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NORMAN MAILER: THE COUNTDOWN by Donald L. Kaufmann. 190 pages. Southern Illinois University. $4.95; THE STRUCTURED VISION OF NORMAN MAILER by Barry H. Leeds. 270 pages. New York University. $6.95. Two assistant professors of English establish tenuous positions on the perpetual beachhead that is the imagination of Norman Mailer. Leeds waits anxiously for the Big Novel. Kaufmann, by contrast, wonders whether Mailer's methods will—or even should —catch up with his protean intellect.
ALONE WITH AMERICA by Richard Howard. 594 pages. Afheneum. $12.95. Too many cross-eyed insights and too much precious jargon detract from an otherwise vast and valuable accounting of American poetry since 1950.
THE MODERN POET edited by Ian Hamilton. 200 pages. Horizon. $5.95. An Anglo-American anthology of criticism and poetry from a little magazine, The Review, including interviews with William Empson and Robert Lowell.
BOOKS I LOVE by John Kieran. 200 pages. Doubleday. $4.95. Playing the old "books I would take to a desert is land" game, the author provides fond essays on his largely predictable choices, and an occasional sharp judgment (Rousseau is "an intellectual sharper"). Information pleasing mainly to readers who prefer Masefield to Donne, Tennyson and Kipling to Eliot.
Biography and Autobiography
AMBASSADOR'S JOURNAL by John Kenneth Galbraith. 656 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10. The dreary daily round in New Delhi (1961-63) greatly brightened by dashes of wit, wisdom and sheer vanity. (Reviewed in TIME, Oct. 17.)
MALCOLM X: THE MAN AND HIS TIMES edited by John Henrik Clarke. 320 pages. Macmillan. $7.95. Since his murder, Malcolm X's autobiography has sold close to two million copies, and he has captured the imagination of the young and the black as a martyred leader. This collection of comments by approving observers helps explain why.
HISTORY OF A NATION OF ONE by Jecon Gregory. 228 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $5.95. The barefoot, world wanderings of a 61 ft. English hobo painter. Not as pungent and pandemic as such recollected tales need to be.
NELSON AND THE HAMILTONS by Jack Russell. 448 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10. A fond, splendidly informative account of the grotesque but genuine love between a blowsy beauty and the small, skiny, one-armed, one-eyed seaman who was England's greatest admiral.
SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON by Brian Fothergill. 459 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World. $10. The man cuckolded by Nelson turns out to have been a man of many parts —diplomat, art collector and scientist.
GEORGE W. CABLE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A SOUTHERN HERETIC by Louis D. Rubin Jr. 304 pages. Pegasus. $6.95. Cable was the first post-Civil War novelist to deal forthrightly with racial injustice. This fine biography tells how the controversy that he stirred up turned him from a passionate witness into a confectioner of costume romance.
CASANOVA by John /Wasters. Illustrated. 302 pages. Geis. $15. Love's labours labored.
MAX BECKMANN: MEMORIES OF A FRIENDSHIP by Stephan Lackner. 126 pages. University of Miami. $7.95. The life of the German Expressionist painter presented in a sometimes dull, always informative reminiscence.