Books: Grand Hotel

ATHENE PALACE—Countess Waldeck—-McBrlde ($2.75).

The Countess Waldeck takes current history out of the funeral parlor and puts it into the Grand Hotel. Her book is as perversely engrossing, gossipy and gamy as a clandestine conversation in the lobby. Her Grand Hotel is the Athene Palace in Bucharest, "the last cosmopolitan stage on which post-World-War Europe and the new-order Europe made a joint appearance." Theme of her book is the murder of a nation—Rumania.

For this sensational subject the subtle and shrewd Countess Waldeck is almost the ideal reporter. When she was Frau Dr. Ullstein in 1930, she was the storm center of a...