Read 'Em & Weep

"There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books." wrote Georg Lichtenberg, an 18th century German aphorist. "Printed by people who don't understand them, sold by people who don't understand them, bound, criticized, and read by people who don't understand them, and now even written by people who don't understand them." A look at the current bestseller list (see p. 84) gives Lichtenberg the air of a prophet. The fiction crop is one of the poorest in years. Items:

P: James Michener's Hawaii, a vast pudding in which amateur geology, history and sociology scarcely blend with crude, febrile fiction.

P: Thomas Costain's The Darkness and the Dawn, a turgid historical.

P: John Hersey's The War Lover, a well-meant attack on war and warriors by a serious writer whose work in this book is not equal to the demands of his sermon.

P: Robert Ruark's Poor No More, a portrait of a heel who seems to have affected both the author's prose and point of view.

ij| Taylor Caldwell's Dear and Glorious Physician, a lugubrious attempt at catching St. Luke in a wide-screen historical that all but approaches farce.

EURf Leon Uris' Exodus, a plodding novel about Israel that could almost serve as a textbook of inept fiction writing.

The only novel good enough to be out of place on this list is Morris West's The Devil's Advocate, a Graham Greene-thumbed story about sin and sainthood.

The nonfiction list, though undistinguished, is almost a relief after the novels.

Against the shrewdly calculated corn of Harry Golden's For 2$ Plain and the old wives' appeal of Dr. D. C. Jarvis' Folk Medicine, there can be set Garrett Mattingly's The Armada, a rare, readable example of historical scholarship. To offset The Stolen Years, which cashes in on headlines about the recent murder of Prohibition Gangster Roger Touhy, and Vance Packard's The Status Seekers, a flight of amateur and secondhand sociology, there is a vivid re-creation of D-day in Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day.

Moss Hart's Act One reflects the undying interest in the theater when a prime mover goes uninhibitedly candid; and Herman Wouk's This Is My God, while it surely owes much of its success to the fact that its author is a bestselling novelist, is nevertheless a competent and tender summary of the Jewish faith.

Yet, taken altogether, it is a deplorable list. A reader who worked his way through all the books on it would find his sense of style outraged, his deepest emotions hardly touched, his stock of information increased but little and his understanding of his times barely improved.

Nevertheless, publishers--and bestseller-minded authors--are making more money than ever. For most, 1959 will wind up as the biggest year in history.

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