Books: A Bumper Year

STORY OF A YEAR: 1848 (206 pp.]—Raymond Pos/ga/e—Oxford ($4.50).

Any year has its census of disaster and misery, but 1848 was a bumper year. The great social fissions of industrial society were beginning, and poverty was the nuclear reactor of a Europe suddenly grown unstable to the point of explosion. Raymond Postgate, a London journalist and historian, has assembled into a single pattern the scattered events of "The Year of Revolution," from Constantinople, where the palaces of the pashas burned down, to the Bosporus, to Sacramento, where the discovery of gold set a human...