Books: On the Ropes

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES (308 pp.)—Ernest Hemingway—Scribner ($3).

Hemingway was the champ all right. He was past 50, but still the champ, and he was ready to take on all comers. He had said so himself, to a New Yorker writer, only a few months before: "It is sort of fun to be 50 and feel you are going to defend the title again. I won it in the twenties [A Farewell to Arms] and defended it in the thirties (To Have and Have Not] and the forties [For Whom the Bell...