say, the end of World War II.
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The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of Motion Pictures, by Donald Spoto (Anchor, $18). In a new edition of his 1976 masterpiece, Spoto does not simply touch up his first impressions. He was finished with the first edition, when he sent a few chapters of it to Hitchcock, who liked it so much that he invited Spoto to watch the filming of ”Family Plot,” which would be his last film, and the two men became friends. That led Spoto to write ”The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock,” a stunning biography that would fascinate even a reader who had never seen a Hitchcock film. So Spoto has thought more about Hitchcock`s films and seen them again, making this an even more perceptive work than the first.
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Of Kinkajous, Capybaras, Horned Beetles, Seladangs, and the Oddest and Most Wonderful Mammals, Insects, Birds, and Plants of Our World, by Jeanne K. Hanson and Deane Morrison (HarperPerennial, $9). One chapter begins with the question: Are sloths really slothful? Any experienced reader of cliche headlines just knows the answer will be no. But here it is yes, and, in fact, the sloths` being slow is a key to their survival. No endangered species the sloth, either the two-toed or three-toed version. For years their numbers were grossly underestimated for the same reason they escape slaughter: Camouflaged and slow-moving, they aren`t easily spotted. Open the book to any of its 150 chapters and expect more surprises.
