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FREEDOM OR DEATH, by Nikos Kazantzakis. Greece's greatest living writer in a passionate affirmation of patriotism, in which 19th century Cretans trade life for the hope of freedom from their Turkish oppressors.
KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, by George Orwell. An early (1936) novel of Orwell's, but new to the U.S. Its slashingly satirical attack on left-wing intellectuals and phony-proletarian martyrs of the '305 shows how early Orwell understood that it is the puny fellow traveler who clears the way for Big Brother.
NONFICTION
OLYMPIC: THE LIFE OF VICTOR HUGO, by Andre Maurois. One of the year's very best biographies: a just and urbane study of the virile French poet who was always lustily at home in life, in and out of exile.
THE NUN'S STORY, by Kathryn Hulme. The account of a spiritual failure that is more moving than most stories of spiritual success. After 17 years of selfless work and self-laceration, Sister Luke knew that she did not have the nun's vocation; she inspired a fascinating and consistently moving picture of a world and a life that cannot even be imagined by outsiders.
RICHARD THE THIRD, by Paul Murray Kendall. A U.S. historian's big, balanced biography of "Richard Crookback" that pleased even Britain's reviewers. Richard may or may not have murdered the princes in the tower, but this book accords him kingly virtues which readers of history have seldom suspected.
SURPRISED BY JOY, by C. S. Lewis. A partial autobiography by the Oxford don, which makes Christianity an exciting intellectual adventure as well as an act of faith. Its description of the road that led from indifference to skepticism to a firm belief in God makes this one of the most graceful and credible "conversion" books in years.
BERNARD SHAW, by St. John Ervine, and GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: MAN OF THE CENTURY, by Archibald Henderson. The answer to just about all questions that can arise about Shaw for a long time to come, Ervine's book is the more balanced and intimate, Henderson's the more massively researched. Together they leave no doubt of Shaw's gadfly genius.
RUSSIA LEAVES THE WAR, by George F. Kennan. Ex-Ambassador Kennan starts a massive (the first volume of three) attempt to show how U.S. liberal statesmanship tried, and failed, to play ball with Russian ideology during and after World War I. No book this year has documented so carefully and so effectively the impossibility of matching deceit with good will.
THE LETTERS OF THOMAS WOLFE, by Elizabeth Nowell. An unconscious autobiography of a sometimes great and nearly always tragic writer. Like Wolfe himself, and like his novels, the letters are one great, formless, undisciplined and tempestuous repository of lust for life, love for the U.S., and passion in personal relationships.
GALLIPOLI, by Alan Moorehead. A monument to the British defeat by the Turks at Gallipoli in 1915—which, like many another military disaster, is better remembered for valor than for folly. Combat writing that can stand with the classics in a much overwrit ten field.