Recent & Readable

AN AMERICAN EXODUS -- Dorothea Lange & Paul Schuster Taylor--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2.75). Subtitled A Record of Human Erosion, this volume tells in nonfiction, mainly in photographs, the grim story most famously told in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Some of the photographs are exceedingly good; some are merely "magnificent" -- over-filtered, overdramatized. Even so, the whole selection considerably excels that in the Caldwell-Bourke-White collaboration, You Have Seen Their Faces, or in Archibald MacLeish's poem with photographs, Land of the Free. The text has dignity and is compactly informative. Many of the captions are direct quotations--their strong immediacy undermined by the tear-jerking inherent in dialect re-used by sophisticates.

THE SCRAPBOOK OF KATHERINE MANSFIELD--Edited by J. Middleton Murry--Knopf ($2.50). Of negligible appeal to readers-in-general, these last scraps from Katherine Mansfield's notebooks are of automatic importance to her cult of admirers, of genuine literary interest as well. A writer's scraps often reveal him better than his letters or his journals; and Mansfield is here revealed in her grievous living, in her streaks of curious repellence, and in her unique, luminous perceptions. Since her perceptions often had the instantaneousness of magnesium-powder flashes, some of her brief entries contain some of her best work.

THE CRADLE BUILDER--Walter Schoenstedt--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50). The man in this young German emigre's novel is a young German emigre, his wife, a Vermont girl, the-setting. Manhattan's Yorkville (German district) and an upstate farm. Central theme is the couple's slow, half-reluctant maturing through marriage and child-begetting. Complications are local Bund-boys, the young man's abortive infidelities, his gradual adjustment to a new country. Stringent in style, sensitive in its perceptions it is the work of a somewhat oldfashioned, gently talented German romantic poet, nicely translated.

THE DARK STAR--March Cost--Knopf ($2.50). March Cost manipulates her flashbacks gracefully to trace the 18-year relationship between Actor Eden Loring and Actress Fanny Wreath; it takes just a week's neatly woven action and reminiscence to bring their lives to a romantic head. Novels about theatre people, good or bad, have one thing in common: they delight those who are fascinated by the theatre; they bore those who are not. The Dark Star conducts itself more adroitly and with less "glamor" flapdoodle than most, yet not well enough to transcend the general rule.

ONE WAY TICKET--Eugene O'Brien--Doubleday, Doran ($2). Late of the U.S. Navy (machinist's mate), hard-muscled Author O'Brien wrote as honestly about sailors in his first novel (He Swung and He Missed) as Steinbeck does about farm hands. This time he adds considerable data not advertised on the recruiting posters--of life below deck, in port, under good captains and bad--but goes on a spree with his plot in which curly-headed Kelly falls for a sweet girl, his pal Mac is court-martialed for theft, another pal is taken off to the asylum, Kelly's wife goes to prison for killing another of the fraternity.

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