ONE YEAR'S READING FOR FUN (166 pp.)Bernard BerensonKnopf ($5).
The late Bernard Berenson called World War II a "manquake" and calmly retired to his book-lined storm cellarthe 50,000-volume library he had amassed 'at his famed Tuscan villa, / Tatti, near Florence. This took a certain amount of fatalism in wartime Italy, Nazi Germany's ally, since Berenson was born a Jew (he was converted to Roman Catholicism), and his only safety lay in a promise from Mussolini's son-in-law, Foreign Minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, that he would not be molested. The master pundit of Renaissance art, his ailing wife Mary (who died in 1945),...
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