Books: With Columbus

To THE INDIES—C. S. Forester—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Cecil Scott Forester's narrative is so excellent that it cries out loud for the one thing it lacks: a touch of the terse hypnosis that Hemingway manages with words. Aside from this lack, there is nothing to regret about To the Indies.

Don Narciso Rich, like Forester's Horatio Hornblower (TIME, May i, 1939), is capable of intelligent reflection; but he is not by nature a man of action. He is, rather, a sort of Leopold Bloom light-ballasted for a more adventurous sailing pace: plump, humane, timorous, uneasily...