Short Takes

Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis
By Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster, 224 pp., $25

Amid the onslaught of bad news afflicting the Bush administration, one item seems to have slipped in under the Beltway radar: Jimmy Carter's new book, criticizing the mutual degradation of religion and politics, quietly debuted at the top of the best-seller list.

This might seem criticism from an odd quarter, since arguably it was Carter who started the whole thing, proffering his Christian bona fides as credentials in the political arena and, as president, taking the metaphorical ''bully pulpit" all too literally. He nevertheless remains a New Deal liberal and an internationalist, positions whose rightness is confirmed for him by his devout lifelong adherence to Jesus's teachings. He is distressed to find both his beloved Southern Baptist faith and, not coincidentally, his government promoting doctrines he finds mean, materialistic, selfish, and rigidly authoritarian, in brief, profoundly un-Christian.

''Our Endangered Values" appears to have been written not just in sorrow and anger but in some haste. Carter's diatribe against right-wing malfeasance is overbroad and disorganized; but he is not speaking to liberals, who already have those arguments memorized. His critique of the fundamentalist takeover of his church, which is detailed and quite personal, is addressed to a different audience, and one that may be attuned to listen.

Summer Crossing
By Truman Capote
Random House, 142 pp., $22.95

Quite literally rescued from the trash, where the author consigned it, this early novel by Truman Capote -- the tale of Grady McNeil, a wayward debutante with ''green estimating eyes" -- has been exhumed for publication by Capote's literary trustees.

We anticipate a brittle romantic comedy, a precursor to ''Breakfast at Tiffany's," perhaps. But Grady's alienation from her privileged milieu runs too deep and dark for that. The time is summer, shortly after World War II. Left on her own in Manhattan by her globe-trotting parents, Grady indulges her dangerous attraction to Clyde Manzer, a discharged GI working as a parking-lot jockey. Grady is a precocious sophisticate, Clyde a Coney Island Stanley Kowalski, rough and crude. Champagne and schnapps: an unpalatable combination.

And, oh my, is this a period piece, with jazz on the radio, ball gowns by Dior, and the rancid odor of prejudice polluting the air, the perception that racial and religious others are exotic species, mildly interesting but as noisy and rank as animals at the zoo. To Capote, a shrewd connoisseur of the zeitgeist, this scrap of juvenilia must have seemed hopelessly dated and melodramatic when he threw it away 40 years ago.

Abducted
By Susan A. Clancy
Harvard University, 179 pp., $22.95

This snappy study by Susan A. Clancy is not your typical scholarly monograph, beginning with the subject matter. As the subtitle succinctly puts it: ''How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens."

Clancy makes her own position clear. She does not believe in alien abduction. But a number of people (that is, white, middle-class, American people) insist that they have been snatched, prodded, even impregnated by extraterrestrials, and as a research psychologist, Clancy wanted to know why. What she found is that it all begins with commonplace night terrors, a sensation our ancestors would have blamed on a witch or an incubus. Today's culture offers a different hypothesis -- ''I was kidnapped by aliens!" -- and, regrettably, Clancy's profession includes therapists willing to construct ''recovered memories" to flesh out the details.

That tells us how people believe such things. But why do they believe them? As Clancy reminds us, beliefs need not be true to be real. To answer the latter question, she must examine the psychology of faith in a rational society, a subject she treats with respect as well as a fondness for many in the ''abduction community."

Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.