The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay (Viking, $6.75). Besides the fact that his military career was served in a staff, rather than a line, capacity, the main reason “Pug” Ismay has never basked in the limelight he certainly deserves is that he has never made any play for headlines. His memoirs are no exception. Almost an essay on modesty, they shed far more light on Churchill than on the author and the impressive role he played—as the Prime Minister’s World War II Chief of Staff, head of the office of the Minister of Defense, Deputy Secretary to the War Cabinet, and later as Secretary-General of NATO. Unlike the published recollections of Alanbrooke and Montgomery, Ismay’s memoirs are not likely to stir great controversy. Nonetheless, they should be welcomed as a long overdue account of the war by one who served closer to Churchill than perhaps anyone else. K. THOMPSON
Can These Bones Live, by Edward Dahlberg (New Directions, $4.75). This book is a series of brilliant and sinister contradictions. An avowed champion of non-violence and Oriental detachment, Dahlberg writes an orgiastic, shot-and-shell prose which makes Carlyle seem tame. Closely imitating D. H. Lawrence, he brilliantly attacks the Puritan sterility, the fear of flesh and blood, in our tradition. But in his own comments on politics and morals, he finds every aspect of modern life soiled with blood-ritual. After roundly damning Hawthorne and Whitman, he runs to the Puritan anarchists, Tolstoy and Thoreau. The Shaker- Quakers, the Dukhobors and Oneidans, whom Dahlberg praises, are just those groups which carry the Puritan ethic into modern times. Beneath the violent prose-manhandling of all his hero-enemies, Dahlberg’s own contempt for himself is only thinly veiled, g. wills
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