I'LL CALL YOU TOMORROW And Other Lies Between Men and Women

Humor along arched-eyebrow lines--for those who can identify with the pangs of ""Manspeak"" (where ""Let's elope to Brazil"" should be translated as ""if something else doesn't come up""), or appreciate the excitement of a party where men actually outnumber women (despite the fact that some of the men are merely ""engaged to be separated""). This collection of previously published pieces does occasionally stray from the witticisms of wisecracking girlfriends and the foibles of the fickle male to the plight of children caught in the divorce trap (""Today their parents worry less about how to rear them than about where to deposit them""); the battles to bring Abeel's remedial group up to snuff at John Jay College (race antagonisms have to be dealt with before anyone can learn); the loneliness of being the only woman on the park bench who can't get everyone else's labor stories straight; and--rather strangely and ponderously--the trial of Jean Harris for the murder of Herman Tarnower. (""To rally behind Harris,"" we are informed after pages of hand-wringing moralizing, ""is. . . to affirm. . . [that] between longtime lovers there exist unnotarized yet unbreachable 'contracts,' written not in ink, but in honor."") Marginalia.