Home front.

• Author: Donaldson, Sam

Home Front.

Patti Davis with Maureen Strange Foster. Crown, $15.95. Last November in Geneva, while his father was locked in semi-mortal combat with Mikhail Gorbachev, I made the acquaintance of Ronald Prescott Reagan, age 27, who had been commissioned by Playboy to come along and write a story about the press corps. He is a good guy, intelligent, willing to listen and argue politics without being dogmatic or holier-than-thou, unpretentious despite the fact of who he is, but, most important to this review, a young man who clearly loves and admires his parents.

Now I read his sister's book in which she paints a grim and painful picture of growing up with mom and pop. Oh, sure, she cautions us that Home Front, a novel about a conservative California governor named Canfield who wins the presidency, his society-conscious wife, and their two children, Brian and Beth, is a work of fiction. But really, Patti, your feelings about your parents, Ronald and Nacy Reagan, come through loud and clear. You resent the fact that both of them put dad's career ahead of spending time with you. You find dad's "know-nothing' support for the Vietnam war and conservative causes frustrating. You find mom's silly sense of society and straight-laced decorum false. I'm sure there are a lot of people around who...