Recent Books

Non-Fiction

TOCQUEVILLE AND BEAUMONT IN AMERICA--George Wilson Pierson--Oxford ($7.50). In 1835, during Jackson's second administration, Alexis de Tocqueville, an aristocratic radical, published his Of Democracy in America, won instant success in the U. S., France and England. At the age of 25, with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville visited the U. S. He traveled from Green Bay, Wis. to New Orleans, taking notes, talking to bankers, doctors, governors, plain citizens, spent nine months gathering material for a book which required four years to write. In this 852-page study, Author Pierson has carefully retraced the journey, pictured social conditions of the time, shown the source of Tocqueville's opinions, combined them with biographies of both men. Although Author Pierson accuses Tocqueville of missing the significance of the abolition movement and underestimating the power of a plutocracy, his book makes Tocqueville's observations seem extraordinary, Tocqueville's warnings to democracy timely.

MY DOUBLE LIFE--Mary Sullivan-- Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50).

Mary Sullivan became a policewoman in 1911, when she was 27, became New York City's Director of Policewomen in 1925. She has guarded women prisoners from the Tenderloin, kept arrested women from committing suicide, taken care of abandoned babies, investigated dance halls, abortionists, matrimonial agencies, posed as a brothel keeper to get evidence against white slavers. She finds detective stories exasperating, thinks girls who answer matrimonial advertisements are taking a chance of getting murdered, writes sensibly, bluntly, complacently about feminine police work.

Fiction

POOLROOM--William Jourdan Rapp-- Fur man ($2).

Novel based on the wire service providing race-track information to poolroom bookmakers, with much whipped-up and unconvincing material on the size of the racket, and much melodrama on the attempts of racketeers to get control of it. The best section, telling how dumb Joe Dugan of Kansas City unwittingly beat up a powerful gangster, who thereafter thought the worst mob yet had come to town, is so funny that the rest of the book seems flatter by contrast.

REQUIEM FOR IDOLS--Norah Lofts-- Knopf ($2).

Inconsequential performance below the level of Norah Lofts's best work; the story of an English girl who makes a fortune writing popular songs, buys the old family house, gets her sisters home for a sentimental reunion, finds them all drifting their own ways as distant as ever.

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