Long Chance

THE TREE OF LIBERTY--Elizabeth Page --Farrar & Rinehart ($3).

It is practically impossible for anyone who has hit the jackpot of a slot machine to keep from trying it again. The Manhattan publishing firm of Farrar & Rinehart hit the public jackpot hard with the first of the 1,000-page historickal-romantickal novels, Anthony Adverse. After five years of wistful abstinence (particularly trying because meanwhile Macmillan hit an even bigger pot with Gone

With the Wind), Farrar & Rinehart pulled the lever again last week with another whopper, The Tree of Liberty (985 pages to 1,224 for Anthony Adverse). The book and the law of averages being what they are, no jackpot is likely to shower down. The Tree of Liberty, Elizabeth Page's first novel, took five years to write, will not take so long to read. Its breeziness is astounding, in view of the hot and heavy research the author did for it (32 huge collections of national, state, private records and letters, files of 26 periodicals, 183 biographies, histories, travel books, reference books). Its setting is Virginia from 1754 to 1806, easily the most fact-packed era in U. S. history. Miss Page, who once wanted to be a history professor, gets all the facts in--Indian trouble, tax trouble, Patrick Henry's rebel-rousing, the Declaration, Trenton, Saratoga, Lafayette off Rhode Island, the Constitution and how it grew, the rise of the Republicans (later called Democrats), everything from A to the XYZ affair--but so sweetly does she coat her historical pill that it might well be prescribed for students who are sick of textbooks.

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