NONFICTION - May 19, 1991

NOTES OF A HANGING JUDGE: Essays and Reviews 1979-1989 by Stanley Crouch (Oxford: $8.95). African-American political leaders are taken to task in pieces originally featured in the Village Voice.

ONCE THERE WAS A FARM . . . by Virginia Bell Dabney (Ballantine: $8.95). Making her literary debut at 71, Dabney recounts (and repeats) her mother’s single-handed management of a Virginia farm.

AN OPEN ADOPTION by Lincoln Caplan (Houghton Mifflin: $8.95). Both an adoptive parent and an attorney, Caplan is eminently qualified to speak of the emotional and legal joys and pitfalls.

LAKOTA WOMAN by Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes (HarperPerennial: $9.95). The ethnic pride of the ‘60s and ‘70s inspired a Native-American woman to avoid becoming a casualty of reservation life.

FICTION

THE BURDEN OF PROOF by Scott Turow (Warner: $5.95). Suicide of prosecutor Alejandro Stern’s wife forces him to weigh law and morality.

WHITE NINJA by Eric V. Lustbader (Fawcett Crest: $5.95). Cowabunga dude? Nicolas Linnear, of “The Ninja” and “The Miko,” has lost his ninja powers.

FRIEND OF MY YOUTH by Alice Munro (Vintage Contemporaries: $10). Munro’s stories about aging Canadians have been compared to those of Chekhov.

STARDUST by Robert B. Parker (Berkley: $5.50). When Spenser is hired to protect a star, there is no shortage of characters to fill the part of potential murderer.