LETTERS

Their Turns

Having just finished Sally Quinn's review of Nancy Reagan's My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (Book World, Nov. 5), one wonders if Quinn (the wife of the executive editor of the Washington Post -- a fact omitted from her byline) suffers from the "projective identification" with which she credits Reagan. Did Quinn and her husband not get invited to a White House dinner they coveted or did they not get a telephone call returned? One wonders.

Though I have only read excerpts from the book, I find Quinn's vituperation and anger extraordinary. To cite only one example: in reference to the allegations by CBS News that Reagan had her astrologer on a $3,000 a month retainer, Quinn says: "Think of all the clothes she could have bought with that. At least one and a half Galanos dresses!" That is particularly unbecoming from someone who lives in a Georgetown house worth, one would guess, in excess of $4 million. Think what Mitch Snyder could do with that!JOHN PETERS IRELAN Washington

The review of Nancy Reagan's book, My Turn, grabbed my attention only because it was written by Sally Quinn. I don't care a whit about Nancy's book, (especially since I own a copy of The Search for the Real Nancy Reagan, by Frances Spatz Leighton), but I'm always eager to enjoy Quinn's exquisite prose. What a joy she is to read!

Sally Quinn has not written enough since that "I'm Going to Make You a Star," episode in 1973. This has been a definite loss for her many fans. Please, all of you out there, pressure The Washington Post to once again feature Sally Quinn's excellent articles in the Style section. And, on a regular basis. HILDA ORLEANS Greenbelt

Sally Quinn's scathing review of Nancy Reagan's My Turn got this reader to break one of his personal promises -- never to buy a hardback book. But I wanted (despite having experienced "downward mobility" during the Reagan years and still clinging to my membership in Americans for Democratic Action) to personally savor finding numerous examples of Quinn's conclusion -- that My Turn confirmed that the critics were right about Nancy Reagan being "cold, calculating, angry {and} vindictive."

While I found nothing to make me want to burn my ADA membership card, neither did I find anything to convince me that Reagan should be ranked with Marie Antoinette or Lady MacBeth. But the tone of My Turn left me wondering if Reagan is despised because she is a new feminist. With her devotion to Ronald Reagan and her size four figure modeling designer dresses to perfection, she infuriates "old school" feminists who are locked into seeking independence from all men. Thus Nancy Reagan gets no credit for her dealings with powerful men who bristle because she does not kowtow to them.

Political ideology aside, "old school" feminists might well decry the review as sexist characterization or "Nancy gnashing" by posing the counterpoint -- if Nancy Reagan were a man, critics might see My Turn as describing someone who is generous, shrewedly observant, fiercely vocal in her loyalty and as tough. Despite eight years of First Lady-level scrutiny, My Turn has me feeling "Nancy, I hardly knew you."RONALD M. ENG Washington

Tribute to Seymour Krim

I'VE JUST FINISHED reading Gerald Nicosia's tribute to Seymour Krim (Book World, Oct. 29). Krim would have liked it a lot. Not because it was favorable (although that certainly would have been all right with him) but because Nicosia got it right. That's what Krim did. No one of our time saw America more clearly than he. Somehow he penetrated its pieties and public relations better than anyone else I know. And he got it down in a prose like no one else's. It was like him: prickly and truthful and funny, most of all truthful.

Like Nicosia, I met Krim through his writing. His Views of a Nearsighted Cannoner astonished me. Years later he asked me to be his literary executor. I accepted without really understanding what that entailed, other than keeping carbons of his mammoth non-fiction novel Chaos at my place until he finished. Decades from now if anybody cares what America was truly like in the decades after World War II, I hope they come across Krim. He got it right. RICHARD J. WALTON Warwick, R.I.

Query

FOR A biography of Augusta Savage, the sculptress active in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s and believed to have spent some time in Washington during the 1940s, I would appreciate hearing from anyone who knew her. CLYDE HART P.O. Box 27462 Washington, D.C. 20038

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