Audition
By Barbara Walters
624 pages. Knopf.

Barbara Walters's prodigious gift for intimacy won't surprise readers of Audition (Knopf), her frank, graceful memoir of a quasi-glamorous girlhood (her father was a daredevil nightclub entrepreneur) and groundbreaking career in television. What might startle is her revelation of the relationship that meant the world to her—with her mentally disabled sister, Jackie—and the way it taught her compassion, giving her a kind of X-ray vision into the world's most closely guarded psyches.