■ More September Titles: William Davis, the editor of Punch, contradicts the received wisdom of his countrymen in It’s No Sin to Be Rich: A Defense of Capitalism (Thomas Nelson, $8.95). … In his book Inside East Germany: The State That Came In from the Cold (Urizen Books, $12.95), Jonathan Steele, a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, makes the important points a) that East Germany is undergoing increasing “privatization”; b) that streets are safer there than in Western cities (from muggers or from the Polizei Mr. Steele doesn’t say); and c) that the most meticulous social security is provided, from sperm to worm. . . . Robert Lowell, the dullest American poet since Amy Lowell, has a new book of poems out called Day by Day (Farrar, $8.95). . . . Sex Link: The Three-Billion-Year-Old Urge and What the Animals Do about It (M. Evans, $8.95) is full of fascinating ethological tidbits, for example: the female praying mantis, in coitus with her mate, bites off his head, after which his remnant continues to provide crucial philanthropic services. . . . Aldous Huxley’s The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara 1959 (Harper & Row, $8.95), edited by Piero Ferrucci, is strictly for the rapt followers of that strange Englishman who was more Californian than the Californians. . . . Harvey Cox, author of The Secular City, has another book ready, Turning East: The Promise and Peril of the New Orientalism (Simon and Schuster, $8.95), which recounts how its author has become a better Christian by visiting with the Colorado Buddhists. . . . In Facing Up to Modernity: Reflections on Society, Politics, and Religion (Basic, $11.50), Peter Berger argues for transcendence as a means of relieving the stresses of modernization. . . . James J. Kilpatrick, contributing editor of NR, will be out in September with the season’s longest title: The Foxes Union, and Other Stretchers, Tall Tales, and Discursive Reminiscences of Happy Years in Scrabble, Va. (EPM, $9.95), a rewriting and recycling of the country columns he writes from his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
■ October Titles: The second volume of John Bartlow Martin’s two-volume biography of one of the most overestimated men in recent American politics is just as good as the first. Adlai Stevenson and the World: The Life of Adlai Stevenson (Doubleday, $15) covers the life of the Rev. Mr. Stevenson from the day he stubbed his toe in November of 1952 to the day he departed this world in 1965.
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