WITH the publishing industry churning out a flood of un, anti, null- and non-books, it has not been a good year for genuine books. But a few emerged—although perhaps no single volume could pass the Robinson Crusoe test beloved of Sunday supplements (Which ten books, apart from a guide to edible fungi, would you take with you if cast away on a desert island?).
Two trends should be noted. One is that while middle-aged women of pious persuasion are novelizing as hugely as ever, adolescent girl threnodists have fallen into a decline. The other is that lately there has been less good fiction than good nonfiction.
NONFICTION
SHADOWS ON THE GRASS, by Isak Dinesen. The author, who is Denmark's finest writer and one of the world's best, writes a dry, elegiac reminiscence of the years she spent from 1921 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya. Miss Dinesen's principal theme is the feudal harmony of white master and black servant, making the book seem removed by centuries, not decades, from the present.
THE WHITE NILE, by Alan Moorehead. The last half of the 19th century saw the Nile traced to its sources and the vast, hostile area it drained subdued by such peculiarly Victorian heroes as Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley, "Chinese" Gordon and Kitchener. A too-brief book that is the most readable of the year's popular histories.
FATE IS THE HUNTER, by Ernest K. Gann. Author Gann was an airline and Air Trans port Command pilot before he became a bestselling storyteller (The High and the Mighty], and he writes convincingly in this excellent memoir of why he quit flying—his growing belief, supported by all too much chilling evidence, that he had pressed his luck too far. Not recommended for above-sea-level reading.
RESISTANCE, REBELLION AND DEATH, by Albert Camus. These actuelles, as the author called them, are short, passionate sermons on the theology of politics, justice and death, several of them written during World War II as editorials for the underground paper Combat. Camus thought as highly of them as he did of his novels and longer philosophical essays, and he may well have been right,
RING OF BRIGHT WATER, by Gavin Maxwell. A lyric bouquet in memory of the best pal the author ever had—a lovable, rubbery otter named Mij, who could clown like a dog, slink like a cat, and swim better than anything else that ever got wet. Maxwell respects his old friend's dignity, and never allows his recollections to become cute.
RUSSIA AND THE WEST UNDER LENIN AND STALIN, by George F. Kennon. Some of the author's arguments prove merely that almost everything about Soviet Russia is arguable; but much of his analysis—particularly his criticism of the Allies' World War II policy of unconditional surrender —is brilliant. Now U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia and long one of the State Department's top-ranking experts on Russia, Kennan writes in prose that is unfailingly graceful.
SUMER: THE DAWN OF ART, and THE ARTS OF ASSYRIA, both by Andre Parrot. These splendid books are the first two in a 40-volume survey of man's art. The project's guiding hand, as might be expected, is that of that homme perpetually engage, Andre Malraux.