Books: The Permanent Revolution

CAPITALISM IN AMERICA (119 pp.)—Frederick Martin Stern—Rlnehart ($2).

When Frederick Martin Stern went to visit the U.S. in 1935, all his well-bred European friends warned him what to expect. Americans were rude, they everlastingly "chased the dollar," they were cultural midgets. For a while, Frederick Stern looked at the U.S. through morose-colored glasses, waited a good two years before moving his wife and two children from Switzerland to New Rochelle, N.Y. But even before that, he began asking himself a practical businessman's question: "How did people in the United States manage to build industries and cities so fast, how did they have...