Shelf life.

IT's often by looking at a microcosm that we can best take the measure of a historical period. The ugly brutality of the 20th century is crystallized in miniature in the sober and definitive Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine Under Nazi Rule (Harvard, 463 pp., $29.95) by Karel C. Berkhoff. When Kiev fell to the Nazis in September 1941, some in the population were sullen and watchful, but others were "upbeat." One observer who had been victimized by the Soviet regime was relieved: "The devil's regime was gone and I had become a human being. I thought to myself, what a fatal tragedy for a citizen to wish the defeat in war of his own state." That fatal tragedy was, of course, far from over, and would indeed become more cruel over the years of Nazi atrocities and Stalinist restoration. Berkhoff's account shows a people pushed to the limits of endurance by systematic dehumanization, and, in its painstaking, scholarly way, shows that tyranny victimizes the soul as well as the body by creating a climate of mistrust. The culture of hatred and denunciation was the fruit of Stalin's soulcraft; the Nazi forces then liberated traditional forms of ethnic hatred and anti-Semitism from their social restraints. Berkhoff stresses that social "atomization" under Nazi rule "was not total," but admits that "the balance still tilted toward social disunity" and brutalization. To be a beast, just as to be a saint, man needs encouragement; this book paints a picture of the triumph, in one time and place, of the dark angels.

* In The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde (Ignatius, 412 pp., $19.95), literary biographer Joseph Pearce offers a fresh perspective on the man of letters and gay icon: "'We are all in the gutter,' says Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere's Fan, 'but some of us are looking at the stars.' To look for Wilde in the gutter, whether to wallow with him in the mire or to point the finger of self-righteous scorn, is to miss the point. Those wishing a deeper understanding of this most enigmatic of men should not look at him in the gutter but with him at the stars."

* In 1979, historian Jean-Baptiste Duroselle published France and the Nazi Threat: The Collapse of French Diplomacy 1932-1939. This fascinating work, now available in an English translation (Enigma, 508 pp., $26) by Catherine E. Dop and Robert L. Miller, recounts in detail the creation of a truly catastrophic foreign policy.

* Something Will Come Along: Witty Memoirs of a Foreign Service Officer with Nine Children (Ivy House, 200 pp., $24.95) is the autobiography of diplomat Malcolm Lawrence, an engaging book about an American family's life both abroad and at home.