July 14, 1991

TURKISH REFLECTIONS A Biography of a Place. By Mary Lee Settle. Introduction by Jan Morris. 233 pp. New York: Prentice Hall Press. $19.95.

Translating the slogan "Support your local police" into bricks and mortar, the leaders of Cali's cocaine cartel reportedly helped pay for the tidy police posts that dot this Colombian city's middle-class neighborhoods in a drive to suppress street crime. In contrast, the capos of the rival Medellin cocaine cartel adopted a different policy toward their city's police force last year: a $4,000 bounty for each officer killed. By the time the offer was withdrawn, about 400 policemen in the Medellin area were dead.

New Yorkers have long known that the privilege of living in their region costs them dearly. New proof of that truism now comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose latest look at family spending patterns shows that residents of the New York region -- the city and 21 contiguous New York, New Jersey and Connecticut counties -- spend a lot more on housing than most Americans. In the period covered by the most recent analysis, 1988 and 1989, residents of the region spent 40 percent more than the national average for housing.

Hoping to capitalize on a growing interest in tennis and improved transportation to Roosevelt Island, developers have broken ground for the Roosevelt Island Racquet Club, with 11 dome-covered courts and a 7,000-square-foot clubhouse. The club is scheduled to open in October on a two-acre site on the New York State-owned island directly under the Queensboro Bridge. "This is the first business on Roosevelt Island that is designed to attract people from Manhattan," said Skip Hartman, one of the developers. Mr. Hartman and a partner, Robert Kelton, have obtained the use of the site in an 11-year concession agreement with the state. The club is next to the Roosevelt Island tram station and 600 feet from the island's new subway station, its first such link with midtown.

FOR centuries, swift and powerful borzois, also called Russian wolfhounds, were hunters, kept by the Russian nobility to pursue and kill wolves. When the Russians turned against the ruling elite, they turned against the dogs as well, slaughtering the borzois, symbols of the class that kept them. A few borzois, smuggled across the borders to Germany, survived, but World War II spelled their end. Had early champions not been brought to the United States shortly before World War I, the best of the pure and ancient breed might have perished altogether in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Recently, a breeder of borzois in the Soviet Union, Nadya Novikova, came to the Majenkir Borzoi Kennels in Swartswood to see the Russian wolfhound preserved as it was before the revolution, and with hopes of eventually taking an American pup to Leningrad.