BOOKS ON THE MIND, THE FEELINGS, AND ON THE WINDS OF WAR

Author: Date: SUNDAY, January 26, 1997

Page: N17

Section: Books

This being Greater Boston, there are always plenty of books on the mind and the psyche. Psychotherapist Terrence Real has written ``I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression'' (Scribner, $24). Using many case studies from his own practice at the Family Institute of Cambridge, Real describes an epidemic of depression in men. In his view, men are more likely than women to deny their condition, and thereby risk passing it on to their children. ``We tend not to recognize depression in men,'' Real writes, ``because the disorder itself is seen as unmanly.''

A more purely entertaining and diverting work about the mind is ``On the Couch: Great American Stories about Therapy'' (Atlantic Monthly Press, $23) edited by Erica Kates, who lives in Boston. The book contains 19 short stories about the talking cure, including Donald Barthelme's ``Basil from Her Garden,'' Francine Prose's ``Imaginary Problems,'' John Updike's ``The Fairy Godfathers'' and Lynne Sharon Schwartz's ``The Age of Analysis.''

Kates writes that the patient-therapist relationship is often distorted or given a negative spin by the mass media. The stories in this collection, she writes, ``provide a window into an intensely private world by disclosing both the therapist's and the patient's experience of the therapy . . . in and out of the office.''

What hath war wrought: In drab little Building 20 on the Massachusetts Institute of Techology campus was the Radiation Lab, where during World War II a cadre of scientists worked in secret to develop microwave radar. In ``The Invention that Changed the World: How a Small Group of Radar Pioneers Won the Second World War and Launched a Technological Revolution'' (Simon & Schuster, $30), Robert Buderi of Cambridge explains how this device made radar practical on ships and planes, revolutionizing tactics in the Pacific and European theaters of operation.

After the war, the men who made microwave radar went on to related innovations that led to magnetic resonance imaging, the transistor and countless other inventions that changed the world and still affect our everyday lives. If the first part of the subtitle is a bit hyperbolic, the story is a fascinating one.

The war changed more than technology. Before World War II, it was mostly the elite who went to college, while the middle and working classes finished high school -- or often no more than ninth grade -- and went to work on farms, in factories or trades. In ``When Dreams Came True: The GI Bill and the Making of Modern America'' (Brassey's, $27.95), Michael Bennett, a former Boston Herald reporter, tells the amazing story of the 1944 law that sent 7.8 million American men to college after World War II, transforming higher education from the privilege of the elite to an expectation of the majority, and projecting the economy into the service and information age.