Books: Great Life?

IF YOU DON'T WEAKEN—Oscar Ameringer—Holt ($2.75).

The East has no labor newspaper like Oklahoma City's weekly American Guardian, no labor editor like the Guardian's 69-year-old Oscar Ameringer. Now available to all sections, however, is Editor Ameringer's autobiography. Too good a book to be dismissed with the term "Americana," If You Don't Weaken breathes a spirit (grass roots Socialist) that the U. S. would have been poor without.

Oscar Ameringer's life began in a German village on the Danube in August 1870. When he was 15, having had flute playing and insurgence beaten into...