Bernard DeVoto's The Course of Empire, originally published in 1952, was lauded by historian Henry Steele Commager at the time of its publication as "the best book that has been written about the West since Webb's Great Plains." A new paperback edition of this book has just been published by Nebraska [$12.95]. Also available as a Nebraska paperback is George R. Stewart's The California Trail, a description of the early wagon trains along the hazardous route to California in the 1840's [$8.95]. A third Nebraska reprint is Absaraka: Home of the Crows, the experiences of an Army officer's wife on the plains in the 1860's, the wife being Margaret Irvin Carrington [$21.50 cloth, $6.95 paper]. Another work involving the opening of the wilderness, in this case the opening of the Appalachian frontier, is Harriette Simpson Arnow's Seedtime on the Cumberland, a new edition of which is now available from Kentucky, with a foreword by Wilma Dykeman [$28.00 cloth, $13.00 paper]. With an election year upon us, it is scarcely surprising that there should be a new edition of Stephen J. Wayne's The Road to the White House: The Politics of Presidential Elections, a basic guide to the strategy and tactics of winning the presidency [St. Martin's, $13.95 cloth]. And with greater interest than ever before in the role of the woman candidate, Beacon Press has issued a reprint of Ruth B. Mandel's In the Running: The New Woman Candidate, which the Washington Post described as "a fine testimony to a growth industry: women as political partners" [$9.95 paper]. A third book dealing with contemporary politics is Paul C. Light's The President's Agenda: Domestic Policy Choice from Kennedy to Carter (with notes on Ronald Reagan), a Johns Hopkins reprint [$20.00 cloth, $8.95 paperback]. Two new Vintage Books are Kevin P. Phillips' Post-Conservative America: People, Politics, and Ideology in a Time of Crisis [$6. 95] and Albert Murray's The Omni-Americans: Black Experience and American Culture [$6.95]. Yale has published a paperback edition of John R. Stilgoe's Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845, a work which received the 1982 Francis Parkman Prize for literary distinction in the writing of history [$12.95]. Touchstone has reprinted Irving Howe's national best seller, World of Our Fathers, an account of "the journey of the East European Jews to America and the life they found and made" [$12.95]. Other Touchstone reprints include William L. O'Neill's A Better World, The Great Schism: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals [$9.95], Michael Novak's The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism [$9.95], Clarence Darrow's Attorney for the Damned, a selection of excerpts from the great defense lawyer's famous cases, edited by Arthur Weinberg [$9.95], and William Broad and Nicholas Wade's Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science, which Science magazine called "utterly fascinating reading" [$6.95]. Touchstone has also reprinted Norman Podhoretz' controversial account of Why We Were in Vietnam [$5.95].