With less than two weeks left to bone up for the election, U.S. citizens were not exactly rushing to buy books about the candidates. Stanley Walker's new campaign biography, Dewey; an American of This Century (Whittlesey House; $2.50), was no more a best seller than the year's two Roosevelt books: Compton Mackenzie's Mr. Roosevelt, Noel F. Busch's What Manner of Man?
Problems, not personalities, were on the reading public's mind. On most nonfiction best-seller lists were Sumner Welles's The Time for Decision, Charles & Mary Beard's A Basic History of the United States, Edgar Snow's People on Our Side, Walter Lippmann's U.S....