Books: Barroom Talk

LIFE IN A PUTTY KNIFE FACTORY—H. Allen Smith—Doubleday, Doran ($2).

Smith's new book, a clothesline strung from his best-selling Low Man on a Totem Pole, ought at least keep its author paying stiff-collar taxes. Like Totem Pole it consists of the sort of talk that might be had, by the hour, from any boozy, bawdy, abundant newspaperman. Such talk is dull in spots, complacently boorish in others, childish in some of its conclusions (Westbrook Pegler, though mentally "the human saddle sore" is as a prose stylist "one of the great writers of our day")....