SECRET SANCTION By Brian Haig Warner. 405 pp. $24.95 You have to wonder about a book that has a punctuation error in the first sentence, especially when it's not a long sentence. So I began Secret Sanction with a certain amount...

SECRET WARRIORS Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era By Steven Emerson Putnam's. 256 pp. $17.95 IT WOULD be a covert espionage operation in the classic Soviet tradition. Learning that a group of about 150 retired CIA paramilitary...

His friends all tell similar stories: Norman Mailer at a dinner party, awards ceremony or afternoon gathering, hobbling on canes up or down a few steps or a flight of stairs, short of breath, as if getting from one place to another was a struggle...

Within the past year, three of the most famous authors to emerge after World War II have died: Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron. Their deaths all resulted in front-page stories, lengthy appreciations and ongoing discussions about their place in American letters.No writer was...

In the following essay, Seib identifies elements of Homeric epic in The Armies of the Night, particularly Mailer's concern for the destiny of the United States, allusions to the supernatural, and warfare as its central theme.

[One] of the many edges on which Mailer has always precariously balanced his career and reputation is the edge between fiction and what we like to call (forgetting how fictive it really is) "real life." The subtitle of his best political book, The Armies of the Night, is History as a Novel: The Novel as History. And, seriously as that subtitle may have been meant in Armies, it takes on even more serious meaning in The Executioner's Song (subtitled A True Life Novel). For if "fict...