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AUTOBIOGRAPHIES are notoriously fickle. Diana Ross' memoirs, Secrets of a Sparrow (Headline $205), contains few secrets. The woman who has been at the forefront of popular music since Where Did Our Love Go, her first hit single with the Supremes, was released in 1963, meanders around on a sentimental journey, unwilling to chase shadows. ''I have always had a gift of seeing the good bits. I had lots of fun. It was wonderful,'' she writes.

David J. Garrow's biography of the assassinated civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Bearing The Cross (Vintage $118) presents a great leader in all his valour and all his frailty. Mr Garrow, a professor of political science in New York has written two other books about King. He won the Pulitzer Prize for this mammoth work (800 pages in paperback).

Victoria Glendinning won the Whitbread Biography of the Year Award in 1992 for Trollope (Pimlico $85), now out in paperback. The Sunday Times of London called it the finest of the many lives of Anthony Trollope and made it one of its books of the year.

Less brilliant is The Warburgs (Chatto & Windus $295), Ron Chernow's heavyweight biographical saga of the pre-eminent Jewish banking dynasty in Germany earlier this century.

Mr Chernow has all the material at his disposal for an entertaining and enlightening work - drama, money, family feuds - but fails to present it with panache.

The Fate of the Elephant (Viking $298) by Douglas Chadwick is a report on the state of the world, or at least its natural dimension. It is an extensive account of one of the largest and cleverest creatures to have walked the planet and its clash with Man.

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