Random Notes

The Complete Guide to the Soviet Union (St. Martin’s, $17.95), by Victor and Jennifer Louis—two journalists living in Moscow—is full of interesting information (such as the fact that there is a Franklin D. Roosevelt Street in Yalta) and marvelous photographs which seem to prove that the USSR is too beautiful a place for Communists. No word, however, on the Civil Defense works. . . . Roger Parkinson’s The Fox of the North (McKay, $14.95) is a biography of General Kutuzov, Commander of the Russian forces from 1805 to 1812 and vanquisher of Napoleon Bonaparte. The book is partially based upon letters and documents not previously rendered into English. . . . Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, completed his Memoirs (Farrar, $11.95) in the 12-day interval between the overthrow, of blessed memory, of the inflated pedagogue Allende, and Neruda’s own death. … In Victorian Murderesses (Schocken, $15) are told the tales of 13 middle-class French and English damsels who were driven by the frustrations of the pre-Liberation era to butchering husbands, lovers, and children. The author is one Mary Hartman. Mary S. Hartman.

gusto so infectious that the blithe spirits of the age, in succumbing to it, overlooked entirely the fact that they were reading the writings of men who were critics, rather than celebrants, of the prevailing Zeitgeist. In the case of Mencken, the unwary were lured into error by the ambiguities deriving from the great number of enemies that Mencken and they had in common (Prohibitionists, smuthounds, Herbert Hoover, Episcopalians): very many of his followers simply assumed that if he was against Woodrow Wilson he was, like them, for Eugene Debs. In the case of Wolfe, much of his claque was led astray by the nature of the literary vehicle he had constructed to further his artistic purposes.

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Alexis de Tocqueville

Karl Marx

The Complete Guide to the Soviet Union (St. Martin’s, $17.95), by Victor and Jennifer Louis—two journalists living in Moscow—is full of interesting information (such as the fact that there is a Franklin D. Roosevelt Street in Yalta) and marvelous photographs which seem to prove that the USSR is too beautiful a place for Communists. No word, however, on the Civil Defense works. . . . Roger Parkinson’s The Fox of the North (McKay, $14.95) is a biography of General Kutuzov, Commander of the Russian forces from 1805 to 1812 and vanquisher of Napoleon Bonaparte. The book is partially based upon letters and documents not previously rendered into English. . . . Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, completed his Memoirs (Farrar, $11.95) in the 12-day interval between the overthrow, of blessed memory, of the inflated pedagogue Allende, and Neruda’s own death. … In Victorian Murderesses (Schocken, $15) are told the tales of 13 middle-class French and English damsels who were driven by the frustrations of the pre-Liberation era to butchering husbands, lovers, and children. The author is one Mary Hartman. Mary S. Hartman.

gusto so infectious that the blithe spirits of the age, in succumbing to it, overlooked entirely the fact that they were reading the writings of men who were critics, rather than celebrants, of the prevailing Zeitgeist. In the case of Mencken, the unwary were lured into error by the ambiguities deriving from the great number of enemies that Mencken and they had in common (Prohibitionists, smuthounds, Herbert Hoover, Episcopalians): very many of his followers simply assumed that if he was against Woodrow Wilson he was, like them, for Eugene Debs. In the case of Wolfe, much of his claque was led astray by the nature of the literary vehicle he had constructed to further his artistic purposes.