Non-Fiction Reviews

The Sunday Times Book Review on April 14 gave more space to reviews of non-fiction books it considered of special significance than it did to fiction.

The lead non-fiction review went to Chicago journalist Lloyd Lewis’s assessment of MIDWEST AT NOON by Graham Hutton, who had been head of the British Information Office in Chicago during the war years. Lewis noted that it seemed to have been hastily written but in some respects compared favorably to DeTocqueville's writings as an interesting set of insights on American society by an outsider.

BREAKING THE BUILDING BLOCKADE by Robert Lasch addressed the nation’s dire postwar housing situation. Reviewer Arthur D. Gayer called it the most important domestic issue of the day. Housing was being debated in the press and in the federal, state and local governments. Lasch laid out the problem, discussed the barriers to its resolution and offered some ideas for a solution. Economist Arthur D. Gayer reviewed. For more on this book, the review and the problem addressed SEE HERE.

Two books about the Soviet Union, THE PEOPLES OF THE SOVIET UNION by eminent fellow traveler Corliss Lamont reviewed by former Communist Bertram D. Wolfe and RUSSIA AND THE WESTERN WORLD by Max M. Laserson, presented differing views of America’s postwar rival. Lamont praised the USSR for the supposed democratic equality enjoyed by its many minorities, an assessment that Wolfe found absurd. Laserson saw Stalin’s USSR as a betrayal of the Russian Revolution but was optimistic about its future. MORE HERE.

EXPERIMENT IN GERMANY: The Story of an American Intelligence Officer was written by Saul K. Padover and reviewed by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., whose 1945 The Age of Jackson won the Pulitzer Prize. The author’s assessment of the postwar situation in Germany was based on his experiences in the Army's Psychological Warfare Division. He asserted that the German people had offered no resistance to the Nazis and showed little contrition over the crimes that had been committed by the regime. He criticized the early days of the occupation both for the pillaging and sexual assaults perpetrated by American troops and for the US policy initially of leaving local administration in the hands of the people who had run the towns during the Nazi years. Most controversially, he asserted that since the Germans had suffered relatively light casualties from the war, they would again set out on a campaign for world domination within 20 years. Schlesinger noted that the Germans actually had suffered heavy casualties during the war and were currently facing widespread starvation and major dislocations caused by the influx of millions of German speakers expelled from Eastern Europe. He also noted that Padover ignored the wartime resistance efforts within Germany such as the aborted July 20 plot.

VEDANTA FOR THE WESTERN WORLD edited and with an introduction by novelist Christopher Isherwood was reviewed by Denver Lindley. It offered a basic explanation of this school of Hinduism through the words of its celebrity Western practitioners like Isherwood and Broadway playwright John van Druten as well as swamis. MORE HERE.

Lafcadio Hearn, was a new biography by Vera McWilliams of the turn-of-the-century writer whose writings about Japan helped form the positive image many Americans had of the country before Pearl Harbor. Reviewer Willard Price wrote that the biography shed some light on why Hearn “seriously misled the western world as to the nature and aims of the Japanese.” Price wrote extensively about Japan before, during and after the war and reputedly served as a spy for the US government during his frequent pre-war trips to the country for National Geographic.

Man-Eaters of Kumaon by professional tiger hunter Jim Corbett was the Book of the Month Club co-selection for April and a future best seller.

Book Reviewing by John Drury was dismissed as an “elementary text” that “offers little that is not obvious to book review readers."

Composer and Critic by Max Graf was a book about the influence that music criticism has had on composers from the pre-baroque era up to the time the book was written. The 72-year old Austrian Graf taught music criticism at the New School. He was one of an elite faculty of refugee artists and scholars who had taken up positions at the Manhattan college during the war. Reviewer Mark Schubart, who began his long association with the Juilliard School and later the Lincoln Center in 1946, thought Graf had “written a “charming, comprehensive, intelligent treatise,” but he had gone too easy on the critics who Schubart believed were usually “splendidly and consistently wrong” in their judgments of new music, preferring “inoffensive mediocrity” while decrying any composer who broke new ground as “a disturber of the peace.”

The Journals of Charles King Newcomb, edited with a biographical and critical introduction by Judith Kennedy Johnson, and Wandering in the Wilderness, compiled by William Elliot Wood, were reviewed together. William B. Hamilton found little of interest in the journals of these two obscure 19th- century figures, one a fringe member of the Transcendental movement, the other a disciple of Swedenborg.

Modern German Literature by Victor Lange was reviewed by Charles Neider. Lange was an authority on German culture who was teaching in 1946 at Cornell. Neider, who later became a respected novelist and authority on Mark Twain, marveled at Lange’s lack of rancor toward the writers of a nation whose soldiers had burned his grandmother to death along with her fellow Jews in the synagogue of the Bessarabian town from which Lange’s parents had emigrated.

No Time for Tears by Lora Wood Hughes was the winner of the Houghton-Mifflin Life in America award. It is the autobiography of a nurse whose career stretched back to the turn of the century. It is “a lively biography,” according to reviewer Lucy Greenbaum and is still in print.

Radar: It's Genesis and its Future by Orrin E. Dunlap Jr. was reviewed dismissively by D.G. Fink.

Yankee Storekeeper by R.E. Gould was the folksy autobiography of a Maine storekeeper and raconteur. Reviewer R.T. Bond recommended reading it aloud “as the best way of enjoying the full flavor of its tart humor and philosophy.” In Print.