Books: Chile con Carne

SHANGHAI '37—Vicki Baum—Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

Author Vicki Baum this week moved her Grand Hotel from Europe to the Orient. Her scene: a Shanghai hotel, in the summer of 1937. Her cast of ten carefully disparate characters: a Chinese banker, his Occidentalized son, a refugee Jewish surgeon who had won the Iron Cross, a svelte White Russian married to a drunken English millionaire, a bespectacled little Japanese journalist, a trained nurse from Iowa and her self-pitying fiance from Hawaii, a tuberculous coolie, a young German musician turned opium addict.

Shanghai '37 is Novelist Baum's usual chile con carne ("her eyes went on a pleasure...

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