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The specter of World War III was conjured up by writer after writer on the atomic bomb, notably John Hersey in the laconic, harrowing Hiroshima; and also by the New Yorker's E. B. White in his earnest tract, The Wild Flag; by Sumner Welles in Where Are We Heading?; by a long series of pro-or anti-Soviet special pleaders. Probably the standout pro-Soviet pleading of the year was Soviet Politics by Williams Professor Frederick L. Schuman. The most widely read (75,000 copies) attack: I Chose Freedom, by disillusioned Soviet functionary Victor Kravchenko.
Of World War II histories, the shrillest (and most adeptly plugged by the press-gents) was likewise one of the most widely read: Ralph Ingersoll's bitter Top Secret, a boiling-mad assault on British wartime policies and "politics" which told more about Author Ingersoll than it did about the British. No top-ranking general told his own story, though Katherine Tupper Marshall told her husband's, Ike Eisenhower had a tactful Boswell in his naval aide, Harry C. Butcher (My Three Years with Eisenhower), and General Lewis H. Brereton published his diaries, which made him out a far duller man than his fellow flyers knew him to be. The war in China was presented from an anti-Chiang point of view by Theodore H. White and Annalee Jacoby in Thunder out of China, which sold like hot cakes.
Perhaps the most readable personal war reporting of the year was by Britain's Captain George Reid Millar, who described in Horned Pigeon and Waiting in the Night his hair-raising escape from a Nazi P.O.W. camp and subsequent undercover work with the French Maquis. Among correspondents, the New York Times's Drew Middleton and Australia's Alan Moorehead were the best of the I-witnesses. Among the unit combat histories already published: those of the 24th, 83rd, 84th, 103rd, 104th Divisions.
After Lincoln, F.D.R. The U.S. Civil War, in contrast, seemed remote, almost mythical, virtually genteel. But Clifford Dowdey's Experiment in Rebellion, 'Roy Meredith's Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man, Burton J. Hendrick's Lincoln's War Cabinet and a corporal's guard of books dealing with Lincoln himself testified to the apparently fathomless curiosity of the U.S. reader in the events of 1861-65.
The year also saw able new biographies of Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, Zachary Taylor, et al, but only Franklin Roosevelt seemed likely to become a biographers' favorite in the way Lincoln was. The first books were by his friends: former Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins' warm The Roosevelt I Knew and White House Physician, by Vice Admiral Ross T. Mclntire, each of which was admiring and modest. But Son Elliott, in As He Saw It, and Louis Adamic in Dinner at the White House, attempted debatable projections of Roosevelt's international views.
More Industry Than Skill. In the rich field of literary biography, Americans had a thin year. In Leo Tolstoy, Columbia Professor Ernest J. Simmons made use of much new material, and his book seemed likely to become a standard text. Matthew Josephson's Stendhal was the most thorough work in English on the French novelist, but its qualities arose more out of industriousness than skill.