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She was fat and she was Jewish and her pride was inordinate. She hated her father, her mother, her sisters, the tenement they lived in, the market that gave them their living, the boys & girls she went to school with, the teachers who did not like her. She admits she was dirty and implies she was not much help around the house. She felt she was cut out for higher things, flew into tantrums when she was crossed. She drove her mother wild with suspicious fear by friendships with elderly men, by going to their rooms to talk. Her father beat her but it did no good. One day in her teens she fell ill; when she recovered her hearing was gone.
She became more rebelliously ferocious than ever, turned her gentler impulses to writing poetry, to talking to her soul: "Sh-sh-sh, dear, sh-sh-sh. Stop your quivering. Stop your quivering, dear. We know. We have each other. You must not quiver, dear." She ran away to Manhattan to be a poet, got a room in Greenwich Village, was fired from a succession of jobs. One day she went to a clinic and told the nurse she thought she was going to have a baby (though she did not really think so). She was sent to a home for wayward girls. During the five days she was there she suffered terribly. One of the worst things was watching the staff eat ''hot, golden biscuits, while we tore apart cold rolls." When they discovered she was not going to have a baby they lectured her, sent her away. She thought it was wonderful to be free again.
The Author will not allow her publishers to tell anything about her, but they say her autobiography is true, candid.
Western
GUNSIGHT TRAIL—Alan LeMay—Farrar & Rinehart ($2).
Detective stories have come a long way from Holmes. Best plots are no longer always like chess-problems with one master mind coolly moving toward a mate; clever detectifictioneers now often simplify the story, multiply and humanize the characters. Gimsight Trail is a combination of Western and murder story: it makes a lively yarn.
Cowpuncher Clay Hughes, heading for a job in Buckhorn Valley, made camp on Gunsight Pass. As he was smoking a bed-time cigaret he heard a mule bray, later a shot. He thought it was probably all right until a dying man staggered up to his fire, sprawled dead in the embers. Next day when Clay got to the "Lazy M" Ranch he foolishly let it be known that the murdered man had said something to him before he died. That night Clay was locked up, shot at through the window. Before he could find out what it was all about, hell began to pop in the Buckhorn. Luckily for him Clay was no softy, was also the hero. He fulfilled both roles handsomely before the smoke cleared away and peace and poten- tial plenteousness descended on the Valley.
†Published May 29.
* Published June 3.
*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.
*Published June 5.