Disorderly Conduct

When he stops trying to sound like Sam Spade or Jack Kerouac and sticks to analysis, Jackson, director of the Center for Studies in American Culture at the State University of New York, illuminates the contradictions of America in vignettes from across the landscape. Written over a span of 25 years, they depict such subjects as red-baiting in a Kentucky coal town, life in a Texas prison, antiwar demonstrators at the Pentagon in 1967 and the witch-hunt against literary critic Leslie Fiedler. But when Jackson chronicles his own adventures, he goes off the mark with displays of the overdramatic: ``The stripper was a pretty blonde with a sad piquant mouth that didn't go very well with the rest of her face which wasn't very sad or very much of anything.'' Civil rights attorney Kunstler's foreword is slight. (Aug.)