Books: American Stoic

DEATH OF A MAN (181 pp.)—Lael Tucker Wertenbaker—Random House ($3.50).

Charles Christian Wertenbaker was a member of one of Virginia's grand old families, an able journalist (on and off from 1931 to 1948 with FORTUNE, LIFE and TIME), an occasional novelist (To My Father, The Death of Kings), a big man with a strong appetite for good living. This is his widow's story from the time he learned, in the fall of 1954, that he had cancer of the lower bowel until, less than four months later, he committed suicide, at 53, by slashing his wrists with a razor handed to him...