Random Notes

■ Some April Titles : Orwell: The Transformation (Knopf, $12.95), by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, is the second volume (there will probably be a third) of a biography of George Orwell, describing his passage from the art novel to the polemical novel. . . . Richard Sennett, who intends to do four volumes on the emotional forces which permit society to cohere, has completed the first of them: Authority (Knopf, $10). . . . Peter F. Drucker’s new book is Managing in Turbulent Times (Harper & Row, $9.95), in which the author provides business executives with suggestions for mapping their course through an unpredictable future. Drucker especially advises that one think macro, not micro, and pay close attention to changes in such things as population factors. . . . They laughed when he stood up to speak, with his lisp and his stutter, but Winston Churchill overcame these impediments, even if he did not entirely banish them (“we shall fight in the fieldsh and streetsh, we shall fight in the hillsh”). James C. Humes’s Churchill: Speaker of the Century (Stein & Day, $12.95) presents Winnie’s career from the oratorical perspective.

Doris Lessing’s most recent novel, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five: As Narrated by the Chroniclers of Zone Three (Knopf, $10), is about as interesting as its title. . . . Louis Auchin-closs’s latest, The House of the Prophet (Houghton Mifflin, $10.95), certainly carries no surprises. . . . Saltbound (Methuen, $10.95), by Chilton Williamson Jr., is at once a narrative of a winter spent on Block Island, R.I. (14 miles at sea, population 450), and a study of the supersession of one America by another. Drawings by Gretchen Dow Simpson.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

■ Some April Titles : Orwell: The Transformation (Knopf, $12.95), by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, is the second volume (there will probably be a third) of a biography of George Orwell, describing his passage from the art novel to the polemical novel. . . . Richard Sennett, who intends to do four volumes on the emotional forces which permit society to cohere, has completed the first of them: Authority (Knopf, $10). . . . Peter F. Drucker’s new book is Managing in Turbulent Times (Harper & Row, $9.95), in which the author provides business executives with suggestions for mapping their course through an unpredictable future. Drucker especially advises that one think macro, not micro, and pay close attention to changes in such things as population factors. . . . They laughed when he stood up to speak, with his lisp and his stutter, but Winston Churchill overcame these impediments, even if he did not entirely banish them (“we shall fight in the fieldsh and streetsh, we shall fight in the hillsh”). James C. Humes’s Churchill: Speaker of the Century (Stein & Day, $12.95) presents Winnie’s career from the oratorical perspective.

Doris Lessing’s most recent novel, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four, and Five: As Narrated by the Chroniclers of Zone Three (Knopf, $10), is about as interesting as its title. . . . Louis Auchin-closs’s latest, The House of the Prophet (Houghton Mifflin, $10.95), certainly carries no surprises. . . . Saltbound (Methuen, $10.95), by Chilton Williamson Jr., is at once a narrative of a winter spent on Block Island, R.I. (14 miles at sea, population 450), and a study of the supersession of one America by another. Drawings by Gretchen Dow Simpson.