Books: The Editors Like

The American Arena

THE STORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES by Meyer Berger. (Simon & Schuster, $5.00.) As part of the celebration of its centenary, the New York Times asked its Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Meyer Berger, to write the paper’s biography and history. Here it is: the exciting chronicle of one of the world’s distinguished newspapers.

JOE TUMULTY AND THE WILSON ERA by John M. Blum. (Houghton Mifflin, $4.00.) The life of a shrewd, politically tough, simple small-town politician who rose to a certain fame as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary and who turned out to be a cross-section sounding board for the President.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HENRY JAMES SR.by Frederic Harold Young. (Bookman Associates, $4.50.) An account of the ideas and actions of the brilliant father of Henry and William James, an indigenous and cultivated gentleman who had his own vision.

POWELL OF THE COLORADOby William Culp Darrah. (Princeton University Press, $6.00.) A fascinating life of a fascinating man, frontier schoolmaster, self-made geologist and ethnologist, and one of our country’s pioneer conservationists.

Pleasures and Placces

THE PROVINCES OF FRANCEeditedby Doré Ogrizek. (McGraw-Hill, $6.50.) Twenty-five French authors write about their home ground in this discursive, enchantingly illustrated guidebook — the latest addition let the World in Color Series.

I CANNOT REST FROM TRAVEL by Willard Price. (John Day, $3.75.) There’s a touch of the old Pearl White movies in this record of a foreign correspondent’s adventures in seventy countries — tigers and tiger sharks; stampeding elephants and volcanoes in eruption; moonshiners, headhunters, and dangerous Arabians.

THE FACE OF THE EARTH by H. M. Tomlinson. (Bobbs-Merrill, $3.00.) Though they date back from the forties to before the First World War, these five sketches — about Spain, England, the sea — have the enduring vitality of fine descriptive writing.

The Gentlest Art

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF JOHN KEATS edited by Lionel Trilling. (Farrar, Straus & Young. $3.50.) The absorbing letters of the great, youthful English poet, once described by Yeats as a ‟boy with his face pressed to the window of a sweetshop.”

THE LETTERS OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND JANE MECOM edited by Carl Van Doren. (Princeton University Press, $5.00.) One hundred and sixty-six pieces of mail, sixty-one of them never before published, exchanged between Franklin and his sister. Jane, who was the wife of a saddler, the mother of twelve children, and a neighbor of Paul Revere.

DEAREST ISA: Robert Browning’s Letters to Isabella Blagdenedited by Edward C. Mc Aleer. (University of Texas, $5.00.) Some relaxed and gossipy communications from the famed poet to a maiden lady who had become a dear friend of the family.