M University

Sixteen-year-old Wayne Ross has a hard time believing that the musicians in his high school marching band - the ones who put in grueling hours of practice, the ones admired for their high-stepping panache, the ones celebrated in their own reality TV show - could be associated with the lurid hazing scandal unfolding 260 miles away at Florida A&M University. "Everyone around here loves the band," Ross said last week while walking to class at Southwest DeKalb High School. "They're a big influence on everyone.

What's in a face? More than meets the eye. Our faces identify us to the world; they are the most important element in the first impressions that we make. Yet outward appearances are frequently no more than skin deep; they tell us little about the real nature of the underlying individual. Masks or windows: Faces can be either and often happen to be both.

Economics is not one of the sciences for which Alfred Nobel set forth his prizes. It is a prize named in his honor in 1968 by the Swedish Central Bank, to commemorate its 300th anniversary, and awarded amid controversy annually since then. James Buchanan won the "Nobel" Prize for Economics in 1986. He did not win it for any breakthrough in economics. For there have been few unquestioned breakthroughs in economics, and those that have been made are as abstruse as a mathematician's proof.

Books about American business and its leaders deserve more serious attention than they usually receive. They are often unread by a public tired of authors who simply ignore the complexities and dynamics of modern economic institutions and depict businessmen as either plundering "robber barons" or selfless visionaries who devote their wealth to society's betterment. Often overlooked is the fact that businessmen are individuals trying to make money in a competitive marketplace.

What a delight it is to come across words I haven't heard in half a century! Like tarvia for a road surface or piazza for a veranda. This collection of words from different regions of the country is a history as well as a geography, and it is fascinating to discover, for instance, that there were once tiny New England enclaves in Cane Creek and New Garden, N.C.; Dorchester, S.C., and Midway, Ga.

In the late teens and early 1920s a group of men in the United States repeatedly risked their lives in the service of their country. They were not fighting a war, testing military equipment or working undercover as spies. They were delivering the mail. "Pilot's Directions" chronicles the beginnings of the Air Mail Service in what was then called the U.S. Post Office Department.

The University of California, in the first such move since it adopted a divestment policy four years ago, announced Tuesday that it will sell $763 million in holdings in three corporations that maintain ties with South Africa. The university's planned sale comes as black South African leader Nelson Mandela prepares to visit California on the final leg of his U.S. tour. Mandela plans to conclude the tour with a stop in Oakland this weekend.

If J.M. Coetzee hangs an icon over his writing desk, it must be a portrait of Erasmus, saint of skeptics. The author of "In Praise of Folly," an amiable forerunner of the Protestant Reformation, was censured by the pope for his forerunning and denounced by Luther for his amiability. "The king of Amphibians," Luther growled; and much later the French writer Georges Duhamel called him "The king of But."

New West magazine was launched in the mid-1970s with high hopes and not a little hype. As the title implies, its editors and contributors were full of confidence about their ability to put their readers on the cutting edge of life in California -- "newness," after all, is the essence of "Westness." As we discover in "Promised Lands" by David M.

I have probably seen Dallas dressmaker Abraham Zapruder's home movie that recorded President John F. Kennedy's assassination hundreds of times. Its 26 wrenching seconds captured the shockingly violent finish to a young president's life 40 years ago. For a journalist trying to resolve the mysteries of Kennedy's death, the Zapruder film is the best visual evidence to determine if there was more than one assassin shooting at JFK and from which direction the bullets were fired.