Books: Boston's Closed Corporation

THE PROPER BOSTONIANS (381 pp.)— Cleveland Amory—Dutton ($4.50).

Most of Boston's 2,550,000 people are apt to regard the city's Social Register as a catalogue of the select, and nothing but the select. But to the few dozen "First Families," the Register's 8,000 names are far too many. Some have refused to let their names be used; one, who called the Register a "damned telephone book," tears each year's edition in half and sends it back.

In The Proper Bostonians, young (30) Cleveland Amory, a Social Registerite himself, has set out to examine his peers. The...