Random Notes

July Holdover: To some people, the high-level intrigue and political pressure of the international arms trade is just another way to make a buck. Anthony Sampson tells the armorers’ side of it in The Arms Bazaar: The Companies, the Dealers, the Bribes, from Vickers to Lockheed (Viking, $10.95).

August Titles: Hailed already as “the most talked about book of the year,” Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (Viking, $12.95) focuses on the trial, conviction, and execution of the Rosenbergs, with bomb spies and some sexual fantasies of Richard Nixon’s scattered throughout. . . . Katherine Anne Porter deals with another notorious trial, that of Sacco and Vanzetti, in The Never-Ending Wrong (Little, Brown, $5.95). One aspect of the case that she does not neglect is the deliberate manipulation of the accused and their sympathizers by the Communists. . . . Nicholas Wade elucidates the growing controversy over the myriad ramifications of recombinant DNA research in his book The Ultimate Experiment: Man-Made Evolution (Walker, $8.95). … In Sicilian Carousel (Viking, $10), the reader accompanies author Lawrence Durrell on a rare bus tour around Sicily with a group whose antics nicely balance his descriptions of Mediterranean culture.

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William F. Buckley Jr.

Communism

New York City

July Holdover: To some people, the high-level intrigue and political pressure of the international arms trade is just another way to make a buck. Anthony Sampson tells the armorers’ side of it in The Arms Bazaar: The Companies, the Dealers, the Bribes, from Vickers to Lockheed (Viking, $10.95).

August Titles: Hailed already as “the most talked about book of the year,” Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (Viking, $12.95) focuses on the trial, conviction, and execution of the Rosenbergs, with bomb spies and some sexual fantasies of Richard Nixon’s scattered throughout. . . . Katherine Anne Porter deals with another notorious trial, that of Sacco and Vanzetti, in The Never-Ending Wrong (Little, Brown, $5.95). One aspect of the case that she does not neglect is the deliberate manipulation of the accused and their sympathizers by the Communists. . . . Nicholas Wade elucidates the growing controversy over the myriad ramifications of recombinant DNA research in his book The Ultimate Experiment: Man-Made Evolution (Walker, $8.95). … In Sicilian Carousel (Viking, $10), the reader accompanies author Lawrence Durrell on a rare bus tour around Sicily with a group whose antics nicely balance his descriptions of Mediterranean culture.