WE’RE NUMBER ONE! Where America Stands--and Falls--in...

WE’RE NUMBER ONE! Where America Stands--and Falls--in the New World Order by Andrew L. Shapiro (Vintage: $10). Shapiro’s collection of statistical rankings draws a revealing and often disturbing portrait of the United States in the early ‘90s. Among the industrialized nations, America ranks No. 1 in total health spending (more than $700 billion annually) but No. 13 in public-health spending; only Japan and Switzerland spend less. Perhaps because U.S. teen-agers scored the lowest of the students in 13 countries tested on basic biology, the country has the highest percentage of teen-age pregnancies and the highest rate of abortions--29% of all pregnancies end in abortions, as opposed to 14.7% in Canada and 8.7% in Belgium. America also ranks first in such dubious areas as executive salaries, forest depletion, beef consumption and coronary-bypass surgery. The picture that emerges from these pages is not a pretty one, but paint-by-numbers seldom are.