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Books: A Choice of the Past

3 minute read
TIME

There are several good ways of mining the past in the writing business, and this year’s authors have proved that all of them can be made to yield rich lore. The vogue of well-researched biography has rarely been more popular; new histories, letters and memoirs descend on U.S. book counters week after week. Occasionally, the researcher takes his camera with him and produces a pictorial report, as in the University of Chicago’s handsome Persepolis (see pictures on following pages). But again and again, researchers market their researches as historical fiction. This fall, with the Christmas trade in cheerful mind, publishers have trundled out something new from almost every surefire era. A sampling:

Sixth Century Constantinople (The Female, by Paul I. Wellman; Doubleday). One more version of the fascinating story of Theodora, the clever charmer who rose from a harlot in the Street of Women to become Justinian’s wife and empress of the Byzantine Empire. Full of dancing girls, whores, eunuchs and Byzantine VIPs.

Medieval Ireland and Cornwall (The Enchanted Cup, by Dorothy James Roberts; Appleton-Century-Crofts). A tearful new version of the old Tristram-Isolde love story which in no way improves on the previous versions of Sir Thomas Malory, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edwin Arlington Robinson and Richard Wagner.

14th Century Rome (Bettina Colonna, by Michel Durafour; Bobbs-Merrill). A souped-up account of the meteoric political rise and fall of Cola di Rienzo (fact), and how lovely, ruthless Bettina won and lost him (fiction), enlivened by pre-Renaissance skulduggery and dalliance.

15th Century England (The Swan and the Rose, by Francis Leary; A. A. Wyn). The Wars of the Roses, as seen by a well-thewed commoner who allows neither defeat nor the threat of death to budge his Lancastrian allegiance.

17th Century France and Martinique (Marie of the Isles, by Robert Gaillard; A. A. Wyn). The story of a single-minded girl who gets two doctors to certify that she still has her virginity so that she can lose it to the man she loves; told with a strong French accent on sex and sadism.

18th Century France (The Devil’s Laughter, by Frank Yerby; Dial). In the turmoil of Revolution and Terror, a third-estate hero runs afoul of a villainous second-estate chap, toys with a tawny-haired demimondaine whose kisses curl his toes inside his boots, but nobly marries Fleurette, a blind flower girl.

18th Century America (Fire and the Hammer, by Shirley Barker; Crown). A willful girl with a pretty but empty head pursues a recalcitrant Quaker for more than a decade and finally gets him.

The Civil War (The Valiant Virginians, by James Warner Bellah; Ballantine). A drawly, short-order helping of war sketches that simmers down to sweet essence of molasses.

Still in print, for those who want a good historical about 19th Century Russia: War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy.

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