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The most successful adventure stories had a personal-narrative quality that challenged the year's best fiction. Two of the best, and bestselling as well, were by Frenchmen: Maurice Herzog's thriller about the scaling of Annapurna (see CINEMA) and J. Y. Cousteau's eerily poetic description of deep-sea diving, The Silent World. Finest of the field was Charles Lindbergh's recollection of his flight across the Atlantic in 1927, The Spirit of St. Louis.
Books on Russia, Korea, Red China and Communism kept the presses warm all year. Among those that stood out was War Correspondent Philip Deane's I Was a Captive in Korea. In an even voice, he told of 33 months as a prisoner, exposed the shockingly calculated inhumanity of his captors. Deane's book and S. L. A. Marshall's The River and the Gauntlet, the story of the U.S. Eighth Army's defeat in North Korea, would make sober Christmas presents, but they are two books of 1953 that thoughtful Americans can still profit from. Not so distressing, and highly informative as well as entertaining, was Admiral Leslie Stevens' Russian Assignment, a critically urbane look at the Russian scene during his 1947-49 mission as naval attache.
There were other books, important by any standard, which never got their real due from the bookstore traffic. Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind skillfully defined a political and philosophical tradition whose qualities are often misinterpreted, even by its friends. In Five Gentlemen of Japan, Frank Gibney explained briefly and readably what more formal scholars have failed to explain: the Japanese national character, its breakdown in World War II, and the reasons why free nations can now welcome the Japanese to their company. Of the trickle of foreign books critical of the U.S., the most sensible and understanding was Italian Luigi Barzini Jr.'s Americans Are Alone in the World. The most gratuitous book from abroad was, by all odds, Briton Earl Jowitt's The Strange Case of Alger Hiss, which niggled at American jurisprudence and raised among readers questions as to the earl's competence to judge the nature of Communist conspiracy.
Among the many books that took the long view on man's past and his future, two raised enough big questions to keep the cracker-barrel set busy all winter. In a casually lofty historical essay, The World and the West, Historian Arnold Toynbee suggested that faithless Western man stands a fair chance of getting his comeuppance from Russia and the East, but who knows?—maybe not. There was no such hemming and hawing from Physicist Charles Galton Darwin. The grandson of the author of The Origin of Species played the old Malthusian game in The Next Million Years, saw ahead nothing but vast increases of population and ultimate world starvation. In a worrying world, Darwin's horizon scanning seemed like a worrier's luxury.