■ Last March Titles: Words Words Words (Scribner’s, $12.95) by C. M. Matthews is a collection of interesting etymological essays. “We may run short of fuel, food, and water,” Matthews observes, “but never of words.” . . . Andrei Amalrik calls Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (Norton, $9.95) “One of the calmest and most terrifying reports on the Gulag Archipelago by a survivor.” . . . Walter Laqueur has turned novelist with his latest work, The Missing Years (Little, Brown, $10.95), about a Jewish family that hides out in, of all places, Berlin and manages to survive the Holocaust. . . . Russian Art and American Money, 1900-1940 (Harvard, $17.50), by Robert C. Williams, is a fascinating book which describes the transfer of Russian art works to wealthy patrons in the United States. According to Williams, the Czars sold contemporary art to the Americans; after the usurpations of 1917, however, the Bolsheviks, who had little use for decadent, bourgeois, and imperialist treasures, began selling off the national artistic patrimony in exchange for factories and machinery. . . . The Art of Literary Publishing: Editors on their Craft (Pushcart, $15), edited by Bill Henderson, is composed of essays by various well-known New York publishers concerned about the commercialization of the American literary mills. . . . Michael Harrington’s new book is called Decade of Decision (Simon & Schuster, $11.95), in which he likens the Eighties to the Thirties in social, economic, and political significance. Same old stuff, more or less. But if the capitalist system were working as ruthlessly as it is supposed to, obsolescence would long ago have caught up with this particular social critic.
■ One for April: Nika Hazelton, who when it comes to literary prolificity is the Isaac Asimov of cookery, is coming out with yet another book, American Home Cooking (Viking, $14.95). —CW
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