Reviewed in Brief

Forbidden Childhood, by Ruth Slenczynska and Louis Biancolli (Doubleday, $3.95). For students of Wunderkind psychology, Miss S’s account of her Svengali-father’s conjuration or her phenomenal concert career will be fascinating. When she was three and a half, her life took an inflexible pattern: nine hours at the piano per day, seven days per week, with a hard slap in the face for every missed note and a sound thrashing for the least recalcitrance. At four, she made her debut, and for the next ten years concertized throughout Europe and America. She was compared to Mozart, doted on by audiences, coached by Rachmaninoff, Cortot, Petri, Rubenstein. Then, in her teens, she broke down, gave up the piano, married, and more recently, after the death of her father, has resumed her career. As part of her promotion, her story rather too sentimentally tends to play up her father’s ruthlessness. After all, She was his creation, and though their relationship was hardly normal, it is necessary to remember that great art, like great diamonds, is the product of a natural, but not very pretty, and certainly never average, process. r. phelps

Personality and Organization, by Chris Argyris (Harper, $4.00). Professor Argyris asks “why people behave the way they do in human organizations,” organizations in this case signifying particularly business organizations; and to find answers, he turns to the pseudoscientific behavioral studies of a number of social psychologists. We are told that the formal organization creates “conflict, frustration and a sense of failure” in the “rela-