Among the Books Advertised in the Book Review This Week

I CHOSE FREEDOM was by Victor Kravchenko, a former Soviet official in Washington whose defection in 1944 was front page news and earned him the scorn and scathing denunciations of Stalin's loyal knee jerk legion. The Soviet Union had demanded his extradition as a traitor and Stalin's New York minions obediently took to the streets to protest his presence in this country, demanding that he be returned for execution to Father Stalin. Predictably they dismissed all the allegations, since proved largely to be true, that he made against his former masters in this expose. Most non-Communists, particularly on the left, praised the book for documenting the true nature of the Soviet regime. Kravchenko lived in hiding for several years to escape the highly effective Soviet assassination teams that had knocked off previous defectors. Unable to kill him, the Stalinists, those self-proclaimed champions of civil liberties, resorted to character assassination. He died in 1966 of a gunshot wound to his head, officially ruled a suicide, a determination that was questioned by his family and others. A number of defectors died of “suicides,” a favored method of assassination in the world of Communist espionage.

CONFESSIONS OF A EUROPEAN INTELLECTUAL was by Franz Schoenberner, who had been the editor of the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus before the Nazi takeover. The book had been released earlier in the month. Schoenberner's magazine, based in Schwabing, the bohemian suburb of Munich, specialized in political cartoons. Schoenberner emigrated to France in 1933 and escaped to the US in 1941, settling in New York. This was the first volume of his three-volume memoirs. The ad played up the literary gossip factor of the book, listing some of the famous names that Schoenberner had known, as well as proclaiming that the book analyzed why the intellectuals of Europe had failed to combat the rise of the Nazis successfully. The Time magazine review indicated that there was actually relatively little gossip in the book but a lot about the chilling effect of the Nazi movement on intellectual life, all told in a witty style. Orville Prescott also took note in The New York Times of the author's conversational, discursive style. Schoenberner, the son of a pastor and a member of Germany’s intellectual elite from birth, wrote that he had seen his own staff grow increasingly hesitant about satirizing the Nazis, whom they initially had gleefully treated with ridicule, as the party's power grew.

THIS HOUSE AGAINST THIS HOUSE was an account of journalist Vincent Sheean's experience covering the rise of Fascism, his wartime stint as an Army officer and his thoughts on the subsequent rise of the US and Russia as the world's two competing superpowers. An installment of a series on foreign relations by Sheean was running this Sunday in This Week, the supplement of the Herald Tribune. His 1935 book, Personal History, had won the first National Book Award for biography and became the basis of the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Foreign Correspondent.” Robert Neville, who reviewed the book for The New York Times Book Review on March 31, wrote that books by foreign correspondents about the war were considered a drug on the market by this point but he hoped this one would be an exception since it was “about the best to come out of this war.” Orville Prescott, on the other hand, reviewing the book for the daily found it “desperately earnest and turgidly muddled.”

Christopher Isherwood's well-regarded movie industry satire PRATER VIOLET was back in print. It was a short. semi-autobiographical novel in which Isherwood is himself a character working with an Austrian director making a movie in pre-war England. Isherwood comes to appreciate the threat of Nazism through the fears of the director. In print. Also at this time, New Directions had reissued Isherwood’s BERLIN STORIES, the basis of the later play “I Am a Camera” and the musical “Cabaret.”

An advance ad for the 911-page MY THREE YEARS WITH EISENHOWER by Captain Harry C. Butcher, USNR, to be published on April 25, urged the public to place an order now with their favorite book or department store to assure an early copy. Butcher had been a vice president of CBS and the company's point person in D.C. when he went into the Navy. He served as Naval aide to Eisenhower, whom he had known for almost two decades. According to the ad his duties included keeping an official diary.

The ad for IN THE NAME OF SANITY by veteran radio newscaster and commentator Raymond Swing quoted prominent journalist John Gunther who said the book was indispensable reading for any American "interested in his own fate or that of the country and the world." This was one of a number of books in print at the time advocating the need for a world government in light of the danger posed by the atom bomb. Several were on the bestseller list this week. Right Wingers and Isolationists, on the other hand, saw the bomb not as a threat but as America's ace in the hole. Swing would come under attack as an alleged Communist sympathizer in the McCarthy era witch hunts. Although he was cleared, he resigned his position with Voice of America in disgust over the government's treatment of the VOA staff during this period and went to work for Edward R. Murrow. He resumed his work with VOA in 1959.

FRANCO'S BLACK SPAIN was a collection of sketches drawn during the Spanish Civil War by a well-known Spanish artist Luis Quintanilla who had supported the Republicans and then gone into exile in New York and later Paris. Unfortunately the success of the book with its simple line drawings pigeonholed him as a cartoonist, deflating his artistic reputation. Quintanilla's imprisonment by Franco was a cause celebre in the world of the arts in the 1930s. The issue of the continued existence of a Fascist government in Spain was being vehemently argued in the UN Security Council, the press and on the streets of New York this week with the Stalinist Left demanding Franco's immediate forced ouster, the Catholic Right rallying to the dictator's defense and most Americans caught in the middle. This book included commentary by New York Post drama critic Richard Watts Jr. The book's illustrations and text are online at Graphic Witness.

MUST WE FIGHT RUSSIA was a new book by Ely Culbertson, well-known then as a bridge expert who had helped popularize the card game. After the war he devoted his energy to promoting world peace. The ad said he knew both the American and Russian peoples as a native. He had been born in Romania to an American father and Russian mother. He had lived for many years in Russia and had fought in the Russian Revolution, although he fled the country soon after. His chapters included "Why We Are Afraid of Russia" and 'Why Russia is Afraid of Us" as well as a chapter on how to avoid a war between the two superpowers.

CHARLES DICKENS was a well-reviewed new biography by British writer Una Pope-Hennessy.

A FRENCHMAN MUST DIE by Kay Boyle had previously been serialized in The Saturday Evening Post. It was a novel about deadly feuds in postwar France affecting the hunt by three Resistance members for a traitor in their midst. Boyle had won a number of awards for her short stories but her literary reputation recently had come under attack by Edmund Wilson, the prominent critic of The New Yorker. This novel was not well received by critics. In 1946 Boyle also published a collection of short stories, Thirty Stories.

Boyle and her husband, the Baron von Franckenstein (yes,that was his real name), would become victims of the ruthless ambition of the amoral Roy Cohn in the fifties. Boyle, who was part of the expatriate bohemian set in Paris before the war, came under attack for having signed several petitions circulated by front organizations. The Austrian-born Franckenstein had spied for the Allies during the war and was working for the U.S. State Department after the war. He was among several employees who had been investigated but cleared of charges of Communist sympathies. Despite the official exoneration, the self-promoting Cohn successfully demanded that Franckenstein and several other State Department employees be fired during one of his headline-grabbing tours of Europe to save the world from Communism. In a ripple effect,The New Yorker dropped Boyle as a foreign correspondent and suddenly all the major magazines turned down her fiction. After years of court cases, Franckenstein eventually was fully exonerated, just before he died. Until her own dying day, Boyle denied ever having been a Communist Party member but she was named as a party member in several testimonies before Congress. In any case, she did not seem to have been a political activist before the war but after falling victim to the witch-hunts she became more outspoken in her support for the anti-war, anti-nuclear and civil rights movement. Cohn went on to become the darling of the New York smart set as a consummate wheeler-dealer who specialized in using his social connections to facilitate the circumvention of the law by his rich and powerful clients. He was charged repeatedly with ethics violations through his career and eventually was disbarred.

AT MRS. LIPPINCOTE'S was the first novel from British author Elizabeth Taylor, who shared her name with the actress who was at this time a promising ingénue. The writer Elizabeth Taylor became a well-respected chronicler of the British middle class. The ad this day promised that "you will find a sensitive, civilized and eager being, subtly and searchingly revealed." The novel, which is still in print, is a wartime story of a woman who joins her husband at an RAF base in a sleepy seaside town and finds it hard to assume the passive role of an officer's wife.

Vardis Fisher 's INTIMATIONS OF EVE takes place in prehistoric times, telling of the rebellion of a young man against the ruling matriarchy. Fisher was an idiosyncratic Idaho-based journalist and novelist. This book was the second in what would become a 12-volume series tracing man from the cave to modern day. He spent two decades on this series but it was not well-received by the public or the critics and he is better known for his popular novels about the West.

WINTER KILL was a well-received hard-boiled thriller from novelist and screenwriter Steve Fisher, one of the major figures of film noir who began his career writing for the pulps. The ad contained testimonials from the Herald Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Chicago Sun. The Sun noted that Fisher was the author of I Wake Up Screaming and Destination Tokyo. This tale of murder revolves around five disparate men who share a small, shabby office on lower Fifth Avenue. Out of print.

RELIGION

It was Palm Sunday and with Easter fast approaching several books with religious themes were advertised.

THE ROBE , a novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, was one of the biggest sellers of 1944 and was getting a seasonal push. It was about a Roman centurion who wins Christ's robe in a game of dice at the foot of the cross. Douglas, an ordained minister, was one of the most popular novelists of the day. It had made the Herald Tribune bestseller list this week. The subsequent movie version was also popular and the book is still in print

THE HUMAN LIFE OF JESUS by John Erskine, Professor Emeritus at Columbia, was deemed the perfect gift for Easter giving. The ad billed the author as a distinguished scholar and reverent layman. He had previously published books on Greek mythology, In print

PRAYERS AND POEMS was from Francis Cardinal Spellman, the arch-conservative head of the New York diocese. Out of print.

Thomas Nelson & Sons announced in an ad that THE REVISED STANDARD VERSION OF THE NEW TESTAMENT had sold over 250,000 copies in its first month. It was the first installment of this new Bible translation in modern English and was produced under the auspices of the National Council of Churches. It was also on the Herald Tribune bestseller list.