Books: The Ships He Loved

The SET OF THE SAILS (292 pp.]—Alan Villiers—Scribner ($3.75).

At the age of eleven, Australian Alan Villiers secretly renamed himself after a sailor who had come to his father's house in Melbourne for dinner. To a boy who dreamed of going to sea in a sailing ship, Christian Christiansen naturally seemed a finer name than Villiers. As 45-year-old Villiers' autobiography shows, his feeling for sailing ships has never left him. His book is full of the names and the nearly human foibles of the ships he has known. It is also his tract for the times: sailing as the solution to man's...