Like his predecessor, Frederick Jackson Turner, historian Ray Allen Billington devoted his distinguished career to an intellectual exploration of the American frontier and was the author or editor of about 25 books on this subject. The late Mr. Billington's final work was Land of Savagery, Land of Promise; The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century. It was, Billington found, a paradoxical image in which Europeans saw America both as a land of savagery, where personal justice ruled and life was brief, and yet as a land of promise, where Europe's downtrodden might find prosperity and freedom. Oklahoma has now published a paper edition of Billington's book [$10.95]. The American West is also the subject of two recent reprints in Nebraska's Bison Book series. The books are, respectively, David Lavender's Westward Vision: The Story of the Oregon Trail [$24.95 cloth, $9.95 paper] and Jay Monaghan's Civil War on the Western Border, 1854—1865 [$26.95 cloth, $9.95 paper]. With the boys of summer dashing across the nation's television screens, Atheneum has brought out two paperbacks looking back at earlier eras of America's favorite pastime. One volume is Harvey Frommer's New York City Baseball: The Last Golden Age, 1947—1957 [$8.95]. The second work is Donn Rogosin's Invisible Men: Life in Baseball's Negro Leagues [$7.95]. Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History, in which the great American theologian draws an ironic contrast between the "innocent" nation our forefathers hoped to build and the superpower America became, was first published in 1952 and has since become a modern classic. A new paper edition of this work has just been published by Scribner's [$6.95], Another new Scribner's paperback is Nick Tosches' Country: Living Legends and Dying Metaphors in America's Biggest Music, which the Houston Post called "an absolute steamroller of a book" [$9.95]. Vintage has published a revised edition of James Q. Wilson's Thinking about Crime, a work Fortune deemed "a powerful indictment of the American criminal-justice system" [$7.95]. Touchstone Books is offering a paper edition of Gerard O'Neill's The Technology Edge: Opportunities for America in World Competition [$9.95].