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The year produced a whole clutch of books on the nature of Communism and Communists, how hard it was to get along with them, what a relief it was to get away from them. The titles told most of the story, and little of it was new, though much of it could stand retelling: The God That Failed, by half a dozen celebrities who had swallowed the Marxist hook but didn't have the wit to gag until they got to the sinker; General Walter Bedell Smith's saga of ambassadorial frustration, My Three Years in Moscow; General Frank Howley's account of day-to-day business with the Russians, Berlin Command; Vladimir Petrov's My Retreat from Russia; ex-Leftist James Burnham's The Coming Defeat of Communism, which blueprinted a strategy for Western victory with the brilliant assurance of a man who could say "I was wrong" or "I told you so" with equal blandness. In a time when treason and charges of treason were becoming commonplace, Alistair Cooke's report on the Hiss-Chambers case, A Generation on Trial, was a conscientious and uncommonly well written courtroom report, but its title was a misnomer that suggested indulgence toward traitors.
A grimly wait-&-see but unpanicked public gave no more than passing notice to half a dozen books on the implications of atomic warfare, was more curious about Frank Scully's mess of conjecture and hearsay on Behind the Flying Saucers. A more legitimate curiosity about six men on a raft in the Pacific elevated to best-sellerdom a rousing record of adventure in Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki. In the midst of the new confrontation of East & West, books about World War II had somewhat the quality of mislaid telegrams, now found and opened but no longer urgent. Yet some were important for the record and others still generated excitement. Easily the most exciting and important were Winston Churchill's third and fourth volumes of his great history of the war, The Grand Alliance and The Hinge of Fate. Together with his amiable Painting as a Pastime and a book of speeches, Europe Unite, they established Churchill as one of the busiest writers of the year as well as one of the top royalty earners.
Cloak & Dagger Missions. Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy's Was There, while dry and cautious, belonged on the shelf of must reading for the history-minded. So did Admiral Frederick Sherman's Combat Command, General Mark Clark's spirited Calculated Risk, and General Bob Eichelberger's straightforward story of the Eighth Army in the Pacific, Our Jungle Road to Tokyo. Several of the personal-adventure books made excellent reading. Best of the lot was British Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean's Escape to Adventure, a lusty, well-written narrative of daring and luck in carrying out cloak & dagger missions in Russia, Persia and Yugoslavia. Eric Williams' The Wooden Horse and Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape were both rattling good stories of daring British breaks from the same German P.W. camp.
One book that gave the look of things just as they happened was LIFE'S Picture History of World War II. Though it was officially ineligible for bestseller rating (since most copies were sold direct and not over bookstore counters), Picture History, with half a million copies sold, was the year's real non-fiction bestseller.