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Living with their Ojibwe family on the Great Plains of Dakota Territory in 1866, twin brothers Makoons and Chickadee must learn to become buffalo hunters, but Makoons has a vision that foretells great challenges that his family may not be able to overcome.

With a shot of adrenaline and an I.V., she was home in two hours. But there will be no such solution for the woman and child in the news story. She will have to pound her boy's back and chest night and day hoping to dislodge mucous. She will have to watch him claw the air for breath. She will have to hold him, sleepless, night after night, and wait for his body to either succumb to or overcome its own allergic response. I am an enrolled Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and I am also German-American. Perhaps what is happening in Bosnia has a special resonance for me. I do feel, simply, that there is a darkness in the soul of every German, second generation, third, however removed. There is a shadow, a self-questioner who asks: What would I have done, given the set of circumstances, the dangers, the persuasions, the choices in the years 1939-45? Would I, for instance, have done the equivalent of denouncing Slobodan Milosevic as a tyrant of bitter and tearless cruelty if it meant my life? Or of calling, as I have done this week, the White House line repeatedly and saying, \"Please ask President Clinton to show leadership on this issue. Please ask him to lift the arms embargo, gather support, prosecute these war criminals. Please ask him to consider a plan of strategic bombing to break the siege of Sarajevo.\" Inwardly I add, \"Do this so that the woman on the news program can obtain a shot of adrenaline for her son.\"

The world as we know it is ending. Evolution has reversed itself, affecting every living creature on earth. Science cannot stop the world from running backwards, as woman after woman gives birth to infants that appear to be primitive species of humans. Twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, adopted daughter of a pair of big-hearted, open-minded Minneapolis liberals, is as disturbed and uncertain as the rest of America around her. But for Cedar, this change is profound and deeply personal. She is four months pregnant. Though she wants to tell the adoptive parents who raised her from infancy, Cedar first feels compelled to find her birth mother, Mary Potts, an Ojibwe living on the reservation, to understand both her and her baby's origins. As Cedar goes back to her own biological beginnings, society around her begins to disintegrate, fueled by a swelling panic about the end of humanity. There are rumors of martial law, of Congress confining pregnant women. Of a registry, and rewards for those who turn these wanted women in. Flickering through the chaos are signs of increasing repression: a shaken Cedar witnesses a family wrenched apart when police violently drag a mother from her husband and child in a parking lot. The streets of her neighborhood have been renamed with Bible verses. A stranger answers the phone when she calls her adoptive parents, who have vanished without a trace. It will take all Cedar has to avoid the prying eyes of potential informants and keep her baby safe.

Fifty years ago a group of 500 men in Hamburg were recruited by the German government to be reserve military policemen. For the most part, they were not members of the Nazi party or the S.S. but working class citizens who, \"after leaving Volksschule (terminal secondary school) at age fourteen or fifteen,\" had been employed in peacetime at regular jobs. \"Ordinary Men,\" Christopher Browning's documentary study of the wartime and postwar records of Police Battalion 101, is a clear and dispassionate record of the process of dehumanization, a chronicle of progressive emotional emptiness. No fictionalizer of the macabre, no Stephen King or Dean R. Koontz or Thomas Harris can, in his wildest imagination, approach the cold evil that possessed this company of average men transformed into killing machines. Ever efficient, occasionally righteous and pious, sometimes with relish, though rarely, according to their recollections, with rage or hatred, 90 percent of them \"followed orders\"-even when offered the option to decline-and became butchers of other human beings. The 101 was responsible for a relatively minor operation, compared to the assembly-line volume of the large concentration camps. Of the 6,000,000 Jews killed by the Nazis and those who collaborated with them as part of the \"Final Solution,\" the Reserve Police Battalion was physically responsible for the deaths of .006 percent. They merely shot the equivalent of a single small city-equal to the population of a Danville, Ill., a Burlington, Vt. or a Vancouver, Wash. However, this fraction, coupled with the particularity and brutality of the deaths documented, makes \"Ordinary Men\" a staggering book, one that manages without polemic to communicate an intimation of the unthinkable.

What then of those authors nonindigenous to this land? In renaming and historicizing our landscapes, towns and neighborhoods, writers from Hawthorne to [Willa Cather] to Faulkner have attempted to weld themselves and their readers closer to the New World. As Alfred Kazin notes in ''On Native Grounds,'' ''the greatest single fact about our American writing'' is ''our writers' absorption in every last detail of this American world, together with their deep and subtle alienation from it.'' Perhaps this alienation is the result of one difficult fact about Western culture - its mutability. Unlike the Tewa and other Native American groups who inhabited a place until it became deeply and particularly known in each detail, Western culture is based on progressive movement. Nothing, not even the land, can be counted on to stay the same. And for the writers I've mentioned, and others, it is therefore as if, in the very act of naming and describing what they love, they lose it. I don't know whether this is true. I hope that it is not, and that humanity springs from us and not only from our surroundings. I hope that even in the unimaginable absence of all familiar place, something of our better human qualities would survive. B UT the danger that they wouldn't, we wouldn't, that nothing else would either, is real and present. Leonard Lutwack urges, in his book ''The Role of Place in Literature,'' that this very fear should inform the work of contemporary writers and act as a tool to further the preservation of the earth. ''An increased sensitivity to place seems to be required,'' he says, ''a sensitivity inspired by aesthetic as well as ecological values, imaginative as well as functional needs. . . . Literature must now be seen in terms of the contemporary concern for survival.'' ''Looking back,'' she says in her reminiscence, ''Out of Africa,'' ''you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air. The sky was rarely more than pale blue or violet, with a profusion of mighty, weightless, everchanging clouds towering up and sailing on it, but it has a blue vigour in it, and at a short distance it painted the ranges of hills and woods a fresh deep blue. In the middle of the day the air was alive over the land, like a flame burning; it scintillated, waved and shone like running water, mirrored and doubled all objects. . . . Up in this high air you breathed easily, drawing in a vital assurance and lightness of heart. In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.'' Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with. One must experience the local blights, hear the proverbs, endure the radio commercials. Through the close study of a place, its people and character, its crops, products, paranoias, dialects and failures, we come closer to our own reality. It is difficult to impose a story and a plot on a place. But truly knowing a place provides the link between details and meaning. Location, whether it is to abandon it or draw it sharply, is where we start. I N our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world. Once we emerge we have no natural limit, no assurance, no grandmotherly guidance like the Tewa, for technology allows us to reach even beyond the layers of air that blanket earth. We can escape gravity itself, and every semblance of geography, by moving into sheer space, and yet we cannot abandon our need for reference, identity or our pull to landscapes that mirror our most intense feelings.

Imagine reading a whole novel and never quite knowing what it's \"about.\" And not minding a bit, because the writing is so rich, so spellbinding in its intricate weave. Experiencing \"Sarah Canary\" is the literary equivalent of gazing at a twirling crystal: your eyes register the brilliance of the spectrum but the impact is ultimately subliminal. No, you're not getting sleepy. Rather you're accelerating to a higher plane where the issues of plot and logic and character seem embarrassing to raise because they betray your inability to dream. Wandering through this enchanted landscape are a disparate band of men and women: Chin, a Chinese laborer fearful of the racism surrounding him but at the same time an astute observer of all he encounters; B.J. an escapee from a mental institution, sweet and innocent; Adelaide Dixon, a free-thinker who travels the lecture circuit; and Sarah Canary herself, part feral creature, part precipitating enigma, voiceless and mesmerizing. The puzzle of her identity, of her very species, inhabits the speculation of every character. Sarah Canary next turns up as a side-show attraction, \"The Alaskan Wild Woman,\" and is this time spirited away by Adelaide Dixon, herself a fugitive and a threat in this mostly male frontier because she publicly advocates female sexuality. Adelaide, Chin and B.J., with Sarah in tow, flee on foot and by boat, eventually arriving in San Francisco. They meet a tiger, Chin returns to China and Sarah disappears, only to haunt and dominate the memory of each person who has encountered her.

\"Set on and around a North Dakota reservation, Love Medicine, the first novel by ... Louise Erdrich, is the epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines ... Each chapter draws on a range of voices to limn its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life\"--Amazon.com.

Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America. By Jonathan Raban. HarperCollins, 372 pages, $25 Jonathan Raban (\"Old Glory,\" \"For Love and Money\") a writer of style, originality and acute perception, is on the trail of the diversity of America in \"Hunting Mr. Heartbreak.\" After a stormy ocean-crossing from England, he nests temporarily in Manhattan, Guntersville (Alabama), Seattle and Key West, remaining in each spot long enough to get a feel for the land, the inhabitants, the rhythms of life. Gingerly, he samples the alternative existence he might enjoy, complete with comfortable local pseudonym (\"Rayburn\" in Dixie, \"Rainbird\" in the often overcast Northwest). \"Identity in Europe wasn't a matter of individual fancy,\" Raban notes. \"Even if you had money for the materials, you couldn't dress as an aristocrat simply because you liked the look of the local nobleman's style. . . . Every European was the product of a complicated equation involving the factors of lineage, proprty, education, speech and religion. . . . Once your personal formula had been worked out by the ruling mathematicians, the result was precise and not open to negotiation. A over B times X over Y divided by Z equaled a calico shirt, a leather jerkin and a pair of clogs.