Books: Recent Non-Fiction, Nov. 5, 1945

THE UNQUIET GRAVE — “Palinurus” (Cyril Connolly]—Harper ($2.50). Cyril Connolly is a British writer of a type almost unknown in the U.S.: an essayist (Enemies of Promise), critic and editor whose influence is as great as his output is small. During the past six years, his bright literary monthly, Horizon, has become must reading for British intellectuals. In The Unquiet Grave, Critic Connolly lets his sizable group of followers down. He serves up a bitter salad of clever preciosity and engaging self-pity: a collection of notes about love, art and religion jotted down while he was on fire-watching duty. Many a highbrow will not see the woods of “Palinurus’ ” neurotic despair for the trees of his precise and sometimes witty prose.

BLACK METROPOLIS—St. Clair Drake & Horace R. Cayton—Harcourt, Brace $5). In the same sort of cool, clinical case history in which Robert and Helen Lynd dissected the U.S. small town in Middletown, Anthropologist Drake and Sociologist Cayton have card-indexed the manners, mores and living conditions of the U.S. Negro in a northern city. Because of the tragic, potentially explosive material with which it deals, Black Metropolis is more engrossing, and may be more important, than the Lynds’ book. Educators, politicians, ordinary thoughtful citizens— and perhaps even a few Southern Senators —may find in this well-organized, well-presented picture of Chicago’s black South Side a required preparatory course in the increasingly critical subject of U.S. race relations.