Recent Books

Non'Fiction

THE LIFE OF RICHARD WAGNER, Vol. II: 1848-1860--Ernest Newman--Knopf ($5). Masterly account of the composer's underestimated role in the Revolution of 1849, his chronic professional and domestic wrangling over musical problems, love affairs, debts, odd cures for complicated illnesses. Astute Critic Newman finds more than hearsay behind the story that Wagner's real father was a Jewish actor named Geyer, his mother the illegitimate child of Prince Constantin of Weimar.

HERE'S TO CRIME--Courtney Ryley Cooper--Little, Brown ($2.75). Hairraising bill-of-particulars on U. S. crime, which Author Cooper calls biggest, best-paying U. S. industry, comparatively safe for the 3,500,000 engaged in it but a menace to the three out of four victims who are not.

Verse ON THIS ISLAND--W. H. Auden--Random House ($1.50). Latest collection (31 poems) of England's most-touted younger poet. Lay readers may note echoes of A. E. Housman, Robert Burns, Laura Riding.

THE GOLDEN FLEECE OF CALIFORNIA--Edgar Lee Masters-Farrar & Rinehart ($2). Short, stout narrative poem in which short, stout Poet Masters (Spoon River Anthology) compares the adventures of some Forty-niners to the quest of the Argonauts.

THE COLLECTED POEMS & PLAYS OF RABINDRANATH TAGORE--Macmillan ($3). Eight moralistic, literary plays, many a psalm and meditative rhapsody, some of which will be recognized as poetry by sympathetic Western readers; by India's aged (75) Hindu Nobel Prizeman (1913).

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