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Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre went on grubbing for the sources of France's moral decay in Troubled Sleep, while Marcel Aymé took a tolerant satirist's view of that same decay in The Miraculous Barber. Sweden's Pär Lagerkvist won the Nobel Prize (he was Faulkner's runner-up last year) soon after his Barabbas was published in the U.S. It was the story of a brutish man, spared from crucifixion in place of Jesus, who carried the memory of Golgotha through the rest of his life. Only a brief sample of Lagerkvist, it nevertheless commanded respect. Two other foreign novels, hard to classify, showed skill with out-of-the-way locales. Edgar Mittelholzer's Shadows Move Among Them dealt with a highly unconventional missionary in British Guiana. From Haiti came The Pencil of God, by Pierre Marcelin and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin, a fascinating study of the power of voodoo.
NON-FICTION
The year's non-fiction was plummed with good reading, mainly concerned with the middle-road facts of modern life. Most of the war books told of battles long ago. A bookish fellow from another planet—unless he saw David Douglas Duncan's chilling pictures of the fighting in Korea, This Is War!—might have found it hard to believe that the nation was engaged in one of the stubbornest wars in its history.
Russia and Communism were getting to be known quantities instead of bogeymen. Edward Crankshaw's Cracks in the Kremlin Wall expressed one expert's judgment that Russia is feebler than supposed. Other careful books exposed Communism in practice. Margarete Buber (Under Two Dictators), Elinor Lipper (Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps), Zbigniew Stypulkowski (Invitation to Moscow) and Gustav Herling (^4 World Apart) were all graduates of Soviet prisons, and wrote of their experiences with skill. The reissue of French Traveler Astolphe de Custine's book of a century ago, Journey for Our Time, reminded moderns that, then as. now, Russia's rulers had a bent for despotism.
The foreign-policy debate in books was remarkable chiefly for its lack of acrimony. It was apparent from The Forrestal Diaries that James Forrestal had become a civilian casualty in his dogged fight for national security. George Kennan, reported to be the next U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, argued in American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, for a foreign policy of more conscious U.S. self-interest. Senator Robert Taft's A Foreign Policy for Americans called for a more economical use of U.S. strength, more emphasis on air and sea power.
Historians & Soldiers. Books about World War II had little of their pre-Korea appeal. Easily the best was Winston Churchill's fifth volume of his history of the war, Closing the Ring; it was, in fact, one of the most readable books of the year. General Omar Bradley's A Soldier's Story, while uncommonly critical of some commanders, did little more than add details to the account his wartime boss, Ike Eisenhower, had told three years before. The Army's own official history, United States Army in World War II (seven volumes finished of go-odd projected), did a workmanlike job in Cross-Channel Attack. For anyone who was in on the show, the pictures alone made it a book to own.