Paperbacks for Christmas

...Anchor published Henry James's The Awkward Age ($1.25) ; and Everyman reprinted W. D. Howells's Indian Summer ($1.35...

...The final two volumes of Arnold Hauser's The Social History of Art (Vintage, $1.25 each) have also been published this year and bring that impressive survey down to very modern times...

...An Anthology of French Poetry from Nerval to Val?ry in English Translation (Anchor, $1.45) ; and The Poetry of Living Japan (Evergreen, $1.25), a representative sampling of contemporary Japanese poetry...

...a new collection of Ionesco plays, Am?d?e, The New Tenant, and Victims of Duty, $1.75...

...If you are in the market for shorter fiction, three good—and altogether different—collections are worth examining...

...Poetry, as I noted last month, has begun to appear in paperbacks in increasing quantity...

...Capote demands no adjustment...

...2.45), e. e. cummings's journal of his 1931 trip to Russia, should also be noted...

...95...

...Beckett manages to be both grim and comic...

...Thomas Aquinas (Meridian, $1.35) and Martin Buber's chronicle-novel For the Sake of Heaven (Meridian, $1.45...

...The best way to make a present of this book, it seems to- me, is to wrap up with it Noonday 1 ($1.25), the first issue of a very enterprising new paperback review which features The Last Summer, a hitherto untranslated short novel by Pasternak...

...Hill and Wang published Nobel Prize winner Par Lagerkvist's The Dwarf ($1.25), and Noonday published Robert Musil's Young Torless ($1.25), one of the most sensitive novels of modern times, a great delicate work...

...You might also investigate the plays published by Evergreen for a sampling of the great new French drama...

...Leader Constraint and Variety in American Education (Anchor, $.95...

...Flaubert's Sentimental Education ($1.45), for instance, was reprinted by New Directions...

...Photographs, drawings, passages from Schweitzer's animal observations, and Joy's very full introduction make this a likely candidate for Christmas giving...

...Three other historical studies, each meriting the term "monumental," have also heen issued this year as paperbacks: Samuel Dill's Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire (Meridia,n, $1.95), Ralph Roeder's The Man of the Renaissance (Meridian, $1.95), an analysis of the Italian Renaissance in terms of the lives of Savonarola, Machiavelli, Castiglione and Aretino ; and Henri Pirenne's two-volume A History of Europe (Anchor, $.95 each), actually a history of Europe from the fall of Rome through the Reformation...

...Also included in Noonday 1 are fine poems by Harold Kaplan and Robert Cassell, a story by I. B. Singer, and short pieces by Ernst Juenger...

...And, for that matter, the record of a very different Russian tour, eimi (Evergreen...

...And Meridian Books, which has recently been devoting a large percentage of its list to things historical and political, has published Harold Lasswell's Politics: Who Gets What, When, How ($1.35), Pieter Geyl's Debates With Historians ($1.35), and Dwight Macdonald's Memoirs of a Revolutionist ($1.45), a fine book, outspoken, witty and wise...

...Enlarged by the addition of two new chapters (one on the significance of the Hungarian Revolution) and revised throughout, this new editioji of a very important book shows in the parallel and overlapping rise of anti-Semitism, imperialism and, finally, totalitarianism the growing horror, the "absolute evil," which must be faced if human dignity is to survive...

...An interesting and very human presentation of Schweitzer, Charles R. Joy's edition of The Animal World of Albert Schweitzer, has also been recently reprinted by Beacon at $1.75...

...If all of these purchases in the territory of drama haven't emptied your purse, you might want to consider some of the books about theater, Stark Young's Immortal Shadows (Dramabooks, $1.65), for instance, or James Agate's very interesting anthology...

...For those who like to become experts on a,n area, the new paperbacks offer all sorts of opportunities...

...Because of the limited size and the frequent grayness of their illustrations, most paperbacks devoted to art have something less than satisfactory illustrations...

...If drama addicts are on your list, you have no problem at all...

...Though it has only a very tenuous relationship to music, Truman Capote's extremely funny account of the Porgy and Bess Russian tour of 1955, The Muses Are Heard (Modern Library Paperback...

...Two of the principal roots of modern drama are also very neatly revealed in Eleven Plays of the Greek Dramatists (Grosset's Universal Library, $1.25) and Living Age's Religious Drama 2 ($1.45), which assembles 21 medieval mystery and morality plays...

...Altogether, a first-rate way to start your friends off on a good new year...

...1958's reprints in the area of religion also ranged very widely, from Robert Lowie's Primitive Religion (Grosset's Universal Library, $1.25), through William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (Mentor, $.50), to Albert Schweitzer's The Psychiatric Study of Jesus (Beacon, $.95...

...Three anthologies that would make fine gifts are Ten Centuries of Spanish Poetry (Evergreen, $2.45), a big, goodlooking book with facing-page English translations...

...Paperbacks for Christmas By John Unterecker Assistant professor of English, Columbia University IT SEEMS IN ORDER n o w to assemble for literate last-minute holiday shoppers a list of the most interesting of the hundreds of paperbacks published during the year which—largely because of the limits of my eyesight and THE NEW LEADER'S space—have in one way or another escaped review...

...Science is, as usual, well represented with popularizations, but the serious reader might be very happy to receive two publications by Ann Arbor Paperbacks, Sir James Jeans' Physics and Philosophy ($1.75) and Sir Arthur Eddington's The Philosophy of Physical Science ($1.75...

...Two titles of special interest are Jacques Maritain's St...

...This important book, a sort of academic equivalent to The Organization Man, needs to be read and understood not only by educators but, more importantly, by all men and women who want their children to be educated rather than housed in their highschool and college years...

...Gore Vidal's A Thirsty Evil (Signet, $.35) dismantles a whole set of lonely gentlemen...

...A number of important works long out of print or available only in expensive editions cropped up in this year's paperback lists...

...Top collection of those printed this year is, in my opinion, Jean Giraudoux: Four Plays, $1.75...

...Broad surveys such as Rudolf Sohm's Outlines of Church History (Beacon, $1.95), and anthologies of essays suoh as Meridian's Religion in America ($1.45), cover really vast territories, while books such as Louis Ginsberg's essays on the achievement of Talmudic Judaism, Students, Scholars and Saints (Meridian, $1.45), and Ernst Troeltsch's Protestantism and Progress (Beacon, $1.45) work within a considerably narrower range...

...Books which might be of use to music lovers or those just becoming acquainted with music include Modern Music (Mentor, $.50), which those who know more music than I inform me is "very clear" and "very helpful...

...Two spectacular exceptions are Ladislas Segy's African Sculpture (Dover, $2.00), the handsomest paperback I know, and Emile Male's Religious Art (Noonday, $1.65...

...Heading the list is, of course, New Directions' soft-cover reprint of Boris Pasternak's autobiography, Safe Conduct ($1.35), a volume which offers as a generous bonus four short stories and a sampling of Pasternak's poetry...

...Heading the list is David Riesman's stimulating, disquieting and painfully accurate 24 The Neu...

...Other art books well worth considering are Langdon Warner's The Enduring Art of Jap an (Evergreen, $1.95) and W. G. Archer's The Loves of Krishna (Evergreen, $1.95...

...These beautifully illustrated, well-designed books set a real standard of publication...

...For a final note, I might suggest a few presents you might want to give to yourself...

...And, so that you can sleep afterward, you should perhaps pick up at the same time Bergen Evans's skeptical tour-de-force, The Natural History of Nonsense (Vintage, $1.25...

...One of these certainly is Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (Meridian, $1.95...

...If fiction is one area where the paperbacks can really he said to have served the reader well, the broad fields of history, economics and political science are others, With so much to choose from, one ca,n only try to pick out the high spots...

...Evelyn Waugh's comedy, on the other hand, is satirical and funny...

...Decline and Fall (Grosset's Universal Library, $1.25) is, for those unacquainted with him, a good introduction to early Waugh...

...Kay Boyle's Three Short Novels (Beacon, $1.60) probes character for its secret, fierce roots...

...Another disquieting, controversial book is Schubert and Lapp's Radiation (Compass, $1.251...

...The English Dramatic Critics (Dramabooks, $1.45), or Antonin Artaud's revolutionary The Theater and its Double (Evergreen, $1.95...

...Less bulky but ,no less valuable, Harold J. Laski's The American Presidency was reissued by Grosset's Universal Library ($1.45...

...I have particularly in mind Jean Genet's The Balcony, $1.75...

...Ernest Newman's twovolume "definitive treatment" of Great Operas (Vintage, $1.25) ; and an a,nthology of biographical and critical studies of 21 jazz musicians, The Jazz Makers (Evergreen, $1.95...

...Fiction has always been staple fare in the paperbacks but this, it seems to me, was an especially good year for the reader interested in filling a bookshelf with major novelists...

...and Beckett's Endgame, $1.25...

...Less delicate but quite as powerful, Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable (Evergreen Original, $1.45) at last makes available in English the final volume of that bare, compassionate trilogy of anguish (Molloy and Malone Dies are the other volumes—both also in print as Evergreen paperbacks) through which Beckett defines man's aimless wandering in a chaotic world...

...Once one adjusts to cummings's individualistic style, one recognizes a writer of wit, of sensitive and eloquent statement...

...Your best bet is merely to keep up with Hill and Wang's Dramabook series, contributing each year the new play collections to your lucky friends...

...One could assemble a fine package, for instance, on China from Marcel Granet's Chinese Civilization (Meridian, $1.95), Herbert A. Giles's A History of Chinese Literature (Evergreen, $2.45), and Arthur Waley's The Way and its Power (Evergreen, $1.75...

...It won't decrease radiation dangers, but it will at least help keep you this side of the psychoanalyst's couch...

...And if you gave the first volume of Elizabeth G. Holt's A Documentary History of Art for Christmas last year, you will December 15, 1958 11 probably want to follow it with the second volume (Anchor, $1.45) which begins with Michelangelo and works up through the 18th century...

...And for science fiction fans who haven't already read it, plan to buy as a stockingstuffer Alfred Bester's Starburst (Signet, $.35), a witty, welcome proof that science fiction can be first-rate prose...

...had better be mentioned here...

...And for those who have never tackled Gertrude Stein, Three Lives (Modern Library Paperback, $.95) is certainly the best starting point...

...And a very neat package of two books that explicate each other could be compounded from The Poems of Robert Graves (Anchor, $1.25) and Graves's "Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth," The White Goddess (Vintage, $1.25...