One Week: The Literary Overflow

EVERY year about 30,000 new titles are printed in the U.S. Putting aside paperbacks (about 7,500), textbooks (more than 2,000) as well as thousands of specialty volumes of limited interest, that leaves some 5,000 hard-cover books which each year come to TIME'S Book Section for examination and possible review. Choosing between them week by week as they arrive is an often agonizing, always time-consuming process, even though many swiftly prove 1) badly written, 2) wretchedly edited, and 3) largely unnecessary. In this issue, instead of choosing, we attempt to give the reader a sampling of the American literary overflow by presenting thumbnail reviews of one whole week of books (excepting a handful, mostly how-to guides and Christmas specials) to be published between Oct. 18 and 24.

Novels

BANEFUL SORCERIES by Joan Sanders. 352 pages. Houghton Mifrlin. $6.95. The mock memoir of a French girl whose marriage to a decadent nobleman is complicated by black Masses and poisonings --some of which actually scandalized the court of Louis XIV. The author succeeds elegantly with baroque setting and sinister plot.

'ENCYCLOPEDIA by Richard Horn. 157 pages. Grove Press. $4.95. The hapless love affair of hopeful Poet Tom (Americana) Jones and wealthy, bohemia-bound Sadie (Britannica) Massey is cross-referenced in brief, satirical, encyclopedic passages from ABORTION to zoo CAFETERIA. What you can't look up, you can't put down.

ERMYNTRUDE AND ESMERALDA by Lytton Sfrachey. 75 pages. Stein and Day. $5.95. A novelistic joke by the author of Eminent Victorians protests repression through the letters of two sexually inquisitive girls. Written in 1913 and rather cutesie-pie, with terms like pussy cat and bow-wow for private parts.

THE FRUITS OF WINTER by Bernard Clavel. 382 pages. Coward-McCann. $6.95. Mere and Pere Dubois cope less with World War II than with the grim guerrilla assaults of old age in this incessantly poignant, Goncourt prizewinning novel of French village life.

THE COUNTRY CLUB by Nancy Bruff. 339 pages. Bartholomew House. $6.95. Worldly doings and undoings on and around a posh golf course. Pure tripe, but wait until you see the movie.

IN A WILD SANCTUARY by William Harrison. 320 pages. Morrow. $6.95. Four Chicago grad students in a suicide pact that begins as a joke and ends with tragedy. Sensitive and full of suspense.

COMING-OUT PARTY by Richard Frede. 237 pages. Random House. $5.95. To pay off a $20,000 debt, a writer is forced into a job with the CIA, etc.

THE SPOOK WHO SAT BY THE DOOR by Sam Greenlee. 248 pages. Baron. $4.95. A CIA "house nigger" drops out to train black teen-agers as "Freedom Fighters." A schizophrenic first novel by a young black, the book blends James Bond parody with wit and rage.

ALP by William Hjortsberg. 157 pages. Simon & Schuster. $4.95. A honeymooning American couple, a witch, a dwarf, assorted deaths, a mad seduction in a careening telepherique--adding up to zero.

THE IMMORTALS OF THE MOUNTAIN by C. Virgil Gheorghiu. 186 pages. Henry Regnery. $5.95. This novel about Rumanian peasants mistreated by landholders is far below The Twenty-Fifth Hour, the author's post-World War II story of concentration camps.

THE BLACK CAMELS by Ronald Johnston. 216 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $4.95. Sheik-to-sheik high jinks among the oil-rich and rapacious Bedouins.

THE DANJU GIG by Carolyn Weston. 195 pages. Random House. $4.95. A smart-mouthed Jewish agent and a black movie star play at espionage in a small West African dictatorship. Sample prose: "Again he belched. Lox and gin."

HOUSE ON FIRE by Arch Oboler. 249 pages. 8arfholomew. $5.95. A radio and film veteran, the author has produced a nasty little hybrid--part melodrama about two juvenile murderers, part philosophical twaddle about whether God is dead, blind or just out to lunch.

THE BIG WIN by Jimmy Miller. 241 pages. Knopf. $5.95. After the virtual depopulation of the U.S. and Russia by a Chinese poison plague in A.D. 2004, a tough New Yorker, a beautiful Parisian aristocrat and a hippie from Venus hunt for the missing Chinese war criminals. An overstrained, social-satire freak-out.

THE ANTIBODIES by Peter Baker. 377 pages. Putnam. $6.95. A transparent and pedestrian attempt to make the bestseller list, using the theme of medical malpractice in transplant surgery.

FOLLOW THE RUNNING GRASS by Georgia McKinley. 244 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95. First novel about a Texas dynasty from pioneer grandfather to would-be-liberal grandson. Overdone.

THE GOVERNOR'S LADY by Norman Collins. 381 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95. The colonials, the natives, and death on safari in Africa of the 1930s, including a governor with a steel-claw hand and scruples to match.

ANGELS FALLING by Janice Elliott. 409 pages. Knopf. $6.95. Miss Elliott's three generation chronicle of a British family named Garland--many of whose members betray great emotion by throwing up --reads a bit like the Forsyte Saga eviscerated for television.

Short Stories

AT NIGHT ALL CATS ARE GREY by Patrick Boyle. 256 pages. Grove. $4.95. Filial infighting, the sound of sibling revelry by night, Irish wakes, corpse-rooms, tippling grannies, occasional flashes of savage perception and true humor.

A WESTERN BONANZA edited by Jod-hunter Ballard. 419 pages. Doubleday. $6.95. Slick fairy tales from everybody's Old West wholesomely packaged as "frontier folklore."

Mysteries and Science Fiction THE LONG TWILIGHT by Keith Laumer. 222 pages. Pufnam. $4.95. Sci-fi explanation of Thor, Odin, Loki and a few other figures from Norse mythology as the ageless earth agents of some intergalactic villains.

YOUNG PREY by Hillary Waugh. 206 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. Sophomoric sermonette about a detective stalking the black rapist-murderer of a blonde would-be hippie. No kin to Evelyn.

CIRCLE OF SQUARES by William Price Turner. 192 pages. Walker. $4.50. A flaccid mystery about clandestine middle-aged conspirators against the tyranny of youth who discover the titillations and limitations of Flab Power.

DAMNATION ALLEY by Roger Zelazny. 157 pages. Putnam. $4.95. A colloidal suspension of sci-fi death wishes, atomic warfare, erupting volcanoes, mutants and--for ultimate deadliness--motorcycle gangs. Light but lurid.

Poetry

ROBERT GRAVES: POEMS 1965-1968. 97 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. "The obstinate habit I have formed of refusing to adopt a synthetic period style, or join any literary racket," Robert Graves once wrote, "has given my poems what would be called a 'handmade, individual craftsmanship quality.' " Characteristic of that craftsmanship, as this add to Collected Poems (1965) shows, are intensity, elegance and a classical lucidity.

WHO REALLY CARES by Janis Ian. 85 pages. Dial. $3.95. A popular folksinger at the age of 15 does not necessarily, at the age of 18, a good poet make.

IN SOMEONE'S SHADOW by Rod McKuen. 108 pages. Random House. $3.95. "I have learned no new alphabet this week," the TV poet admits.

History and Adventure

THE MIGHTY ENDEAVOR by Charles B. MacDonald. 564 pages. Oxford. $12.50. An Army historian confronts America's World War II role in Europe. His prose is pedestrian, but he has an inexhaustible pipeline to fresh material on commanders and command decisions.

SONS OF SINBAD by Alan Villiers. 414 pages. Scr/bner. $7.95. Splendid reprint (from 1940), telling how Villiers sailed aboard Arab dhows in the Indian Ocean to learn the sea ways of a dying trade. Knowledgeable, occasionally eloquent, but mainly for those who really want to tell a boom from a jalboot.

CAPTAINS WITHOUT EYES by Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr. 303 pages. Macmillan. $6.95. Military intelligence failures during World War II--from the German invasion of Russia to the Battle of the Bulge--unstartlingly re-examined by an ex-CIA man. The book might well have been terminated with extreme prejudice.

CITIZEN SAILORS: THE U.S. NAVAL RESERVE IN WAR AND PEACE by William R. Kreh. 270 pages. McKay. $6.95. One half reads like a recruiting poster. The other, more interesting, tells how the Navy has adapted its tactics to the war in Viet Nam, where large ships are superfluous.

THE GREAT BETRAYAL by Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis. 562 pages. Macmillan. $12.50. A thoroughly documented report--often with painfully fascinating first-person accounts--of the disgraceful detention and harassment of the American Japanese during World War II, and the painfully slow restitution afterward.

ADOLF HITLER-FACES OF A DICTATOR, text and captions by Jochen von Lang; introduction by Constantine FitzGibbon. Unpaged. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.75. Morbidly fascinating photographs with a sensible text.

TUDOR CORNWALL: PORTRAIT OF A SOCIETY by A. L. Rowse. 462 pages. Scr/bner. $8.95. A professional Cornishman and famous Elizabethan scholar turns his home county into a microcosm to assess the Tudor reformation of England.

LIFE AND LEISURE IN ANCIENT ROME by J.P.V.D. Balsdon. 463 pages. McGraw-Hill. $8.95. An orgy of trivia, sometimes fascinating but. like most orgies, ultimately stupefying.

THE BRITISH IN THE FAR EAST by George Woodcock. 259 pages. Afheneurn. $12.50. The rise and fall of the Raj in the Far East, from Drake and the daring empire builders to the well-tailored businessmen who run Hong Kong today. A wellrounded, absorbing, and rarely told tale.

NOTORIOUS LADIES OF THE FRONTIER by Harry Sinclair Drago. 270 pages. Dodd, Mlead. $6. What drove the West wild was ladies named Millie Hipps, Mattie Silks, Mammy Pleasant, Madame Moustache, Lurline Monte Verdi and Silver Dollar. Carefully chronicled and not a cuss word throughout.

JULIUS CAESAR by Michael Grant. 271 pages, illustrated. McGraw-Hill. $12.95. Et tu, McGraw-Hill?

Religion and Culture

THE RAW AND THE COOKED: INTRODUCTION TO A SCIENCE OF MYTHOLOGY, VOL. I by Claude Levi-Strauss. 387 pages. Harper & Row. $10. In a book much talked about since its 1964 publication in France, the world's most fascinating social anthropologist studies scores of primitive mythologies, searching for a common code that he hopes will reveal the laws that govern the creative workings of the human mind.

NEW HEAVEN, NEW EARTH by Kenelm Burridge. 191 pages. Schocken Books. $5.50. The vision of the millennium as a golden age of freedom and affluence is a quasi-religious phenomenon that occurs in decaying cultures. In examining a number of millenary movements among primitive peoples, Anthropologist Burridge observes a quaint custom of the behavioral sciences by elaborating the obvious, painfully.

MEN AND ANGELS by Theodora Ward. 241 pages. Viking. $7.50. Angelic evolution--from divine messenger to artistic symbol--delicately traced through religion, literature and the dark corners of the human mind.

THE FEAST OF FOOLS by Harvey Cox. 204 pages. Harvard University. $5.95. A secular theologian urges a return to the medieval facility for joy--as in the current return to dance, mime, jazz and rhythmic movement in worship.

THOSE FABULOUS PHILADELPHIANS by Herbert Kupferberg. 257 pages. Scribner. $7.95. A chronicle of the Philadelphia Orchestra from turn-of-the-century birth pangs to Eugene Ormandy's reflections on the famed Philadelphia sound ("It's me").

THE APPRECIATION OF THE ARTS (3 vols.): ARCHITECTURE by Sinclair Gauldie. 193 pages. $8.50; SCULPTURE bv L R. Rogers. 242 pages. $9.75; DRAWING by Philip Rawson. 322 pages. $9.75. Oxford. Handsomely produced for smaller coffee tables.

A POSSIBLE THEATRE by Sfuarf Vaughan. 255 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95. Able Actor-Director Vaughan left Broadway 15 years ago with egocentrifugal force, but this account of his subsequent travels and travails has the prose urgency of a milk train.

Criticism and the Contemporary Scene

THE YEAR OF THE PEOPLE by Eugene J. McCarthy. 323 pages. Doub/eday. $6.95. Though ostensibly about what happened, McCarthy's book is really about the man, his charm, his wit, his occasional smugness, above all his poetic third eye on himself and his surroundings. An unwitting reminder of the 1968 paradox that those seeking cleaner, simpler political truths chose as hero the most complex politician in the nation.

WE WERE THE CAMPAIGN by Ben Sfavis. 206 pages. Beacon. $7.50 (paper, $2.95). A graduate student turned activist provides a nuts-and-bolts report on the other half of the McCarthy phenomenon, the get-clean-for-'Gene "children's crusade."

THE NADER REPORT OF THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION by Edward F. Cox, Robert C. Fellmeth and John E. Schulz. 230 pages. Baron. $5.95. A tell-it-like-it-is indictment of one of Washington's most slovenly agencies. One can only hope that, like the Hardy boys, Ralph Nader's student crusaders will follow up with a full-scale series.

THE LONGEST MILE by Rena Gazaway. 348 pages. Doubleday. $6.95. A pathetic attempt to do for Appalachia what Agee and Evans did so beautifully for Alabama 28 years ago in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

SYNDICATE ABROAD by Hank Messick. 246 pages. Macmillan. $5.95. This nononsense, all-business book, the fourth Messick "Syndicate" title in three years, bears down on the Bahamas, wonder drug for February sufferers and haven for the U.S. gamblers and tax-afflicted.

THE GREAT PORT: A PASSAGE THROUGH NEW YORK by James Morris. 223 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.95. The well-known Welsh author-traveler tracing the times and tides of a famous city. Though he is given to locutions like "the noble Hudson," it's not a bad book to visit.

THE LONG-WINDED LADY by Maeve Brennan. 238 pages. Morrow. $6. Collected from The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section, these bleak reportorial vignettes of life in Manhattan create the impression of a raw private perception struggling against total loneliness: the great city observed by a see-ing-eye God.

EARTH SHINE by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. 73 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.75. Maundering on about the moon launch and a trip she took to Africa, the author searches for miracles--and too easily finds them. She is much given to expostulation!

ALTERNATIVE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA by Eugene R. Black. 180 pages. Praeger. $5.95. A prescription for Southeast Asia after Viet Nam by the former head of the World Bank: economic development through regional cooperation.

BRITAIN FACES EUROPE by Roberf L. Pfaltzgraff Jr. 288 pages. University of

Pennsylvania. $6. A dry study of how the private sector in Britain helped shape foreign policy between 1957 and 1967, particularly Britain's assaults on the European Common Market.

THE IDEA OF THE JEWISH STATE by Ben Halpern. 493 pages. Harvard University. $15. The 19th century European "Jewish problem" was never solved; it just moved to the Middle East. Through the thickets of history and power politics, Halpern maneuvers with rare discernment and objectivity, giving an account of both the Jewish state and its hostile neighbors.

RUSSIA, HOPES AND FEARS by Alexander Werth. 352 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95. The fear is a return "to some fiendish kind of Stalinism." The hope is the liberalization of Soviet society. But Werth, who escaped St. Petersburg as a boy and later served in Moscow as a French correspondent, examines recent Russian history with barely repressible optimism.

THE PLAN-AHEAD COOKBOOK: 300 DELECTABLE WAYS TO USE YOUR LEFTOVERS by Cecil Dyer. 246 pages. Macmillan. $5.95. Why don't you go ahead and eat, dear? I'll grab something on the way home.

NORMAN MAILER: THE COUNTDOWN by Donald L. Kaufmann. 190 pages. Southern Illinois University. $4.95; THE STRUCTURED VISION OF NORMAN MAILER by Barry H. Leeds. 270 pages. New York University. $6.95. Two assistant professors of English establish tenuous positions on the perpetual beachhead that is the imagination of Norman Mailer. Leeds waits anxiously for the Big Novel. Kaufmann, by contrast, wonders whether Mailer's methods will--or even should --catch up with his protean intellect.

ALONE WITH AMERICA by Richard Howard. 594 pages. Afheneum. $12.95. Too many cross-eyed insights and too much precious jargon detract from an otherwise vast and valuable accounting of American poetry since 1950.

THE MODERN POET edited by Ian Hamilton. 200 pages. Horizon. $5.95. An Anglo-American anthology of criticism and poetry from a little magazine, The Review, including interviews with William Empson and Robert Lowell.

BOOKS I LOVE by John Kieran. 200 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. Playing the old "books I would take to a desert is land" game, the author provides fond essays on his largely predictable choices, and an occasional sharp judgment (Rousseau is "an intellectual sharper"). Information pleasing mainly to readers who prefer Masefield to Donne, Tennyson and Kipling to Eliot.

Biography and Autobiography

AMBASSADOR'S JOURNAL by John Kenneth Galbraith. 656 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10. The dreary daily round in New Delhi (1961-63) greatly brightened by dashes of wit, wisdom and sheer vanity. (Reviewed in TIME, Oct. 17.)

MALCOLM X: THE MAN AND HIS TIMES edited by John Henrik Clarke. 320 pages. Macmillan. $7.95. Since his murder, Malcolm X's autobiography has sold close to two million copies, and he has captured the imagination of the young and the black as a martyred leader. This collection of comments by approving observers helps explain why.

HISTORY OF A NATION OF ONE by Jecon Gregory. 228 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.95. The barefoot, world wanderings of a 61 ft. English hobo painter. Not as pungent and pandemic as such recollected tales need to be.

NELSON AND THE HAMILTONS by Jack Russell. 448 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10. A fond, splendidly informative account of the grotesque but genuine love between a blowsy beauty and the small, skiny, one-armed, one-eyed seaman who was England's greatest admiral.

SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON by Brian Fothergill. 459 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $10. The man cuckolded by Nelson turns out to have been a man of many parts --diplomat, art collector and scientist.

GEORGE W. CABLE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A SOUTHERN HERETIC by Louis D. Rubin Jr. 304 pages. Pegasus. $6.95. Cable was the first post-Civil War novelist to deal forthrightly with racial injustice. This fine biography tells how the controversy that he stirred up turned him from a passionate witness into a confectioner of costume romance.

CASANOVA by John /Wasters. Illustrated. 302 pages. Geis. $15. Love's labours labored.

MAX BECKMANN: MEMORIES OF A FRIENDSHIP by Stephan Lackner. 126 pages. University of Miami. $7.95. The life of the German Expressionist painter presented in a sometimes dull, always informative reminiscence.

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