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> John Scott, onetime steelworker in Rus sia, scored two hits: Behind the Urals ($2-75), an eyewitness account of the building of Russia's mighty steel city, Magnitogorsk; and Duel for Europe ($3-50), a study of Russo-German relations since Munich. Most interesting Russian study: Eugene Tarle's description of the last great battle for Moscow, Napo leon's Invasion of Russia, 1812 ($3.50).
> India symbolized perhaps more than any land the dilemma of Britain and in directly of the U.S., and yet she received small attention from U.S. authors. Kate L. Mitchell's India Without Fable ($2.50) sounded a call for United Nations intervention in the settling of the problems of the Raj. But to many E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) was still able to point up more eloquent facets in the Empire's crown jewel than did even such news events as the failure of Sir Stafford Cripps. Honors for the hardest-hitting book by a correspondent went to Cecil Brown's angry criticism of British leadership in Malaya: Suez to Singapore ($3.50).
Men&the Past. As in all times of stress, men looked for relevance in history, and found it. Outstanding among the year's successes was a 70-year-old novel by a 14-year-old author, Count Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace ($3). A reissue of Harriet Martineau's Retrospect of Westert Travel (2 vols., $4), first published in 1838, ran away with top honors as best travel book of the year. Other survivals-of-the-fittest: George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior ($1.25); the second volume of William Byrd of Westover's sage, spicy Secret Diary ($5) Mr. W. and I ($2.75), Caroline Webster's newly discovered journal of her trip abroad with her triple-threat husband, Daniel; the Oracles of Nostradamus (95¢), still holding its place as U.S. readers' favorite bookworm's-eye view of the future.
How the War Began. No two historians would agree yet on the causes of World War I, but book publishers rushed into print with suggestions as to the causes of World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt's volume of unedited speeches on foreign affairs, Roosevelt's Foreign Policy 1933-41 ($3-75), was preceded by How War Came ($2.50), Ernest K. Lindley's & Forrest Davis' chatty, half-inside story of the Administration's efforts to postpone a Pacific crisis while giving the utmost aid short of war to Britain. Sharp-tongued Liberal Professor Frederick L. Schuman bitterly attacked the Franco-British appeasement record in Design for Power: The Struggle for the World ($3.50).
More solidly grounded: Rohan D'Olier Butler's scholarly Roots of National Socialism ($3); exiled Economist Franz Neumann's Behemoth, The Structure and Practice of National Socialism ($4); Principles of Power ($3.50), by the late Guglielmo Ferrero. Patents for Hitler ($2.50) was Economist Guenter Reimann's patient unraveling of the many threads that had tied U.S. technical developments to the German war machine.