THE YEAR'S BEST
THE LAST HURRAH, by Edwin O'Connor. A lusty, irreverent and affectionate fictional portrait of a shrewd gasbag who became a powerful political boss. The story stays on target so steadily that Boston's ex-Mayor Jim Curley still thinks he was having his picture taken.
THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW PATH, by Honor Tracy. Probably the year's funniest novel, a fine Irish stew of a farce in which a visiting Englishman takes on not only the Irish clergy but Ireland as well, in a contest of face saving and legpulling.
THE MERMAIDS, by Eva Boros. The year's best love story, and the one most neglected by reviewers. In a prewar Hungarian setting, a tubercular girl and a supposedly self-contained man play out one of the oldest emotional exchanges, within a framework of exceptionally sensitive writing.
THE LONELY PASSION OF JUDITH HEARNE, by Brian Moore. The painfully etched life of an old maid as she moves from helplessness to hopelessness in Belfast, Ireland. Dreary and appalling, but so bitterly true that Novelist Moore achieves a small mas terpiece of human defeat.
BEYOND THE AEGEAN, by llias Ve-nezis. The lyrical recollection of a Greek boy's pre-World War I childhood in Anatolia. One of the year's most attractive novels--a remem brance of things past, explored with joyous wonder, grace and dignity.
A SINGLE PEBBLE, by John Mersey. Novelist Hersey's best fiction performance to date; a short, graceful story of what happened when a practical U.S. idealist ran head on into ancient Chi nese superstition and stubbornness on the Yangtze River three decades ago.
THE QUIET AMERICAN, by Graham Greene. Novelist Greene's expedition to wartime Indo-China, showing him as skillful as ever at playing fictional charades with good and evil. His U.S. idealist, born out of Greene's pathological anti-Americanism, comes off only a little worse than his morally bankrupt Englishman, but the book's importance lies in the fact that many Europeans share Greene's phobia.
DOUBTING THOMAS, by Winston Brebner. A brief, deceptively simple novel whose hero, a clown, brings a timely reminder that the fatal flaw of any totalitarian regime is its congenitally inhuman disregard of humanity's best impulses.
YOUR OWN BELOVED SONS, by Thomas Anderson. A first novel about the Korean war that has virtues seldom encountered in more highly praised war novels: a surprisingly accurate feeling for the way men really feel during combat, an understanding of the relationship between the leader and the led, a sense of soldierly compassion that never becomes maudlin.
THE PRESENCE OF GRACE, by J. F. Powers. A collection of short stories that move about with impressive sureness in the U.S. Roman Catholic world of harried priests and puzzled parishioners, and put Author Powers in the highest bracket of his craft.
THE SAILOR, SENSE OF HUMOR & OTHER STORIES, by V. S. Pritchett. Critic Pritchett, who is also one of Britain's top short-story writers, sketching directly from life. The best items in this collection, extremely funny and uncommonly shrewd about people, have the impact of a bitter quarrel overheard.
FREEDOM OR DEATH, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Greece's greatest living writer in a passionate affirmation of patriotism, in which 19th century Cretans trade life for the hope of freedom from their Turkish oppressors.
KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, by George Orwell. An early (1936) novel of Orwell's, but new to the U.S. Its slashingly satirical attack on left-wing intellectuals and phony-proletarian martyrs of the '305 shows how early Orwell understood that it is the puny fellow traveler who clears the way for Big Brother.
NONFICTION
OLYMPIC: THE LIFE OF VICTOR HUGO, by Andre Maurois. One of the year's very best biographies: a just and urbane study of the virile French poet who was always lustily at home in life, in and out of exile.
THE NUN'S STORY, by Kathryn Hulme. The account of a spiritual failure that is more moving than most stories of spiritual success. After 17 years of selfless work and self-laceration, Sister Luke knew that she did not have the nun's vocation; she inspired a fascinating and consistently moving picture of a world and a life that cannot even be imagined by outsiders.
RICHARD THE THIRD, by Paul Murray Kendall. A U.S. historian's big, balanced biography of "Richard Crookback" that pleased even Britain's reviewers. Richard may or may not have murdered the princes in the tower, but this book accords him kingly virtues which readers of history have seldom suspected.
SURPRISED BY JOY, by C. S. Lewis. A partial autobiography by the Oxford don, which makes Christianity an exciting intellectual adventure as well as an act of faith. Its description of the road that led from indifference to skepticism to a firm belief in God makes this one of the most graceful and credible "conversion" books in years.
BERNARD SHAW, by St. John Ervine, and GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: MAN OF THE CENTURY, by Archibald Henderson. The answer to just about all questions that can arise about Shaw for a long time to come, Ervine's book is the more balanced and intimate, Henderson's the more massively researched. Together they leave no doubt of Shaw's gadfly genius.
RUSSIA LEAVES THE WAR, by George F. Kennan. Ex-Ambassador Kennan starts a massive (the first volume of three) attempt to show how U.S. liberal statesmanship tried, and failed, to play ball with Russian ideology during and after World War I. No book this year has documented so carefully and so effectively the impossibility of matching deceit with good will.
THE LETTERS OF THOMAS WOLFE, by Elizabeth Nowell. An unconscious autobiography of a sometimes great and nearly always tragic writer. Like Wolfe himself, and like his novels, the letters are one great, formless, undisciplined and tempestuous repository of lust for life, love for the U.S., and passion in personal relationships.
GALLIPOLI, by Alan Moorehead. A monument to the British defeat by the Turks at Gallipoli in 1915--which, like many another military disaster, is better remembered for valor than for folly. Combat writing that can stand with the classics in a much overwrit ten field.
VENICE OBSERVED, by Mary McCarthy. The year's best travel book. Its three telling assets: Venice itself, a place of changeless enchantment; scores of excellent illustrations; and the sharp, civilized mind and fine writing talent of Observer McCarthy.
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