HYPOCHONDRIA Woeful Imaginations by Susan Baur (University of California Press: $19. 95) Many plausible, intriguing theories to explain hypochondria are offered in these pages, but most commonly, hypochondria offers a way for people who are feeling lonely, fearful or weak to beckon for attention under the socially acceptable guise of being sick. I've been trying to build a house of cards amid a house of people, One should be alone to build a house of cards. If you're looking for a different slant on the role of a secretary, you'd benefit more from a book like Janet Dight's "Breaking the Secretarial Barrier". The community depended on slaves, women were in short supply, newcomers off the ships regularly called in at the company's slave lodge that doubled as Cape Town's semi-official brothel.

"Would it make me happier? Would it make Daddy happier" What is wanted is a return to what was This is possible for neither mother nor daughter Anita anticipates years with a weekend father for Bertie. The narrator is under some unspecified cloud, though men are clearly responsible To get over it, she goes to the YMCA to swim and run Or rather, she tries to. Brutus Brown is a young bear who has lived all his life in a zoo. Arafat is supported by Libya, and we are supported in the same way by the United States" Other interviews describe the cold-blooded killings of unarmed farmers and health workers. Over and over again, the daughter complains of her father's propensity for "vulgar" and "third-rate" women in his affairs, while professing admiration for his public service. After surviving the journey from the weird and otherworldly environment of the womb, which sounds like a pulsating water pump working in tandem with a double bellows, infants are assaulted by a "sensual bouillabaisse" in which sights have sounds, feelings have tastes, and smells can cause dizziness. The Feminization of America: How Women's Values Are Changing Our Public and Private Lives, Elinor Lenz, Barbara Myerhoff (Tarcher.

"I had suggested that night that theatre, like all art, was a kind of hallucination at the service of reality, and that full appreciation of it required total abject surrender-like religion 'Or love. At times, however, he seems to have crammed too much information and too many names into overly general headings Then the whole seems to sprawl. After several more false starts, he completed the slender novel about a young boy growing up in England in what the publisher calls "touching and odd circumstances" in the fall of 1987. Church groups generally declared it ethically justifiable (a conclave of French Catholics decided that a lobotomized priest could not hear confession but could teach at a university. Among them: fuel for the continuing debate over who was the most significant force in rock: Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan or the Beatles? If you accept the number of books inspired by the artist as a measure of influence, Presley was No 1.

The verses are as charming and the rhymes as outrageous as ever. In this struggle, the adolescent Dovie has few allies: Her brother and father are present in the novel, but not privy to the bond between mother and daughter; the family, friends and neighbors too stand outside this bond and cannot register its loss. Glatzer-in this brief, poignant, beautiful book-tells us the love story that was Franz Kafka's life. At times, however, he seems to have crammed too much information and too many names into overly general headings Then the whole seems to sprawl. To publicize his latest best seller, "One Minute for Myself" Johnson's publisher, William Morrow & Co, has signed On the Scene Productions to conduct 20 interviews to be satellited live to news and television talk shows throughout the United States in a four-hour time period.

They may also recall the Aztec practice of sacrificing prisoners. "It is toward Pancho Villa that the story bends-and toward Villa that much of Mexico bent at a certain time, because a few landowners could not perceive when enough was enough, though their wretched peons knew. Perhaps the most common theme is that the American empire is an unprofitable economic proposition; this is Kennedy's essential point. Rose, on a dollar a day for housekeeping, is dutiful, intelligent and angry. Despite its Herculean proportions, the four volumes took only about five years to produce, from start to finish. Poet Lyn Lifshin's "Kiss the Skin Off" appears to be a collection of two decades' work; some of the poems are recent, others date back as far as the '60s. And while he annoys and insults those who have to live with him, he injures himself as well, because he has lost the very possibility of self-respect.

The dead accomplish it, and so, more or less, do those who emigrate and then find that Yeats' gyre has no re-entry-level positions. Ronald Reagan is not called the Great Communicator for nothing, but Robert Canfield is an inarticulate, one-dimensional, stereotypic right winger "You're being duped by outside agitators-members of the communist party. Published in Peking and distributed around the world under the imprint of Panda Books-a colorable imitation, by the way, of the venerable Penguin mark-these books allow us to penetrate a dimension of China that we might never otherwise glimpse. Blacks? They labored loyally in Britain's colonies, played wonderful cricket, worked the factories of Bolton and Liverpool And then there was this Joe Louis fellow from America.