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COMMON SENSE AND THE FIFTH AMENDMENT, by Sidney Hook. Plentifully supported by logic and his own common sense, Philosopher Hook shows how sentimental, not too commonsensical liberals have accepted the Fifth Amendment as a shelter for the just and the unjust alike. Sidestepped by many reviewers and attacked by others, it makes more sense about the Fifth than any book in years.
THE LION AND THE THRONE, by Catherine Drinker Bowen. Biography in the grand manner; the life and times of Sir Edward Coke, who became the watchdog of the common law, bluntly told British kings that law was their sovereign and defined legal principles that stand triumphant three centuries later.
THE NEW CLASS, by Milovan Djilas. A top
Yugoslav Communist, now in a Tito prison, decides after a lifetime of Marx worship that the commissars have done a wretched job, run prison camps instead of states and are far more greedy materialists than the capitalists. Certainly nothing new, but significant coming from Tito's ex-buddy.
GOGOL, by David Magarshack. A sound, readable biography of the little 19th century Russian neurotic who became one of his country's great novelists. Incredibly, he exposed corrupt Russian bureaucracy and the horrors of serfdom in books of genius while obsessed with the notion that he was really helping to preserve the Russia he loved.
NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND FOREIGN POLICY, by Henry A. Kissinger. A book by a Harvard political scientist that, though pre-Sputnik, is still must reading for top military and diplomatic planners. Author Kissinger warns that no Soviet shifts of policy must obscure the basic fact that each new move is a step towards world domination, brilliantly argues that the U.S. must be ready and willing to fight small wars to a winning finish if the world is not to be lost through a succession of new Koreas.
WARWICK THE KINGMAKER, by Paul Murray Kendall. A vivid, expertly handled biography of the Earl of Warwick, the fascinating 15th century British kingmaker who fought in turn on both sides in the bloody civil Wars of the Roses, eventually became drunk with power and died while trying to drink more.
GIVE US THIS DAY, by Sidney Stewart. A grim and unforgettable book about World War II by a young draftee who was captured on Bataan, liberated by the Russians in Manchuria after suffering more than three years of horror and maddening brutality.
GEORGE WASHINGTON, by John Alexander Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth. The seventh and concluding volume of the massive work that Historian Douglas Southall Freeman did not live to finish. Somewhat woodenly written, it is still a competent completion of the most searching and definitive life of George Washington ever undertaken.
THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF AMERICAN PAINTING, by Alexander Eliot. The rich and varied story of American painting superbly fixed in 250 color reproductions, its development and creators described in text (by TIME's art editor) that is at once informative, informal and critically penetrating.