Book of the month. Sometimes all a reader can do is wince. How else to respond to the following facts about Bethlehem Steel Corp., whose decline is expertly recounted by John Strohmeyer in Crisis in Bethlehem: Big Steel's Struggle to Survive (Adler & Adler Publishers Inc., 1986):

* In the palmy days only a couple of decades ago, Bethlehem provided top execs with county-club memberships, use of company planes and chauffeurs, guard and landscaping services for their homes, and bonuses that put them among the best-paid businessmen in the country. The company's board at that time was entirely composed of insiders; they ate lunch together in a special dining room. Each of the company's six vice-presidents had a private dining room as well.

* Bethlehem tried continuous casting -- the technological innovation that helped boost Japan's steel industry to worldwide leadership -- as long ago as the 1960s. Bethlehem's pilot plant worked but was abandoned (at a cost of some $10 million) because it didn't seem adaptable to high-volume output. The Japanese soon learned how to use continuous casters for high volume. Eventually, Bethlehem began using continuous casters, but not before the company has sunk a reported $35 million into an office tower for its corporate headquarters. Now half empty, the building is up for sale.

* The United Steel Workers, over the years, had wrung from Bethlehem and its competitors not only generous wages and benefits but the ultimate catch-22 of work rules: if something was done a certain way in the past, the company couldn't change it. Though the union finally gave concessions on wages, it never compromised on that clause. "With the industry in peril," writes Strohmeyer, "an electrician, a motor repairman, and usually a laborer still had to be called in on a simple motor repair job, even if only a fan belt adjustment was needed."

In 1985 the American steel industry lost a total of $7.25 billion. Read Strohmeyer, and all you'll wonder is why it wasn't more.