GOING `HOME' TO BUDAPEST

Author: Date: SUNDAY, January 19, 1997

Page: N19

Section: Books

Oh, how times change. In movies today, censorship is unimaginable. But in the 1920s, '30s and after, the Roman Catholic Church exercised enormous power over what Hollywood could and could not do. In ``Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry'' (Yale University Press, $35), Frank Walsh, a historian at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, writes about the Production Code, the Legion of Decency and the conflicts within the church over the censorship apparatus. Among other things, church officials questioned Frank Sinatra's fitness to play a priest in ``Miracle of the Bells'' and forced the alteration of a dance scene in ``Oklahoma.''

The prolific Henry Louis Gates Jr. teams up with Harvard colleague Kwame Anthony Appiah on a reference book, ``The Dictionary of Global Culture'' (Knopf, 35). Predicated on the reality that by the year 2000, half the world's people will be Asian, one-eighth will be African and the majority will be non-Christian, Appiah and Gates (calling upon various other scholars) have compiled this alphabetical directory, which emphasizes the culture of the non-Western World.

Along with Theodore Dreiser, Charles Darwin and John Bunyan, the book includes the Han-lin Academy, a Chinese school founded in the 8th century; the Ifa oracle, ``Yoruba religious texts''; and Carlos Gardel (1887-1935), an Argentine singer and actor. There's Marcus Garvey, parfleche (``American Indian rawhide sack'') and even such obscure figures as Alfred A. Knopf.

In ``Ashes of Revolt: Essays on Human Rights'' (White Pine Press, $15), Marjorie Agosin, Chilean poet and professor at Wellesley College, writes about life under the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and of the artists and activists who struggled to survive and prevail. Also from White Pine ($12, paper) comes Agosin's ``Starry Night,'' a book of poems translated by Mary G. Berg.

Another Latino voice, on a similar theme, is that of Ilan Stavans, a Mexican-born essayist and critic who teaches at Amherst College. In ``Art & Anger: Essays on Politics and the Imagination'' (University of New Mexico Press, $29.95), Stavans writes about Latin American writers and their relationship to their countries' politics: Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Fernando Pessoa and Jorge Luis Borges. He writes as well about his own experience as a Jewish Mexican who grew up in a household where Spanish and Yiddish were spoken, then emigrated to the world of English letters.

How do people who work with animals -- not their own pets -- every day in research labs, veterinary clinics and animal shelters understand their own relationships to the vulnerable creatures they work with? Using interviews and direct investigations, sociologists Arnold Arluke and Clinton R. Sanders explore this and related questions in ``Regarding Animals'' (Temple University Press, $54 cloth, $16.95 paper). Arluke teaches at Northeastern University and Tufts University, while Sanders teaches at the University of Connecticut.