Books: About but Not for Boys

THE CONFESSION (180 pp.)—Maria Soldati—Knopf ($3).

When shades of the prison house of maturity begin to close upon a growing boy, he has the chance, later denied him, of choosing his peculiar cell. The story of the choice is usually fascinating to the balding businessman who insists on recalling how, as a youth, he nearly ran away to sea, or to the physician who claims to have been, at 16, a poet. It takes an artist to make the story of adolescent crisis fascinating to others. Such an artist is Mario Soldati (The Capri Letters, TIME, Feb. 27, 1956), a busy, boisterous...