Books: Rough Diamond

BARNEY BARNATO—Richard Lewinsohn—Button ($3).

U. S. financial history is crowded with accounts of self-made millionaires who never let wealth change their mining-camp habits. How rare they are in the financial annals of other countries was demonstrated last week by the awed fashion in which Richard Lewinsohn (The Profits of War) wrote about the democratic simplicity of Barney Barnato, one of the roughest rough diamonds among South African diamond millionaires.

Born Barney Isaacs in London's Whitechapel, Barnato became a juggler, comedian, boxer, diamond merchant and eventually financial master of the South African mining fields....