Books: Utterances that are Strange

NEVER TO DIE—Josephine Mayer and Tom Prideaux—Viking ($3.50)

Nearest thing in the world to the architecture of ancient Egypt is the clean-sloping, massive 20th-century dam. Nearest thing to Egyptian stone-carving is the work of modern sculptors who feel that if they could surpass its life-loaded repose they would touch the summit of their art. Appreciation of such forms is not purely abstract. Through the imaginations of writers as diverse as Emil Ludwig and Thomas Mann, the civilized life of the Nile has begun to intrigue common thought as Classic Greece intrigued it for centuries. In Never to Die, a neat, lucid...