DARDEN TAKES THE GLOVES OFF.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Title: ``In Contempt''

Author: Christopher A. Darden, with Jess Walters

Data: Illustrated. 387 pages, ReganBooks/HarperCollins; $26

Our rating: Four Stars

Another book on the O.J. Simpson trial? The prospect of reading a memoir by one of the prosecutors who lost the case might not immediately grab you. Didn't the eight-month trial, minutely annotated and deconstructed by television commentators, exhaust our interest in the whole sordid affair? Hasn't the flood of books - by everyone from Johnnie Cochran's ex-wife to dismissed juror Michael Knox to O.J. Simpson himself - simply underscored the noxious role that celebrity and money played in the case?

Well, Christopher A. Darden's powerful and affecting new book ``In Contempt'' is different. Though Darden gives the reader his own candid impressions of the Simpson case, his book is less a rehashing of the so-called ``trial of the century'' than the story of his own coming of age - as a lawyer and as a black man, caught up in the racial upheavals of Los Angeles during the '80s and '90s. It's the story of Darden and his brother Michael, who grew up in a poor, working-class neighborhood in Richmond, Calif., and the story of their twin journeys: the author's through college and law school to a job with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office; Michael's into heroin addiction and AIDS.

In a trial peopled with glib demagogues and carefully coiffed publicity hounds, Darden stood out as an earnest, conflicted presence - alternately brooding and impassioned, introspective and acerbic. That same voice comes through in ``In Contempt,'' a book written with journalist Jess Walter. There is nothing lawyerly about Darden's language in these pages, no waffling, no slippery circumlocutions. He pointedly recalls watching the famous O.J. Bronco chase and thinking ``I hope he just kills himself'' and ``I could well imagine the horror his two children would feel if they discovered that their father had killed their mother.'' And he describes his first impression of the O.J. jury as a group of 12 angry ``people lined up at the grinder with big axes.''

He blasts the defense team's cynical decision to play the race card, and he assesses the prosecution's unsuccessful handling of the case. While some of his remarks read like a rationalization of his team's mistakes - from their plodding presentation of scientific evidence to his own disastrous decision to have O.J. Simpson try on the infamous glove - he is as tough on himself as he is on his colleagues.

Darden's portraits of the main players in the trial are colorful and blunt. He complains that Judge Lance Ito allowed the trial to slide out of control like ``a runaway bus,'' and that the judge seemed ``starstruck'' with both the likes of lead defense attorney Johnnie Cochran and with his own high-profile role in the case. Darden affectionately describes his prosecution partner, Marcia Clark, as a ``strange blend of Type A personality and retro-hippie,'' a woman who looked ``like a tough little package someone had left on the chair.'' He portrays defense lawyer Robert Shapiro as a man who ``smiled without really smiling, constantly straddling the border where friendly ended and slick began.'' And he depicts defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey as ``a foul-mouthed, arrogant SOB,'' an ``attack dog'' whom the prosecution referred to as ``Flea.''

Darden's harshest words, however, are reserved for Cochran, whom he describes with a quote from Proverbs: ``A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.'' Of Cochran's efforts to transform ``a murder trial into a backhanded hearing about centuries of oppression and racism,'' he writes: ``The revolution is over when the revolutionaries have nothing better to do than decry the treatment of a millionaire who was given every deference by the system. The movement will be a farce when young blacks are forced to storm the streets, yelling `Remember Brentwood!' ''

Cochran's manipulation of the race issue had personal consequences for Darden as well. The defense lawyer's suggestion that Darden was a token black recruited by the prosecution team for the color of his skin led to accusations, on the street, that he was ``an Uncle Tom, a sellout, a house Negro.'' Darden says he received death threats, was spit upon, and his family, too, was harassed. Worst of all, he says, were the stories about his brother Michael, depicting him as a pathetic drug addict unable to help himself.

When they were children, Michael Darden was his younger brother's role model, the big brother who taught him what music to listen to, what clothes to wear. He was also the one who was always getting into trouble. ``I have always felt guilty about Michael because he always got the worst of everything,'' Darden writes. ``Michael was the gentle one and was never violent, but he got in more trouble than anyone I ever saw. It was like he was walking through this minefield, just ahead of me, blowing up all the mines and showing me where not to step. Some part of me wonders if I was able to escape that life only because he lived it.''

By the time he was in the 11th grade, Michael was an addict. Darden, meanwhile, had decided to find a way out of their neighborhood, a place where people lived ``in a two-mile radius of the house they were born in'' and died ``over an ounce of dope or a flirtatious glance.'' He graduated from college in three years, slogged through law school, and thought he had found his vocation. By the age of 25, he had a job in the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, prosecuting gang members and later, police officers accused of brutality.

There, disillusion began to tarnish Darden's shiny idealism. Learning that a witness who was to testify against a gang member had been shot in the face; being pressured by his bosses to reduce felony charges against officers who had trashed a housing project; realizing he couldn't prosecute the policemen who had shot a mentally unbalanced woman in the back - such events, says Darden, made him question the efficacy and justice of the system.

By 1994, he had begun thinking of quitting the DA's office and moving back home, where Michael was dying of AIDS. It was then, he says, that he was tapped to work on the O.J. Simpson case - a case he would work on 16 hours a day for the following year.

Michael Darden died less than two months after the end of the trial. Christopher is currently teaching at the Southwestern University School of Law. ``There, I am encouraged to see young, idealistic people who look at the law as a calling,'' he writes. ``For myself, I doubt I will ever practice law again.''

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Photo: O.J. Simpson prosecutor Christopher Darden tells whe re he's been and where he's going in his new book, ``In Contempt.''