Books: People of Destiny

THE MAGIC PEOPLE: AN IRISHMAN APPRAISES THE JEWS (158 pp.)—Arland Ussher—Devin-Adair ($2.75).

Anyone wishing to "acquire a bloody nose," remarked a British reviewer last year, need only go to Dublin or Belfast and spout a few well-chosen lines from Arland Ussher's The Face and Mind of Ireland. Ussher, an Irish philosopher and art critic, paid his people handsome compliments, but he also larded in some remarks that no Irishman could take lying down—e.g., "To all appearance the Irish really have no sexual life, beyond the minimum necessary to perpetuate their cantankerous species."

Critic Ussher also declared that the Irish are in some...