Books: Too Much, Too Late

MR. BARUCH (784 pp.)—Margaret L. Coit—Houghton Mifflin ($7.50).

Pulitzer Prizewinning Biographer Margaret Coit (John C. Calhoun) has entered the supply-and-demand cycle of Baruch books at the critical phase where supply becomes glut. The truth is that the wily old (87) speculator has cornered the market with Baruch: My Own Story (TIME, Aug. ig), which has a grip on the No. 1 nonfiction spot of national bestseller lists. The first half of Mr. Baruch (Book-of-the-Month Club choice for December) is a blurred carbon copy of Baruch's own book, concerned mainly with his South Carolina boyhood and his stock market coups. Biographer Coit labored...