RECENT & READABLE

Charles Dickens and Early Victorian England, by Robin Cruikshank. Random, informal chapters on the sturdy characters and irritating characteristics of Queen Victoria's energetic subjects (TIME. March 20).

The Outlander, by Germaine Guevre-mont. What happens when a careless, high-spirited wanderer settles down in a tiny, pious farm hamlet in Quebec. Good regional writing with nature as a major character (TIME, March 13).

John C. Calhoun: American Portrait, by Margaret Coit. A spirited biography of the great ante bellum Sauth Carolinian who, as Congressman, Secretary of War and Vice President, was the champion of states' rights and the South's slave-owning aristocracy (TIME, March 6).

The Wall, by John Hersey. The tragic, agonized story of Jews resisting extermination in Warsaw's ghetto during the Nazi occupation; a sometimes moving, often tedious novel in diary form which never quite succeeds in recapturing the factual tang and immediacy of Hiroshima (TIME, March 6).

Peterson, Book III, by William Carlos Williams. The third volume of a jumpy but virile four-part poem by a New Jersey pediatrician who versifies between cases (TIME, Feb. 13).

Burmese Days, by George Orwell. Reissue of a fine early novel by the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four; a story of native intrigue and white men's burdens in a Burmese village (TIME, Feb. 6).

The Horse's Mouth, by Joyce Gary. That rare thing, a first-rate comic novel; the final volume of a wise, hilarious trilogy about a modern Moll Flanders, an eccentric country gentleman and a scapegrace painter (TIME, Feb. 6).

Bring Out Your Dead, by J. H. Powell. Horror and heroism in Philadelphia's yellow-fever plague of 1793 (TIME, Jan. 23).

The God That Failed, by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Richard Wright, Andre Gide, Louis Fischer and Stephen Spender. Six disillusioned men tell why they got into and out of Communism (TIME, Jan. 9).

Lincoln Finds a General, by Kenneth Williams. The first two volumes of a four-volume Unionside history of the Civil War, a work that tops anything yet done in its field (TIME, Jan. 2).

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