J Anthony Lukas

Her friends just couldn't understand. Over and over, Cynthia Gorney tried to explain why she had quit her job as a Style section reporter for the Washington Post: to write what she hoped would be the first balanced narrative history of abortion in America, sympathetically explaining the motives and actions of both sides in the wrenching controversy.

In France, young people riot about the poor quality of their education. In the United States, it would take cancellation of "The Simpsons" to get a rise out of most students. Yet in France, 17 to 24% of the students who complete high school are prepared to do college work, while in the United States, the figure is a pathetic 5%. And that doesn't include the 600,000 or more U.S. students who drop out each year. The Fall issue of New Perspectives Quarterly is packed with those sorts of statistics.

Say goodbye to the theater program of the National Endowment for the Arts, which is being submerged along with other discipline-based programs in the current NEA reorganization. The final round of professional theater company grants was announced last week, with amounts to most local recipients reflecting the NEA's severe cutbacks. Center Theatre Group's grant fell to $70,000, down from $161,980 last year and a far cry from the 1985 high of $315,000.

Joni Evans has replaced Howard Kaminsky as head of trade book publishing at Random House, Robert L. Bernstein, chairman of the publishing giant, announced last Tuesday. Evans had been head of trade publishing at Simon & Schuster until just two months ago when she was hired to begin a new imprint within Random House.

Studded with vivid character sketches and evocative descriptions of the American landscape, journalist Judy Pasternak's scarifying account of uranium mining's disastrous consequences often reads like a novel — though you will wish that the bad guys got punished as effectively as they do in commercial fiction. Real life is complicated, and Pasternak, a veteran of 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, does justice to the historical and ethical ambiguities of her tale while crafting a narrative of exemplary clarity.

It sits on a bluff above one of the best surfing spots in the world, with a view that can reach 60 miles to San Clemente Island on a clear day. It's so isolated that you can barely see the tip of a gazebo or get a peek of some of the Spanish-style buildings from the beach. And the closest you can get to it is a model at the city's public library.

In a cry of outrage from the heart of the American literary establishment, a group of the nation's most prominent authors Wednesday condemned the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran for ordering the execution of novelist Salman Rushdie and attacked booksellers for removing his controversial work. Hours later, the B. Dalton and Barnes & Noble chains reversed themselves, announcing that the book, "The Satanic Verses," once again will be available for sale.

Getting through to the Kremlin is a lot easier than getting a response from most publishers, says John Boswell in "The Awful Truths About Publishing: Why They Always Reject Your Manuscript--and What You Can Do About It" (Warner Books). On the brighter side, Boswell says that 53,000 books did manage to get published in this country last year, so evidently, there is a lot you can do about it. Boswell is co-author of "What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School."