Books: Non-Fiction

The year’s true bestseller was the Bible. Though this is so every year, it was true this time with an important difference. The new Revised Standard Version, product of 15 years of scholarship, was one of the few Bibles ever copyrighted. With the best book-shopping weeks still ahead, 1,600,000 copies had been sold. Next to the Bible on the bestseller list stood Catherine Marshall’s warm, clear-eyed biography of her husband, the late chaplain of the Senate, A Man Called Peter.

Not so searching or reflective but nearly good enough to set beside Witness was Austrian Physicist Alexander Weissberg’s The Accused, one of the best accounts yet of what happened to victims of the Kremlin purge in 1937. And those who still doubted the Communists’ double-dealing in the Spanish Civil War could read George (Nineteen Eighty-Four) Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, posthumously published in the U.S., one of the best books yet written about that tragic episode.

Politics & War. Election year brought the usual flutter of campaign quickies. John Gunther’s superficial Eisenhower might well have been called Outside Ike; the books on Adlai Stevenson were competent profiles at best. None of them did startlingly well. A curious, garishly illustrated hodgepodge of miscellaneous Trumaniana called Mr. President—its publication had been encouraged by Harry as a kind of farewell gesture—passed the 100,000 mark.

The best of the books about World War II was Australian Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe. Its blunt criticism of U.S. foreign and military policy aroused some resentment, but there was mostly praise for its skillful, informed exposition of the fighting side of the war. Commander Edward Beach, U.S.N., wrote the most exciting of the action books in Submarine!, which showed for the first time what submerged combat was really like. The services were still pumping out solid tomes that celebrated and detailed their contributions. Among the few U.S. war leaders who had not yet published their memoirs, only Admiral Ernest J. King came forth with a full-dress account. His Fleet Admiral King reflected the toughness that made him valuable, but only a student or a devoted Navy man could follow a happy course through its battleship-grey prose.

Two important Americans made important contributions to their fellow citizens’ understanding of the world. The late Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s Private Papers described the growth of a good mind from narrow isolationism to a sharp sense of world responsibility. In Journey to the Far Pacific, Governor Tom Dewey brought back a comprehensive and surprisingly readable account of Asia’s problems.

History & Biography. Abraham Lincoln still was the figure of whom neither writers nor readers seem to tire. To the 5,000 books about him already written, another dozen or so were added in ’52. Two were worth adding to any bookshelf: Stefan Lorant’s Lincoln—A Picture Story of His Life, and Benjamin Thomas’ lucid, informed, one-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln. For Civil War fans it was a leaner-than-usual year, but a few books stood out. Among them: Bell Wiley’s The Life of Billy Yank, down-to-earth researches into the daily life of Union soldiers; Glory Road, the second volume of Bruce Catton’s highly readable history of the Army of the Potomac; Volume III of Kenneth Williams’ fine study of Union generalship, Lincoln Finds a General.

The year’s diet of biography and autobiography was as varied as a good smorgasbord. In Arrow in the Blue, Arthur Koestler began to tell the story of his progress from Viennese bedrooms to the grimmer places of the yogis and the commissars. Dancer Agnes de Mille published Dance to the Piper, a spirited success story; and Professor John H. Wilson skillfully told all that anyone needs to know about the girl friend of Charles II in Nell Gwyn, Royal Mistress. There were two important and readable books on Napoleon. One was Napoleon at St. Helena, the journal kept by his grand marshal in exile during the months when the ex-Emperor was dying; the other, a first-rate full life, Napoleon Bonaparte, by Britain’s J. M. Thompson. A book Napoleon would have enjoyed, and one that might have helped to explain his defeat, was The Letters of Private Wheeler, a fine collection of letters-to-the-family by a stout, shrewd fellow who fought with Wellington.

Herbert Hoover produced two more volumes of his Memoirs, vigorously denounced the New Deal and disclaimed responsibility for the Great Depression. For Douglas Southall Freeman, the end of his major work was in sight as he completed volume V of his massive George Washington. F.D.R., too soon, perhaps, was getting a full-scale biography in six volumes by University of Illinois Historian Frank Freidel; Vol. I, The Apprenticeship, was quite pedestrian.

Among the literary biographies, Lawrence & Elisabeth Hanson’s Necessary Evil: The Life of Jane Welsh Carlyle was outstanding for thoroughness, understanding and delicacy. Rupert Hart-Davies was too good a friend of his subject to write a final Hugh Walpole, but it was lively, shrewd, and at least never claimed that Walpole was a great writer. Poet Conrad Aiken’s autobiography, Ushant, was a book for the few who never stumbled while reading Joyce’s Ulysses. Curiously dated by its stream-of-consciousness technique, it told all about a writer who could never decide whether England or the U.S. was home. Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay was a sketchy but frank self-portrait by the poet whose very name was poetry to young men & women of the fevered ’20s. Dixon Wecter did not live to finish Sam Clemens of Hannibal, but helping hands wound up a thoroughly pleasant biography of a young scamp later known as Mark Twain.

Two vastly different biographical books had solid successes, one predictable, the other a surprise. Tallulah had all the ham to be expected from Actress Bankhead; at year’s end it was at the top of the bestseller list. The other, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, was the deeply moving journal of a teen-age Jewish girl in hiding from the Gestapo (she died later in a concentration camp).

Among many readable books of true adventure, perhaps the most exciting was Ann Davison’s Last Voyage, the tense report of a tragic effort, made with her husband, to cross the Atlantic in a small boat. Aldous Huxley made an appearance with an urbane history of some 17th century French Ursuline nuns who were possessed by The Devils of London. Rome and a Villa, an intellectual love affair that Author Eleanor Clark carried on with the Eternal City, made better reading than all the year’s travel books put together. The finest picture book of the year was Henri Carder-Bresson’s book of magnificent photographs, The Decisive Moment.