Word: book-of-the-month
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Pulitzer Prizewinning Biographer Margaret Coit (John C. Calhoun) has entered the supply-and-demand cycle of Baruch books at the critical phase where supply becomes glut. The truth is that the wily old (87) speculator has cornered the market with Baruch: My Own Story (TIME, Aug. ig), which has a grip on the No. 1 nonfiction spot of national bestseller lists. The first half of Mr. Baruch (Book-of-the-Month Club choice for December) is a blurred carbon copy of Baruch's own book, concerned mainly with his South Carolina boyhood and his stock market coups. Biographer Coit...
...four of Cozzens' books have carried at least one mark of popular recognition-selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club: S. S. San Pedro (1931), The Last Adam (1933), The Just and the Unjust (1942), and now By Love Possessed. Still another novel, Guard of Honor, won the Pulitzer Prize for 1948. Nevertheless, the hardcover sales of all Cozzens' books combined (140,000) lag well behind that current dreary splash in a small-town sex sump, Peyton Place (250,000 copies). The interior decorators of U.S. letters-the little-magazine critics whose favorite furniture is the pigeonhole...
...time, other books followed, including The Roman Way and The Echo of Greece. But this month the Book-of-the-Month Club chose the 27-year-old Greek Way for its current selection. Thus thousands more readers will learn what Edith Hamilton has to teach about the city where "the great spiritual forces that war in men's minds flowed along together in peace; law and freedom, truth and religion, beauty and goodness, the objective and the subjective-there was a truce to their eternal warfare, and the result was the balance and clarity ... a reconciling power, something...
Though The Short Reign of Pippin IV (a May co-selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club) is a fable that makes no claims for itself beyond the desire to please, its author waters Aesop with Alsop, mixes persiflage with prescriptions for the ills of modern France. The satiric lapses into the pontifical ("The French are a moral people-judged, that is, by American country-club standards"). Pippin makes a charming king-for-a-day, but the joke goes on for so long that those who come to laugh may stay to yawn. Hélas, political reality...
...outfit on New Year's Day 1953, the Korean war had become a stalemate of dug-in positions. Massive mortar and artillery barrages confined both sides to night patrols, reconnaissance, ambush or recovery of the dead. With a certain Byronesque recklessness, Russ volunteered for them all. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection for January, The Last Parallel is peculiarly fascinating for its creation of a new war generation in print, a kind of fighting man who could go into combat spouting bop talk, read the plays of Sophocles between barrages, and sniff heroin for kicks when away from...