Books: The Editors Like

Great Americans

CHARLES EVANS HUGHES by Merlo J. Pusey. (Macmillan, $15.00.) This authorized two-volume biography of the Chief Justice is a Judicious study of a towering personality, whose career is a great American success story embracing half a century of our political and legal history.

TURN WEST, TURN EAST by Henry Seidel Canby. (Houghton Mifflin, $3.50.) After the manner of Plutarch, Dr. Canby has written “parallel” lives of Mark Twain and Henry James. His urbane critique seeks to show that they had a common theme—American “innocence” — and were both by way of being innocents themselves.

THE LETTERS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT edited by Elting E. Morison. Volumes III and IV. (Harvard University Press, $20.00.) Here is the second installment of T.R.’s spirited and often amusing Letters, which now cover his first four years in the White House, 1901-1905.

Glamour and Grease Paint

SHOW BIZ by Abel Green and Joe Laurie, Jr. (Holt, $5.00.) Ranging from “Vaude Socko— 19051913” to “Video Era,” a couple of the top scribes on Variety have turned in a slangy, encyclopedic history of vaudeville, burlesque, the drama, the movies, radio, and television.

THE MAGIC CURTAIN by Lawrence Langner. (Dutton, $6.60.) The founder of the Theatre Guild chronicles, with many a good anecdote, his lifelong involvement with plays, playwrights, and stage folk, and his successful career as a patent attorney.

BALLET by Cecil Beaton. (Doubleday, $3.50.) Beaton’s love affair with the ballet — from the days of Pavlova to Fonteyn, from Diaghilev to Sadler’s Wells. Illustrated with drawings by the author and a gallery of his photographs.

Resitive People

THE VOICE OF ASIA by James A. Michener. (Random House, $3.50.) A thoughtful and engrossing, though gloomy, report of a swing through the Far East, Burma, Pakistan, and India. Michener found the area aflame with hostility to the white man, and he proffers some ideas as to what must be done.

THE PERÓN ERA by Robert J. Alexander. (Columbia University Press, $3.50.) The history, policies, internal strategy, and ambitions of the Perón dictatorship are trenchantly set forth here, with the warning that U.S. attempts to appease Perón won’t pay.

CARAVAN by Carleton S. Coon. (Holt, $5.00.) A well-known anthropologist supplies a popularly written account of the people of the Middle East, the heartland of Islam, from their remote beginnings to the explosive present.

STRANGE LANDS AND FRIENDLY PEOPLE by William O. Douglas. (Harper, $4.00.) The human problems and political dynamite in the Middle East keenly observed and fairly interpreted by an American Justice who lived with the people and talked to the rulers.