S. C. Gwynne

Taken together, two new books tell the century-long story of the revolutionary ideals that transformed the United States, and the counterrevolutionaries who fought them.

“Cavalrymen remember such moments: dust swirling behind the pack mules, regimental bugles shattering the air, horses snorting and riders’ tack creaking through the ranks, their old company song rising on the wind.”

S C Gwynne Op-Ed article recalls Purple Sneakers, harmless crazy man who hung around Princeton campus in 1970, and turned out to be John Forbes Nash Jr, brilliant mathematician, Nobel laureate and schizophrenic whose story is told in movie A Beautiful Mind; says best part of Sylvia Nasar's biography is Nash's miraculous recovery after years of delusional illness and hospitalization (M)

Now that the film version of "A Beautiful Mind" is in the theaters, millions more people will learn something about the amazing story of John Forbes Nash Jr.

BELLY UP The Collapse of the Penn Square Bank. By Phillip L. Zweig. Illustrated. 500 pp. New York: Crown Publishers. $17.95. PHILLIP L. ZWEIG was a reporter for the conservative trade paper The American Banker when he broke what was to become the most astounding banking story since the 1930's. In a series of articles written during the summer of 1982, Mr. Zweig blew the whistle on a tiny shopping-center bank in Oklahoma City called Penn Square Bank, which had moved more than $2 billion of the shakiest loans ever foisted on the American banking system. The bank failed in July 1982, left thousands of depositors with millions of dollars in uninsured deposits and nearly destroyed outright two of the country's largest banks - the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company and the Seattle First National Bank.