Recent Books

ALL GOOD AMERICANS--Jerome Bahr-- Scribner ($2.50). Thirteen short stories in a Winesburg, Ohio framework, by a young writer whose talent will bear watching. Novelist Ernest Hemingway praises these stories for "their solid, youthful worth, their irony, their humor, their peasant lustiness." ALLI'S SON--Magnhild Haalke--Knopf ($2.50). Sombre Norwegian story of a young sailor's wife whose son becomes a psychopathic case; a first novel recommended to U. S. readers by Nobel Prize-winner Sigrid Undset.

THE GODS ARRIVE--Grant Lewi--Lippincott ($2.50). Comfortably overstuffed Depression chronicle of a 26-year-old Albany blueblood who deserts his family for New York's bohemia, comes to his senses as a disillusioned department store executive.

I WOULD BE PRIVATE--Rose Macaulay --Harper ($2.50). Horrified by the publicity of quintuplet parenthood, upright London Policeman McBrown & family flee in vain to a remote Caribbean island.

Not Author Macaulay's best or funniest book, but pleasant entertainment.

LIGHT WOMAN--Zona Gale--Appleton-Century ($2). Fluffy stage piece, transmogrified into the story of what happens in the old homestead (upstate New York) when oldest Son Nicholas arrives with playful Mitty, his supposed wife, for the family reunion.

Non-Fiction

SUNS Go DOWN--Flannery Lewis-- Macmillan ($2). Excellent characterization, recalling the tender humor of Glenway Wescott's The Grandmothers, of the author's doughty, imaginative, 90-year-old grandmother, "the first decent white woman in the Comstock District." A vivid piece of Americana covering the era of Virginia City, Nev., from its fabulous boom days of 40,000 families to its present ghostly desertion.

WHY WAS LINCOLN MURDERED?--Otto Eisenschiml--Little, Brown ($3.50). It may have been Booth's idea, says Author Eisenschiml, but it was Secretary of War Stanton's curious negligence in protecting Lincoln that was really responsible for the murder.

PORTRAITS FROM LIFE--Ford Madox Ford--Houghton Mifflin ($3). Memoirs of eleven famed Edwardian authors on whom Author Ford, wearing his gently smiling expression, has been sharpening his anecdotal claws these many years. On H. G. Wells he uses his teeth as well, because, charges Ford, Wells is the man who has trained the world into a defeatist resignation to the horrors of the Machine Age.

Murders

A CASE FOR THREE DETECTIVES--Leo Bruce--Stokes ($2). Three famed detectives solve a seemingly impossible murder but with three different results, and Sergeant Beef, of the local police, triumphs over Scotland Yard.

THE TINY DIAMOND--Charlotte Murray Russell--Double day, Dor an ($2). Vacationing in Chicago, a practical, small-town spinster discovers her landlord's corpse, scolds the police, shadows a cross eyed man, gets thrown downstairs and discovers the ingenious criminal.

THE THIRTEENTH BED IN THE BALLROOM--Esther Haven Fonseca--Doubleday, Dor an ($2). An old Southern mansion makes a charming dormitory for young business women, but crystal chandeliers and romantic balconies lose their charm when two girls are found dead in the same ballroom bed.

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