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ROBERT GRAVES: POEMS 1965-1968. 97 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. "The obstinate habit I have formed of refusing to adopt a synthetic period style, or join any literary racket," Robert Graves once wrote, "has given my poems what would be called a 'handmade, individual craftsmanship quality.' " Characteristic of that craftsmanship, as this add to Collected Poems (1965) shows, are intensity, elegance and a classical lucidity.
WHO REALLY CARES by Janis Ian. 85 pages. Dial. $3.95. A popular folksinger at the age of 15 does not necessarily, at the age of 18, a good poet make.
IN SOMEONE'S SHADOW by Rod McKuen. 108 pages. Random House. $3.95. "I have learned no new alphabet this week," the TV poet admits.
History and Adventure
THE MIGHTY ENDEAVOR by Charles B. MacDonald. 564 pages. Oxford. $12.50. An Army historian confronts America's World War II role in Europe. His prose is pedestrian, but he has an inexhaustible pipeline to fresh material on commanders and command decisions.
SONS OF SINBAD by Alan Villiers. 414 pages. Scr/bner. $7.95. Splendid reprint (from 1940), telling how Villiers sailed aboard Arab dhows in the Indian Ocean to learn the sea ways of a dying trade. Knowledgeable, occasionally eloquent, but mainly for those who really want to tell a boom from a jalboot.
CAPTAINS WITHOUT EYES by Lyman B. Kirkpatrick Jr. 303 pages. Macmillan. $6.95. Military intelligence failures during World War II—from the German invasion of Russia to the Battle of the Bulge—unstartlingly re-examined by an ex-CIA man. The book might well have been terminated with extreme prejudice.
CITIZEN SAILORS: THE U.S. NAVAL RESERVE IN WAR AND PEACE by William R. Kreh. 270 pages. McKay. $6.95. One half reads like a recruiting poster. The other, more interesting, tells how the Navy has adapted its tactics to the war in Viet Nam, where large ships are superfluous.
THE GREAT BETRAYAL by Audrie Girdner and Anne Loftis. 562 pages. Macmillan. $12.50. A thoroughly documented report—often with painfully fascinating first-person accounts—of the disgraceful detention and harassment of the American Japanese during World War II, and the painfully slow restitution afterward.
ADOLF HITLER-FACES OF A DICTATOR, text and captions by Jochen von Lang; introduction by Constantine FitzGibbon. Unpaged. Harcourt, Brace & World. $6.75. Morbidly fascinating photographs with a sensible text.
TUDOR CORNWALL: PORTRAIT OF A SOCIETY by A. L. Rowse. 462 pages. Scr/bner. $8.95. A professional Cornishman and famous Elizabethan scholar turns his home county into a microcosm to assess the Tudor reformation of England.
LIFE AND LEISURE IN ANCIENT ROME by J.P.V.D. Balsdon. 463 pages. McGraw-Hill. $8.95. An orgy of trivia, sometimes fascinating but. like most orgies, ultimately stupefying.
THE BRITISH IN THE FAR EAST by George Woodcock. 259 pages. Afheneurn. $12.50. The rise and fall of the Raj in the Far East, from Drake and the daring empire builders to the well-tailored businessmen who run Hong Kong today. A wellrounded, absorbing, and rarely told tale.