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Rommel, the Desert Fox, by Desmond Young. A brisk, well-written biography by a British brigadier who obviously admires his subject (TIME...
ROMMEL, THE DESERT FOX (264 pp.) Desmond Young Harper...
Biographer Desmond Young, a wartime British brigadier, is too good a soldier to suppose that Rommel was a superman, but his admiration takes him just this side of hero worship. Brigadier Young was captured in North Africa by Rommel's men, had one brief glimpse of his hero, later escaped in time to serve with Auchinleck in India. After the war, Young went to Germany, talked with Rommel's widow, his son Manfred, his fellow officers and his orderly. When Rommel, the Desert Fox was published in England last year, it sold 170,000 copies to a chorus...
Winged Barbs. In the sparkling back-of-the-book sections, directed by Literary Editor Thomas Cuthbert Worsley, surprisingly little of this left-wing fuzziness appears. Worsley, who is also drama critic and chief puzzle-master (under such pseudonyms as "Thomas Smallbones"), leans heavily on a few steadily brilliant contributors: Desmond Shawe-Taylor (music), Patrick Heron (art), G. W. Stonier, who also writes as "William Whitebait," (books, cinema) and topflight Book Critic V. S. Pritchett...
Sunset Boulevard is crammed with detail-witty, revealing, evocative, sometimes contrived but always effective. Much of it, as the camera roams the Desmond mansion, sustains the mood of a good ghost story: a pet chimpanzee is solemnly buried by candlelight; the wind sighs through a pipe organ; rats scurry across the bottom of an empty swimming pool. The modern Hollywood is reflected in a gallery of expertly drawn types. Actress Desmond's Hollywood of the past comes alive in the fantastic trappings of her house and in her visiting bridge companions ("the Waxworks"), played by Hollywood Oldtimers Buster Keaton...