Wednesday's Children

Celebrities who reveal that their parents abused them shouldn't be criticized, states TV actress Somers, who chronicled her own unhappy childhood in Keeping Secrets . If public figures had been more open in the past, she writes, ``Maybe I wouldn't have grown up thinking I was the only girl in America with a father like mine.'' Here she assembles a star-studded list of memoirs that will satisfy the nosy and tug at the heart strings too. Gary Crosby, Patti (Reagan) Davis, Desi Arnaz Jr., Angie Dickinson, B. J. Thomas, Cindy Williams and other victims of physical, emotional or sexual abuse relate their ordeals and eloquently reach out to readers suffering the same problems. Gary Crosby, whose father Bing savagely beat (and made jokes about) his backside, conveys the humor and determination needed to survive. Writing of her father, the former president, Patti Davis confesses, ``I never got to know the man any better than a waiter would.'' Though the stories are poignant, reading them is, as Somers notes in her commentary, uplifting. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates. ( Sept. )