More December Titles: Eric Sevareid, whose autobiography was reissued earlier this year, will shortly be publishing his Conversations with Eric Sevareid: Interviews with Notable Americans (Public Affairs Press, $6.50). . . . Stuart Berg Flexner is the author of I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated Treasury of American Words and Phrases (Van Nostrand Reinhold, $16.50 to Dec. 31; $18.95 thereafter), which is a popularized, updated treatment of the sort of material covered by H. L. Mencken in The American Language . . . George B. Kistiakowsky’s A Scientist at the White House: The Private Diary of President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for Science and Technology (Harvard, $15) is rather dryly written but withal contains some very interesting stuff. … In The End of Exurbia: Who Are All These People and Why Do They Want to Ruin Our Town? (Stein and Day, $10), John J. Tarrant argues that people who dwell in ritzy suburbs will protect their holdings with their lives, which they have forfeited to the huge corporations that made them wealthy. The author appears satisfied with an exurban prognosis that cannot be pleasing to his rich subjects.
Some January Books: Five autobiographical fragments by Virginia Woolf appear in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings (Harcourt, Brace, $8.95), edited by Jeanne Schulkind . . . Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist best known for her interviews with the famous, carries on a monologue directed to her unborn child in Letter to a Child Never Born (Simon and Schuster, $7.95). … In Of Pure Blood (McGraw-Hill, $10), Clarissa Henry and Marc Hillel investigate the Lebensborn clinics in which the Nazis attempted to breed supermen from Aryan-looking children kidnapped all over Europe . . . Crusaders, Criminals, Crazies: Terror and Terrorism in Our Time (Norton, $9.95), by Frederick J. Hacker, examines the psychology of terrorism, including that which wrung a conversion out of Patty Hearst . . . Herbert Ruhm has edited a volume called The Hardboiled Detective: Stories from Black Mask Magazine, 1920-1951 (Random House/Vintage, $2.45). The Black Mask was a pulp magazine edited for a time by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan in order to raise money to keep The Smart Set alive for the edification of “fat women with diabetes.”
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