Books: For The Temple (Cont'd)

THE JEW OF ROME—Lion Feuchtwanger —Viking ($2.50).

Whether progress is provable or not, even praisers of times past would have to admit that the historical novel of today stacks up favorably alongside its peers of yesterday. Though past-partisans might not allow Robert Graves's Claudius books, Alfred Neumann's The Devil, Lion Feuchtwanger's Power and Josephus, Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers the palm over such classics as Defoe's The Journal of the Plague Year, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Flaubert's Salammbo, critical consensus would be that the modern exponents are obviously better grade than run-of-the-mine...