NONFICTION - Jan. 29, 1995

THE NPR INTERVIEWS, 1994 edited by Robert Siegel (Houghton Mifflin: $24.95; 376 pp.). Richard Avedon, age 9: “So I took a negative of Louise and pasted it onto my shoulder and went out to the beach. The next morning I peeled it off and there was my sister on my shoulder. She later died in a mental institution.” Jimmy Santiago Baca, a poet who was introduced to literature in prison and couldn’t help talking back to those he read: “The people there next to me in the cell would say, ‘Who’s in there with you?’ And I would say, ‘Everybody is in here with me.’ ” Benjamin Hooks, then executive director of the NAACP, on guarding Italian POWs in Georgia while he was a member of an all-black military unit during World War II: “The prisoners went to the restaurant to eat and we couldn’t guard them inside the restaurant. We had to stand outside. Imagine the incongruity and the bitterness that could well up in you.” Simon Perry, an English cheese-lover, on buying a 200-year-old piece of Tibetan cheese, called “The Eye of the Tiger,” for about $1,500: “It’s about a cubic brown inch, with a bit of string through the middle of it. . . . It’s a cheese with a history.” Klint Freemantle, who survived, uninjured, the mis-deployment of his main and backup parachutes after jumping out of an airplane at 3,500 feet: “I just turned onto my back and started undoing my harness. I thought, Well, if I’m going to live through this, there’s no way I’m going to drown in a duck pond when I hit the bottom.” Are these the best interviews to be found in “The NPR Interviews, 1994” (which actually collects material aired in 1993)? No: They are merely typical, which should tell you that this is a literate, funny, wide-ranging, free-wheeling, occasionally brilliant and generally wonderful book. Buy a copy, or two, please, so “The NPR Interviews” will indeed become an annual series.