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THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, by Hugh Thomas. The author is the first historian to write about this little-understood prologue to World War II neither as a partisan nor an embittered memoirist. His book is likely to be the definitive one for some years to come.
NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, by James Baldwin. Essayist Baldwin does not need the advantage of a black skin to give his work the cutting edge of indignation; his mind and style are sharp enough. As a Negro, he takes himself and his race as his subject matter, is always disturbingly provocative, though sometimes too bitter to be persuasive.
THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1960, by Theodore H. White. A superb job of reporting, tense as only a few novels are, by a journalist who let his partisanship for Kennedy be known, but did not let it cloud his judgment.
THE ROAD PAST MANDALAY, by John Masters. The author, a British officer in the Indian army in Burma during World War II and a professional novelist (Bhowani Junction) since then, writes with skill and passion of the many faces of his war.
AN ONLY CHILD, by Frank O'Connor. An account of the author's boyhood in a wet, ruined, pious, oppressed Cork slum. The heroine is O'Connor's mother; her son writes of her with eloquence and wonder.
THE CHILDREN OF SANCHEZ, by Oscar Lewis. From an unlikely source—tape-recorded interviews with five Mexico City slum dwellers—comes a work of pathos and drama. The language is fierce, rich and foul, and the folkways might startle even a resident of Tortilla Flat.
THE SUPER-AMERICANS, by John Bainbridge. Another excellent piece of reporting, this one a maliciously objective portrait of Texas by an observer sly enough to realize that this improbable area is its own satire.
THE AGE OF REASON BEGINS, by Will and Ariel Durant. The first of three projected volumes on the age of reason is one of the best in Durant's vast Story of Civilization.
THE COMING FURY, by Bruce Catton. The Civil War's ablest popularizer retreads the hallowed ground, this time tracing the nation's course through the outbreak of war. The author takes the reasonable view that the disparate leaders on both sides were less heroes and villains than men tossed about by a confusion of events.
Three mighty collections in progress for historians and readers of history: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Volume III), edited by Leonard W. Labaree; The Adams Papers (Volumes I to IV), edited by L. H. Butterfield; and The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Volumes I and II), edited by Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke.
FICTION
RADITZER, by Pefer Motthiessen. The title figure of this unusual war novel is a devious sniveler who is an irritation and a danger to the men around him, but who, by a claim based subtly on weakness, is able to coax and goad an exasperated stronger man into protecting him. The ending is powerful, the entire book impressive.
A BURNT-OUT CASE, by Graham Greene. A world-renowned architect, who has arrived at the feeling that fame and the love of many women are not sufficient to warm his cooling soul, finds the touch of life again among the inhabitants of an African leprosarium.