FROM BEGINNING TO END

More Wisdom Lite from the Seattle sage (All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, 1988, etc.). Fulghum's ``informal, backstage view of life'' wears increasingly thin in this volume, which under the guise of redefining rituals in less rigid terms treats readers to a seemingly endless description of what his friend Alice does after she wakes up in the morning (this, the author informs us, is a ritual of ``Beginning'') and a collection of equally mundane accounts of ``first times'' ranging from a woman getting her period to a 23-year-old voting. In his effort to avoid any tradition that might offend or exclude anyone, Fulghum comes up with ``rituals'' so formless and tentative they hardly deserve the name. ``It's a good thing I didn't set out to write the definitive book on rituals and rites of passage,'' he comments towards the end. That's for sure. (First serial to Good Housekeeping, Modern Maturity, and Penthouse; Literary Guild main selection; author tour)