Books: Remembrance of Things Past

LANTERNS ON THE LEVEE—William Alexander Percy—Knopf ($3).

One day last year William Alexander Percy, a slight, short Mississippian with a broad, tall forehead, gave up the management of his 3,000-acre plantation, gave up his 30-year law practice, and settled down to putter, think, remember. Last week Northerners and Southerners could read in Lanterns on the Levee just what kind of memories he had. They covered 54 years of an active, sensitive, civilized life. They showed their author to be not only the "poet laureate of Mississippi" and one of the South's bigger planters, but...