OVEMBER

By RON BERTHEL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Random House is giving the Democrats and the Republicans equal time -- if not quite equal pages -- in two new books.
At 600 pages, Lewis L. Gould's "Grand Old Party: A History of the Republicans" is about 200 pages shorter than Jules Witcover's "Party of the People: A History of the Democrats" -- perhaps understandably so since the GOP's history is some 50 years shorter.
In his book, Gould, an American history professor and author of several political books, traces the GOP from its emergence as an anti-slavery coalition in the 1850s, and explores the issues and influences that have made it the party of social and political conservatism that it is today.
Witcover, political columnist for the Baltimore Sun, combines historical events and personal observations in his history of the Democratic Party, the world's oldest continuous political organization, which is rooted in the principles of Thomas Jefferson -- and was first called, oddly enough, the Republican Party!
Many other new hardcovers appear on the book buyers' ballot, including novels by Danielle Steel and Larry McMurtry; and nonfiction about Princess Diana, Caroline Kennedy and wartime intelligence.
In "Safe Harbour" (Delacorte), Steel's 59th book, a young widow and her 11-year-old daughter who are still grieving from their loss begin to heal when they are befriended by an artist they meet on a California beach.
Sagas
Three sagas continue in novels by McMurtry, Anne Rice and Stephen King:
U"By Sorrow's River" (Simon & amp; Schuster), the third of McMurtry's "The Berrybender Narratives," has the British Berrybender family beset by a deadly drought, a smallpox breakout, and an Indian bent on revenge against the white man as they make their way across the Great Plains in the Old West.
URice's "Blood Canticle" (Knopf), the latest in "The Vampire Chronicles," finds Lestat, once rotten to the core, looking to change his image as he seeks redemption and the love of Rowan Mayfair, a brilliant neurosurgeon who is also a witch.
UIn King's "The Dark Tower V: Wolves of the Calla" (Grant-Scribner), gunslinger Roland Deschain and his companions, still in quest of the Dark Tower, come upon a town whose families bear twins but are raided every 20 years by wolves that abduct half their young and return them with mental and physical limitations.
Diana, Princess of Wales, is the subject of "A Royal Duty" (Putnam), the news-making book by Paul Burrell, Diana's butler from 1987 until her death in 1997. Burrell cites private conversations, diary entries and letters, including the one in which Diana foresaw by 10 months the auto crash that killed her.
Caroline Kennedy gets the "royal" treatment in Christopher Andersen's biography, "Sweet Caroline: Lost Child of Camelot" (William Morrow). Andersen describes how Kennedy, the last surviving member of the former first family, handled the deaths of her father, mother and brother, and other tragedies that have beset the Kennedys.