Books: Chronicle of Steel

THE VALLEY OF DECISION—Marcia Davenport—Scribner ($3).

This big (790-page) novel by the author of Mozart and Of Lena Geyer is an unusually successful attempt to dramatize the central factor in the last half-century of U.S. life—big industry. To most writers, industry has been a monster—to be avoided as too grim or assailed as too inhuman. To Novelist Davenport industry is a fact to be understood. Her approach to such understanding is through the human relationships of a steelmaking family. The Valley of Decision is also a chronicle of American family life. It begins...