Recent & Readable

THE CRAZY HUNTER -- Kay Boyle -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.50). The setting of these three short novels -- with one excur sion to Capri -- is nonbelligerent England. Most readable, least notable, is a horror study in which a piteous, pathic U. S. jazz-player meets a fetid little Cockney girl, blunders into desperate trouble through circumstantial evidence. Another, The Bridegroom's Body, draws sinister parallels between human emotional patterns on an English estate and the serpentine behavior of mating swans. Finest and most ambitious story is the title-piece. The crazy hunter is a defective gelding. Over the issue of his life or destruction, oppositions of a mother, a father, a daughter, come to a head in a conflict of almost mythical cruelty and stature, described with meticulous and searching dread.

EUROPE TO LET -- Storm Jameson --Macmillan ($2.50). Europe to Let consists of four stories of that continent between-the-wars. Told, with bitter anger, by a fictional British writer named Mr. Esk, their essential subject is despair, fear, moral bankruptcy. They sketch the genesis of Naziism, death of Vienna, betrayal of Czecho-Slovakia, premonitions in Hungary.

AN OLD CAPTIVITY -- Nevil Shute --Morrow ($2.50). Nevil Shute is a British aeronautical engineer who now holds an important post in the Air Ministry. His last novel, Ordeal, whisked readably through the harrowing experiences of a middle-class family during a raid on England by a thousand enemy bombers. Less exciting than Ordeal, Author Shute's An Old Captivity turns to a peacetime theme--the story of a British aviator who pilots an Oxford archaeologist and his daughter to Greenland in order to make aerial surveys of old Norse ruins. At his best in describing the flight itself, Author Shute complicates an already tough undertaking when Archaeologist Lockwood's daughter Alix decides to go along.

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN -- Philip Van Doren Stern --Random House ($3.75). Described by Historian Allan Nevins as "much the amplest and best selected body of Lincoln's writings ever brought into convenient form," this book makes a valuable companion to Carl Sandburg's great six-volume biography (TIME, Dec. 4). Neither U. S. readers nor, unfortunately, U. S. public men have ever paid enough attention to the prose of Lincoln's speeches in the '50s, disciplined, direct and clear, with "a logical power as sharp and crushing as a battle ax." Because it contains probably less of anything but honest thought than any other subsequent political writing, Lincoln's prose often has the unsought and surprising force of fine literature.

THIS GENERATION--Edited by George K. Anderson and Eda Lou Walton--Simon and Schuster ($4). Published also as a text book by Scott, Foresman and Co., this is a large, informative and well-printed (double-column) anthology of British and U. S. literature between 1914 and 1939. Varied enough (Sir William Osier to Kenneth Fearing) to indicate the multiplicity of the generation in question, sensible enough to include excerpts from Vincent Sheean as well as Galsworthy, the collection represents the period well. But the editors are guilty of tendentious, vulgar categorizing in naming Part Two "The War and the Waste Landers," in putting William Carlos Williams among "American Revolutionists."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.