Books: The Postman Rings Twice

HOLMES-POLLOCK LETTERS Mr. Justice Holmes & Sir Frederick Pollock—Harvard (2 vols., $7.50).

One scorching day in 1862, a Boston Brahmin stood on the battlefield of Antietam, from which some 5,000 bodies had just been removed. The old man was the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, the author of The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay and The Chambered Nautilus—Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. He had heard that his son, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., 21, was shot through the neck, and he had dashed down from Boston to find the boy or his body. He found neither at Antietam....