CHRIST IN CONCRETE Pietro di DonatoBobbs-Merrill ($2.50).
This is the precocious first novel of a precocious bricklayer. Born 28 years ago in the slums of West Hoboken, N. J., handsome Pietro di Donato was 14 when his father was killed in a construction accident, leaving a widow and eight children. Pietro, a "bricklayer in diapers," took up his father's bricklaying trowel, has supported his family ever since. In his off-hours he read everything in sight, especially Russian novels.
Christ in Concrete, autobiographical but imaginative, is a passionate, humorous, pathetic story of peasant Italians in the U. S., at work, in tenements, in...