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- - - - BOOK REVIEW DESK And Bear In Mind (Editors' choices of other recent books of particular interest) THE PICKUP, by Nadine Gordimer. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) A chance meeting between a rich, white, liberal young South African woman and an immigrant from a Muslim country turns into a love affair that suggests two cultures in quest of each other and the uses of mutual incomprehension for mutual attraction. READING CHEKHOV: A Critical Journey, by Janet Malcolm. (Random House, $23.95.) A gifted journalist's elegant excursion through and around Chekhov, finding ''wild and strange'' objects in his stories where others have often sighted only delicacy, modesty and candid, well-behaved shades of gray. LONDON: The Biography, by Peter Ackroyd. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $45.) A prodigiously researched history that is neither top-down nor bottom-up but cross-sectional: shunning traditional chronology and players (aristocrats are scarce), Ackroyd instead offers a London defined by a set of recurring motifs -- smell, sound, speech, fog, fire, ghosts and plague are a few of them. WHAT EVOLUTION IS, by Ernst Mayr. (Basic Books, $26.) A wise and illuminating examination, by an illustrious evolutionary biologist, that sorts out the complexities of evolution -- as the author calls it, ''perhaps the greatest intellectual revolution experienced by mankind'' -- with insight and authority. NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS: 1931-2001, by Czeslaw Milosz. (Ecco/HarperCollins, $45.) In the winter of his 70-year career, Milosz appears to be locked in insoluble argument with himself: where he once credited poetry with the power to rescue mankind from the void, he now demurs, maintaining that language is inadequate to the task of capturing verity. But if that is so, is not his latest assertion itself suspect? POEMS SEVEN: New and Complete Poetry, by Alan Dugan. (Seven Stories, $35.) A big volume by a major poet (it won a National Book Award this year) whose life work is adult matter, full of conviction and void of easy poses; its great theme is human pettiness exposed yet dignified by mortality. BAD ELEMENTS: Chinese Rebels From Los Angeles to Beijing, by Ian Buruma. (Random House, $27.95.) Conversations with Chinese dissidents around the world, beginning in the West and concluding in parts of China; they show a widespread desire for democracy that is not necessarily adapted to prevail. SAMUEL JOHNSON IS INDIGNANT: Stories, by Lydia Davis. (McSweeney's, $16.95.) Very brief stories that exploit the mental stuff of daily life -- rationalizations, memories, means of communication -- in a kind of meditation on how fiction might begin as a form of editing or correcting memory to fit the mind it lives in. ROOMS ARE NEVER FINISHED: Poems, by Agha Shahid Ali. (Norton, $22.) These poems, written in English by a Kashmiri-American who died earlier this month, show a supple, cultivated imagination that could draw simultaneously on different cultures in language sometimes deeply symbolic. Published: 12 - 23 - 2001 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 14 - - - -
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