South Florida Sun Sentinel from Fort Lauderdale, Florida • Page 93

MS Sun-Sentinel, Sunday, September 27, 1998 9F BOOKS NATIONAL BEST SELLERS The New York Times NONFICTION Chasing miracles like grasping for ash MEMOIR Partners weave cocoon on court THE TENNIS PARTNER: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Loss. Abraham Verghese. HarperCollins. $25. 346 pp.

By RENEE GRAHAM The Boston Globe In tennis, Abraham Verghese always found order. As a African-born boy of Indian parentage, he often felt like an, outsider, belonging neither here nor there in his Ethiopian homeland. But always there was sanctuary in the particular rhythm of ball against racquet. In his child's mind, he would imagine conquering opponents such as Bill Tilden, Rod Laver and Pancho Segura with his prowess and speed. Whacking a ball against the side of a shed began as a release, and evolved into a blessed ritual; it was a sound of solace, and a retreat from his alienation.

When Verghese took a position in the Texas Tech School of fy, UVM- rk Medicine in El Paso, he resumed his childhood passion, a love he shared with David Smith, who had found in tennis a similar refuge from his own dark places. The two became friends, and the game granted both a safe place, a respite from life's uncertainties. The Tennis Partner is Verghese's heartbreaking recollection of his friendship with Smith, a former student whose unshakable addiction to cocaine unraveled his once-promising life. Indelible and haunting, it is an elegy to friendship found, and an ode to a good friend lost. Mick Brown HARDCOVER FICTION Last Weeks week on list 1.

RAINBOW SIX. Tom Clancy. John Clark, heading an international task force, investigates terrorist incidents in Switzerland, Germany and Spain. (Putnam, $27.95.) 1 6 2. TELL ME YOUR DREAMS.

Sidney Sheldon. Three women suspected of committing brutal murders undergo a bizarre trial with a curious defense. (Morrow, $26.) 2 3 3. 1 KNOW THIS MUCH IS TRUE. Wally Lamb.

A troubled man must care for his schizophrenic identical twin brother and face the nightmares that have bedeviled their family. (Regan BooksHarperCollins, $27.50.) 3 13 4. NO SAFE PLACE. Richard North Patterson. The perils suffered by a senator running for president in the year 2000.

(Knopf, $25.95.) 5 3 5. THE LOOP. Nicholas Evans. A biologist finds herself facing professional and romantic problems while trying to protect wolves in Montana. (Delacorte, $25.95.) 1 6.

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. Arthur Golden. The life of a young woman growing up in Kyoto who has to reinvent herself after World War II begins. (Knopf, $25.) 6 44 7. SUMMER SISTERS.

Judy Blume. Two young women from different backgrounds come of age together on Martha's Vineyard. (Delacorte, $21.95) 7 17 8. THE FIRST EAGLE. Tony Hillerman.

Two Navajo policemen pursue a mysterious killer a plague or a person? in the Southwest. (HarperCollins, $25.) 4 7 9. MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE. Nicholas Sparks. After finding a seaborne bottle containing an enigmatic letter, a divorced woman encounters love.

(Warner, $20.) 8 23 10. POINT OF ORIGIN. Patricia Corn-well. Dr. Kay Scarpetta battles an old enemy, a serial killer who has escaped and is resuming her crimes.

(Putnam, $25.95.) 9 10 NONFICTION 1. THE DAY DIANA DIED. Christopher Andersen. An account of the events surrounding the death of the Princess of Wales. (Morrow, $27.) 1 5 2.

TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE. Mitch Al-bom. A sportswriter tells of weekly visits to his dying college mentor. 2 49 3. THE DEATH OF OUTRAGE.

William J. Bennett. A former secretary of education takes a critical view of the Clinton presidency. (Free Press, $20.) 4 3 4. A PIRATE LOOKS AT FIFTY.

Jimmy Buffett. While traveling from the Florida Keys to the Amazon, the singer-songwriter reflects on his half-century of life. (Random House, $24.95.) 3 15 5. THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Laura Schlesinger and Stewart Vogel.

The ra- dro psychologist and a rabbi discuss the significance of the Ten Commandments in contemporary life. (Cliff StreetHarperCollins, $24.) 1 6. A WALK IN THE WOODS. Bill Bryson. A.

journalist finds beauty and humor while hiking the Appalachian Trail. (Broadway, $25.) 6 16 7. ANGELA'S ASHES. Frank McCourt. An Irish-American writer recalls his childhood in Limerick.

(Scribner, $24.) 5 106 8. HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS. Ann H. Coulter. A lawyer states the case for the impeachment of President THE SPIRITUAL TOURIST.

Mick Brown. St Martin's Press. $24.95. 256 pp. By JAMES D.

DAVIS Religion Editor A cloud of fine ash falls from a Sri Lankan swami's fingers proof, his devotees say, of his divinity. Crosses of light appear in every window of a Baptist church in Tennessee one of them appearing to be 30 feet tall and hovering over the street outside. In Germany, a young woman stares into a reporter's eyes and lays her hands on his cheeks. He feels the handprints burning on his face for two hours. Tlie Spiritual Tourist is a brave book for someone who lives by journalistic dispassion.

Mick Brown, a British free-lance journalist, pours himself into this travelogue of the miraculous and mystical. Where others might hang back, fearful of their image, Brown touches, tastes, feels, thinks, wonders. If only he had found something to hold onto. Starting in his own backyard of London, Brown meets Benjamin Creme, the ebullient, elderly scholar who says the Maitreya the Buddhist version of a messiah is on Earth and is using him as his herald. Through Creme, Brown learns of Sai Baba, an Asian Indian revered by many as an avatar, or manifestation of God able to create such wonders as vibhuti, a holy ashen substance, from his fingertips.

Brown meets Sai Baba's followers in London, then resolves to meet the god-man in India. He never gets a private audience, but he sees enough to make him consider whether a human really can embody the divine. From there he hears of a 10 year-old Spanish boy at a monastery in India, believed to be the reincarnation of a revered Tibetan Buddhist lama. In another trip to the subcontinent, he visits the remnants of the Auro-bindoSweet Mother movement, and thence to Germany for an encounter with Mother Meera, a young Indian woman said to be her successor. He then launches into a discussion of the "feminine principle" in Eastern religion, and how it affects Western yearnings too.

This is typical of Brown's skillful interweaving of historical material, providing his spiritual travelogue with depth and context. He has done a daunting amount of homework his bibliography includes 65 volumes, many written by gurus themselves. As part of his visit with the headquarters of the Theosophical Society, for instance, he launches into a two-pronged inquiry. He examines the spread of Eastern spirituality into the West, as shown by Theosophical protege Krishnamurti. He also traces the mingling of religion and occult metaphysical practices: from Theosophy founder Helena Blavatsky, to Alice Bailey, to modern New Age movements.

The book shows a tourist's eye for detail: the colorful chaos of Indian marketplaces, the dreary trailer parks of eastern Tennessee, the thick neck and arms of the Dalai Lama. Brown also captures the peaks and valleys of extended travel. At times, he feels lost in his surroundings, as when he was awed at the play of light and ocean one day at Madras. Other times, he can recall only a hard seat during an all-night bus ride, another rider snoring on his shoulder. He visits as many sites, and meets as many of the leaders, as possible.

And in the interviews, he does not stand apart. He touches, chants, prays, meditates, even admits to vivid dreams of "blue-faced gods and phan-tasmagorical characters" drawn from Indian postcards. But for all the color, each segment of the As in so many relationships, Verghese and Verghese Smith found one another in difficult times. Verghese had recently moved to El Paso with his wife, Rajani, and their sons, Steven and Jacob. It should have been the best of times: At 37, he had been appointed a full professor in the department of internal medicine at Texas Tech, and he welcomed the challenge of starting life anew.

"A newcomer is unencumbered by his past, his mistakes, his secrets unknown," he writes. "This is the great promise of mov-ing: that if you fold your life into a U-Haul truck and put it on the road, you will be given a clean plate with which to approach the buffet." But Verghese could not escape the growing rift between himself and his wife of 11 years, and the concerns it raised for their children. He would eventually move out of the house, and into an apartment he tells his boys is a "time out" place. Things went considerably worse for Smith. A fourth-year medical student from Australia, Smith had once been a good enough tennis player to earn a spot on the pro tour.

But his cocaine addiction eroded everything else in his life. Other doctors and hospital staffers were wary of him. His personal relationships would buckle and break under the weight of his addiction. He came to loathe himself each time he relapsed, allowing the disease to again tighten like a vise. As the book begins, Smith is whisked from El Paso to an Atlanta substance-abuse program designed specifically for doctors.

Here, Verghese succinctly details this dirty secret of the, medical profession drug- and alcohol-addled doctors. "The very qualities that led them to be doctors compulsiveness, conscientiousness, control over emotions, delayed gratification, fantasies of the future predisposed them to use drugs. When they did, when it all came crashing down, what they felt was monstrous, crippling shame." But the tennis court, and the simplicity of two friends chasing a fuzzy yellow ball, allowed Smith and Verghese to hold their demons at bay, and smooth, if temporarily, the harsh angles of their lives. Between those clean white lines, Verghese and Smith seemed to complete each other. "In the way we controlled the movement of a yellow ball in space, we were imposing order on a world that was fickle and capricious," Verghese writes.

"Each time we played, this feeling of restoring order, of mastery, was awakened." At best, such moments were fleeting for Smith, whose slow, incessant decline leads to the book's inevitable but utterly shattering conclusion. In his beautifully rendered first book, My Own Country, Verghese wrote of his experiences as a young doctor battling AIDS in rural Tennessee. His elegant writing goes even deeper in The Tennis Partner, which is both a love story and a horror story. Verghese makes palpable his excitement at first connecting with Smith, as well as his crushing frustration at his inability to save David from himself. "I was his teacher and mentor, and on the tennis courts, he fulfilled those roles for me.

We had found a third arena outside the defined boundaries of hospital and tennis court, found it at a time in both our lives when friendship was an important way to reclaim what had been lost. We had built it up, carefully, the way boys fashion a sand castle with spades and buckets, ignoring the, rising tide. But it was not the tide that washed it away. David knocked down his half." book takes on a depressing similarity. Brown gets a distant rumor of a miracle or pre-eminent personage.

He hustles off to meet the leader and his or her followers. He gets a tantalizing taste of the numinous. He envies the followers for their faith, but he cannot share it. He gives up and follows the next lead. Discussing Sai Baba with a new devotee, Brown sounds a frequent refrain: "Once again, I found myself feeling almost envious of somebody else's certainty." Part of his problem, as he confesses, is the lack of a sure yardstick for miracles.

"Mystical experience, like faith itself, is not amenable to reason. But then, nor are most of the defining experiences of being a human being: love, loyalty, self-sacrifice, the feeling of being inexpressibly moved by a piece of music, a painting, a smile." Brown is not blind to ironies along the way. He is struck by the many Western goods and services flooding India, even as weary Westerners flood India in search of spiritual values. He is also honest about failures of the luminaries: their pride, their frequent oblique comments, their officious deputies. Though he clearly admires the Dalai Lama, he mentions other Tibetans such as Sogyal Rinpoche and the late Chogyam Trungpa, both accused of sexually preying on their disciples.

The book has a sad ending, for it has no proper ending. As it closes, Brown is on retreat at a Tibetan monastery in Scotland. But he still has found no answers. The closest is the Buddhist concept of finding joy in detachment, of living in each moment, then releasing it to embrace the next. "I see how thoughts arise and fall away, how they have no permanence," he writes.

"So feelings come and go. So everything comes and goes. Negativity, self-pity, despair. We can choose to cling to them, or to let them go." These are not answers; this is surrender to an endless stream with no destiny. All his knowledge and experience leave Brown much as he started: an observer of all, a member of none.

He relates a telling comment by a French-Canadian pilgrim in India. "I sometimes think I've come to be as lost as I ever was but in more interesting surroundings." That could be said of Brown himself. The question is whether a constant change of scenery perpetual spiritual tourism is a decent substitute for a spiritual home. Clinton. (Regnery, $24.95.) 1 8 93 9.

CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD: Book 1. Neale Donald Walsch. The author addresses questions of life and love, good and evil, guilt and sin. (Putnam, $19.95.) 10. HIS BRIGHT LIGHT.

Danielle Steel. The novelist recalls the life of her son Nick Traina, who suffered from manic depression and died at 19. (Delacorte, $25) 1 PAPERBACK FICTION Weeks on list Last week MYSTERY Trouble in Paradise is, both hero, story weak For more information 1. SPECIAL DELIVERY. Danielle Steel.

Romance comes to a pair who once disliked each other. (Dell, $6.50.) 3 3 2. COLD MOUNTAIN. Charles Frazier. A wounded Confederate soldier journey's home toward the end of the Civil War to meet an old love and a new $13.) 2 4 3.

DIVINE SECRETS OF THE YA-YA SISTERHOOD. Rebecca Wells. Three generations of Southern women. (Harper Perennial, $13.50.) 1 32 The queen of culinary mysteries Diane Mott Davidson, whose latest novel is Prime Cut, is interviewed on The Mystery Corner, the Sun-Sentinel's permanent Web site devoted exclusively to mystery novels. The Mystery Corner features audio interviews with some of your favorite authors, Web site links, reviews and a message board for you to tell us what you think of mystery novels.

The address is www.sun-sentinel.comfreetime mysteries telling suffers in Trouble in Paradise, which seems more like the kind of uninspired vignettes, complete with the kind of unnecessary violence, used in formulaic action films. There's little doubt where this story is heading, or what will be the denouement. The dialogue-intensive Trouble in Paradise does little to establish believable characters, becoming no more than a third-rate version of Elmore Leonard. It's hard to reconcile the laconic Jesse's metamorphosis into a take-' charge crime fighter. Jesse's taciturn approach to conversation doesn't mask a hidden intelligence; instead, it reveals how slow on the uptake this character is.

The banal Trouble in Paradise reads more like a treatment for a screenplay than a novel with the characters ready-made for central casting. The over-the-top thief, who "needed to get too close to the edge," seems tailored for James Woods. The steady-gazed al-coholic-in-the-making Jesse, with the unexplainable sex-appeal, would be Bruce Willis. Little imagination sparks in Trouble in Paradise. It's as if Parker cannibalized several Spenser novels but left behind the heart and soul that made his series so popular.

Jesse Stone is no Spenser. Trouble in Paradise doesn't even have a Hawk. NONFICTION 1. THE PERFECT STORM. Sebastian Junger.

The story of the nor'easter of 1991, focusing on a crew of fishermen from Gloucester, Mass. (Harper Paperbacks, $6.99.) 1 15 2. INTO THIN AIR. Jon Krakauer. A journalist's account of his ascent of Mount Everest In 1996, the deadliest season In history.

(AnchorDoubleday, $7.99.) 2 23 3. UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN. Frances Mayes. A celebration the Italian countryside. (Broadway, $13.) 3 51 Is -V TROUBLE IN PARADISE.

Robert B. Parker. Putnam. $22.95. 336 pp.

By OLINE H. COGDILL Mystery Columnist There certainly is Trouble in Paradise, and it has little to do with a group of career criminals' plan to rob the wealthy residents of an exclusive island. A predictable plot, one-dimensional characters and tepid action make this second Jesse Stone novel as disappointing as the first. In last year's Night Passage, Robert B. Parker introduced small-town Police Chief Jesse Stone as a supplement to his venerable Spenser novels.

While even die-hard fans of Parker might admit that his recent novels about the introspective gourmet detective have been, at best, lackluster, this new series pales next to the weakest Spenser outing. Chief Jesse's latest crisis in Paradise, revolves around three budding juvenile delinquents who set fire to a gay couple's home. Predictably, Jesse is pitted against two of the boys' wealthy parents who refuse to acknowledge their sons' criminal proclivities. On a personal note, Jesse's love life has never been better. He is sleeping not only with his ex-wife, with whom he wants to reconcile, but also a local and the bank on the island.

The adage "honor among thieves" doesn't exist among this motley crew. Macklin trusts no one, expect Faye, his loyal, longtime girlfriend. And the edgy Macklin, as we are told time and again, lives mainly for the thrill of the plan. "What he could feel most sharply," muses Faye, "was excitement and boredom, and his life was mostly seeking one to avoid the other she knew Jimmy, and what excited him was risk. She knew that the odds were good that he'd risk too much someday." Parker's normally clean, clear story AP PhotoCHARLES KRUPA Robert Parker puts aside his private detective Spenser to explore a new character.

attorney and a no-nonsense realtor. But crime is about to escalate in Paradise. Career criminal Jimmy Macklin targets the upscale enclave Stiles Island, separated by a bridge from Paradise. Assembling a hand-picked gang of experts from across the country, Macklin plans to blow up the bridge and loot each of the mansions Lester Goran, Bing Crosby's Last Song, 8 p.m. Oct.

3 at Books Books, 295 Aragon Coral Gables, 305-442-4408. Marilyn French, A Season in Hell, 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Liberties, 888 E. Las Olas Fort Lauderdale. 954-522-6788, -By VERNA GREEN 4.