Books: Big Woman

"CATHERINE, THE PORTRAIT OF AN EMPRESS—Gina Kaus—Viking ($3.50).

If not the most proper, the most enthralling study of mankind is woman. And a woman like Catherine the Great of Russia is indeed somebody to write a book about. Last week appeared neither the first nor the last of her biographies, but one of the best. Readers whose vague knowledge of 18th Century Russia had been based on vague cinemas, had their smatterings bettered and corrected by it; those who were more interested in women than in empresses found Catherine, The Portrait of an Empress,...