Books: Camille In Clover

THE PLAGUE AND I (254 pp.)—Betty MacDonald—Lippincott ($2.75).

One of the best formulas for making a bestseller is to give a jolly account of some painful personal experience. More than 1¼ million book buyers clucked happily over Betty MacDonald’s The Egg and I (TIME, March 4, 1946), which was a smiling-through-tears account of how she and husband Bob struggled to raise poultry. The Plague and I (now in its third printing) is all about how Betty succumbed to tuberculosis (in her post-Egg days) and was incarcerated in a grim sanatorium for 8½ months. A whimsical vivisection of almost every organ in the female body, and a description of the life & death around her—”small dry coughs, loose phlegmy coughs, short staccato coughs, long whooping coughs”—it has all the frank appeal of a public hanging.