Books to Make Friends Happy

If you had your heart set on the book and can’t get it, Penguin Books have in print for 95¢ an excellent translation of The Graenlendinga Saga and Eirik’s Saga under the general heading of The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America. The archeological buff will also be happy to lose himself in Gerald Hawkins’ Stonehenge Decoded (Doubleday, $5.95), a new and convincing theory about the prehistoric stone circle on Salisbury Plain.

C. W. Ceram, whose Gods, Graves and Scholars was popular some years back, has looked into the beginnings of the movies in Archeology of the Cinema (Harcourt, $6.50), generously illustrated and with a terse narrative. For the man in the know, there is much here that is astonishing (John Herschel assumes the place once occupied by Nicéphore Niepce, for example). The account works its way through all the early analyses of motion right up to the first commercial films, and is a study not of the film in its infancy (as the title might lead one to think) but in its technological gestation.

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Guy Davenport

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If you had your heart set on the book and can’t get it, Penguin Books have in print for 95¢ an excellent translation of The Graenlendinga Saga and Eirik’s Saga under the general heading of The Vinland Sagas: The Norse Discovery of America. The archeological buff will also be happy to lose himself in Gerald Hawkins’ Stonehenge Decoded (Doubleday, $5.95), a new and convincing theory about the prehistoric stone circle on Salisbury Plain.

C. W. Ceram, whose Gods, Graves and Scholars was popular some years back, has looked into the beginnings of the movies in Archeology of the Cinema (Harcourt, $6.50), generously illustrated and with a terse narrative. For the man in the know, there is much here that is astonishing (John Herschel assumes the place once occupied by Nicéphore Niepce, for example). The account works its way through all the early analyses of motion right up to the first commercial films, and is a study not of the film in its infancy (as the title might lead one to think) but in its technological gestation.