Books: Scary and Screwy

SINCE YESTERDAY — Frederick Lewis Allen—Harper ($3).

In Frederick Lewis Allen's best-selling story of the 1920s, Only Yesterday (1931), the nation's readers took much the same pseudo-rueful pleasure as a man might get out of being reminded how he cut up at the Country Club that night in 1924 ("I never did any such thing!" etc.). In Since Yesterday, which is Mr. Allen's record of the 1930s, readers will probably find a more genuine pain in the pleasures of recollection.

Only Yesterday was practically alone in its field at the time it appeared. (Not until...