(4 of 4)
Best Reading
ALEXANDER POPE, by Peter Quennell. A lucid biography of the great 18th century poet, a proud and petulant man who used words as sticks and stones in his savage satires.
THE VALACHI PAPERS, by Peter Maas. A painstaking account of one man's career in the Mafia, made the more fascinating by the author's observation: "If the Cosa Nostra's illegal profits were reported, the country could meet its present obligations with a 10% tax reduction instead of a 10% surcharge increase."
JOYCE GARY, by Malcolm Foster. The first full-scale biography of the late-blooming author of The Horse's Mouth and Herself Surprised reveals his vision of the world as a struggle between creative man and organized authority.
SILENCE ON MONTE SOLE, by Jack Olsen.
In the fall of 1944, Nazi SS death squads rounded up, shot down, grenaded and then burned more than 1,800 inhabitants of the villages around Monte Sole in north central Italy. Author Olsen performs a journalistic feat as he records this atrocity, which was only a footnote to the history of the Italian campaign.
MILLAIS AND THE RUSKINS, by Mary Lutyens. A measured, complex view of the private lives of the Victorian genius John Ruskin and his wife that reads as smoothly as an old-fashioned novel of manners.
THE ARMS OF KRUPP, by William Manchester. The "smokestack barons" of the Ruhr, whose arsenal armed Germany in two world wars, are portrayed in an encyclopedic history of their powerful and eccentric family.
TURPIN, by Stephen Jones. Beginning with the murder of a golden retriever and lurching from ludicrous deaths to outrageous depravities, this savagely comic novel bares the terrors that hide beneath the surface of apparently calm minds.
THE BEASTLY BEATITUDES OF BALTHAZAR B, by J. P. Donleavy. A rich, dreamy young man drifts rudderless through a series of touchingly humorous misadventures. The author's best novel since The Ginger Man.
O'NEILL: SON AND PLAYWRIGHT, by Louis Sheaffer. In the first of two volumes, Author Sheaffer examines the emotional factors in the playwright's family history.
Best Sellers
FICTION 1. The Salzburg Connection, Maclnnes (1 last week)
2. A Small Town in Germany, le Carré (2)
3. Airport, Hailey (3)
4. Preserve and Protect, Drury (4)
5. The First Circle, Solzhenitsyn (6)
6. And Other Stories, O'Hara
7. Force 10 from Navarone, MacLean (5)
8. The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, Donleavy (8)
9. The Hurricane Years, Hawley (7)
10. Testimony of Two Men, Caldwell (10)
NONFICTION 1. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (1)
2. The Arms of Krupp, Manchester (2)
3. Instant Replay, Kramer (3)
4. The Day Kennedy Was Shot, Bishop (4)
5. The Rich and the Super-Rich, Lundberg (7)
6. On Reflection, Hayes (8)
7. Soul on Ice, Cleaver
8. Sixty Years on the Firing Line, Krock (5)
9. Anti-Memoirs, Malraux (6)
10. The Joys of Yiddish, Rosten (10)
*All times E.S.T.