Books in Brief

The Voter’s Presidential Handbook, by John A. Wells (McDowell, Obolensky, $1.45). Mr. Wells has had the novel idea of packing into a 208-page paperback just about everything one could care to know about the American Presidency: the deliberations of the Founding Fathers on the powers to be vested in the office; the gradual growth of those powers; their current extent; their delegation to the Cabinet and to the officials of the Executive Office; short biographies of nine possible 1960 Presidential candidates; the history and procedures of the national nominating conventions; and a do-it-yourself section for readers who want to campaign for some particular candidate this year. The result is a slightly dizzying excursion through early American history, political science, popular biography and something rather like journalism. But Mr. Wells knows his stuff, and despite an occasional tendency to throw in the kitchen sink (he offers, at one point, his own highly irrelevant proposal for a national “individual rights policy”) his book will reward any reader whose knowledge of Presidential politics could stand a little brushing up. It is also the perfect gift for anyone who is thinking of running for President. w. A. rusher

A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr. (Lippincott, $4.95). This is a rare book: a fantasy about the future which does not try to escape the past or present. It looks backward and forward simultaneously, with eerie effect— as of a man following a stranger, only to discover, when he overtakes him, that he has been following himself. The three sections of the novel—each leaping six hundred years ahead of the last—portray a new dark ages after an atomic eclipse of our civilization; followed by another Renaissance; reaching at last another explosion and eclipse. The episodes take place in the monastery that preserves fragments of past culture through the re-enacted dark ages, to become embarrassed by that culture at the “Renaissance” and wiser than it at the moment of fission. Apocalypses come and go in this novel like recurrent night, yet man survives much the same throughout. In the end, as his planet-home is blasted out from under him, man simply begins again his age-old exodus, this time to another star. g. wills

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The Voter’s Presidential Handbook, by John A. Wells (McDowell, Obolensky, $1.45). Mr. Wells has had the novel idea of packing into a 208-page paperback just about everything one could care to know about the American Presidency: the deliberations of the Founding Fathers on the powers to be vested in the office; the gradual growth of those powers; their current extent; their delegation to the Cabinet and to the officials of the Executive Office; short biographies of nine possible 1960 Presidential candidates; the history and procedures of the national nominating conventions; and a do-it-yourself section for readers who want to campaign for some particular candidate this year. The result is a slightly dizzying excursion through early American history, political science, popular biography and something rather like journalism. But Mr. Wells knows his stuff, and despite an occasional tendency to throw in the kitchen sink (he offers, at one point, his own highly irrelevant proposal for a national “individual rights policy”) his book will reward any reader whose knowledge of Presidential politics could stand a little brushing up. It is also the perfect gift for anyone who is thinking of running for President. w. A. rusher

A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr. (Lippincott, $4.95). This is a rare book: a fantasy about the future which does not try to escape the past or present. It looks backward and forward simultaneously, with eerie effect— as of a man following a stranger, only to discover, when he overtakes him, that he has been following himself. The three sections of the novel—each leaping six hundred years ahead of the last—portray a new dark ages after an atomic eclipse of our civilization; followed by another Renaissance; reaching at last another explosion and eclipse. The episodes take place in the monastery that preserves fragments of past culture through the re-enacted dark ages, to become embarrassed by that culture at the “Renaissance” and wiser than it at the moment of fission. Apocalypses come and go in this novel like recurrent night, yet man survives much the same throughout. In the end, as his planet-home is blasted out from under him, man simply begins again his age-old exodus, this time to another star. g. wills