Books: The Editors Like

The Inescapable Present

THE UNITED STATES AND FRANCEby Donald McKay. (Harvard University Press, $4.00.) An analysis by a historian of the strengths and weaknesses of past and present French and American foreign policy within the framework of the world power picture.

CRIME IN AMERICAby Estes Kefauver. (Doubleday, $3.50.) A personal account of crime and political corruption in this country by the Senator who headed up the sensational crime investigations.

INDIA SINCE PARTITIONby Andrew Mellor. (Praeger, $2.50.) A compact story of the internal affairs of a people crucial in contemporary history, by a newspaperman who reported the transfer of power for Britain’s Daily Herald. Chapters on the riots, on Gandhi, on the constitution, on Indian economics, make this book a handy primer.

The Flight from Politics

HOW TO TRAVEL INCOGNITOby Ludwig Bemelmans. (Little, Brown, $3.00.) The author, in typical style, illustrates his theme, which may be defined as a scrupulous guide to the fine art of freeloading while engaged in the heady life of European high society.

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLEby Maurice Zolotow. (Random House, $3.00.) An inexorable interviewer offers insights and outlooks on a number of famous people, amongst whom Jimmy Durante comes off best and Frank Fay second best.

SAILS AND WHALESby Captain Harry Allen Chippendale. (Houghton Mifflin, $3.00.) In the old New Bedford tradition, when whales had a sporting chance because mechanization was unheard of. An exciting gam about it all, including a white whale minus Moby Dick’s anthropomorphic leer.

At Home with Immortality

LETTERS OF GUSTAVE FLAUBERTselected by Richard Rumbold. (Philosophical Library, $3.75.) A slice of letters from the author of Madame Bovary. They take in a good range of his life and some of them are addressed to Maupassant, Zola, the Goncourt brothers, Baudelaire, his mother, and, of course, George Sand. Translated by J. M. Cohen.

PORTABLE HENRY JAMESedited by Morton Dauwen Zabel. (Viking, $2.50.) Selections from short fiction, criticism, travel, correspondence, and autobiographic writings.

JOURNEY WITH GENIUS: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrencesby Witter Bynner, (John Day, $4.00.) The New Mexican poet who became Lawrence’s friend tries to answer a great many questions about the British genius and his wife Frieda.

A WESTERN JOURNALby Thomas Wolfe. (University of Pittsburgh Press, $3.00.) Written in the summer of 1938, shortly before his death, the Journal is Thomas Wolfe’s record of a thirteen-day trip by Ford automobile through the national parks of the West. A diary that was intended by the author to be the nucleus for a large Wolfean work, “the epic of a continent.”