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NORTH OF THE DANUBE--Erskine Caldwell & Margaret Bourke-White--Viking ($3).

A record of six months' travel in Czecho-Slovakia before Munich, North of the Danube contains eight sensitive, compact sketches by Erskine Caldwell, 64 photographs which include some of the best Margaret Bourke-White has done. Slighter than their classic word & picture study of the South, You Have Seen Their Faces, it unfortunately appears when Czecho-Slovakia is a last year's bird's nest. But this is a travel book with an interest which survives politics; even as its subject, the Czecho-Slovakian peasantry, will survive Hitler. Best sketch: A scene in the Carpathian Mountains where, protected by a chauffeur with club and revolver, the authors distributed black bread to starving peasants, some of whom had not tasted bread in seven years. Best photograph: A Slovakian goosegirl, ganders and geese against a background of rolling, lawnlike fields, mountains, summer clouds.

Apart from its subject matter, North of the Danube offers the two collaborators'* second example of a word & picture book which shatters the whole complacent technique of travel books.

*They were married last February 27 (TIME, March 6).

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