Books in Brief

Herbert Hoover: A Biography, by Eugene Lyons (Doubleday, $5.95). Eugene Lyons’ earlier portrait of The Chief, “Our Unknown Ex-President,” appeared in 1948, to tell a whole generation of American children about the fabled half-dozen careers of the then 74-year-old Mr. Hoover. In 1951 and 1952 the great three-volume Memoirs flowed from the pen of Hoover himself, and three more careers were added in subsequent years: historian, elder statesman, and massive analyst of government. So a new biography was in order, and Mr. Lyons has done the job in the spirit of the subject—quiet, fair, factual, and warmly humorous. But the job, its author admits, even with 450 pages can be only a summary of the glorious rise from nowhere, the triumph of the Food Administration, the unheard warnings of the Secretary of Commerce during the ‘20s, the innovations of his Administration, the sickening Democratic campaign of 1932, Roosevelt’s wanton dalliance with catastrophe during the interregnum, the fourteen years of vilification, the vast production of Hoover’s later years, and the happy welcome a nation gave when it returned to its senses and found the great man at his desk laboring in its interest as he always had. Hoover, by the way, didn’t get the name “The Chief” while he was President. The name had stuck with him ever since a bunch of rough miners gave it to him in Western Australia when he was only 23. Quality has a way of being discovered, and eternally rediscovered. A fine biography, and a pleasure to read.

W. F. RICKENBACKER

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Herbert Hoover: A Biography, by Eugene Lyons (Doubleday, $5.95). Eugene Lyons’ earlier portrait of The Chief, “Our Unknown Ex-President,” appeared in 1948, to tell a whole generation of American children about the fabled half-dozen careers of the then 74-year-old Mr. Hoover. In 1951 and 1952 the great three-volume Memoirs flowed from the pen of Hoover himself, and three more careers were added in subsequent years: historian, elder statesman, and massive analyst of government. So a new biography was in order, and Mr. Lyons has done the job in the spirit of the subject—quiet, fair, factual, and warmly humorous. But the job, its author admits, even with 450 pages can be only a summary of the glorious rise from nowhere, the triumph of the Food Administration, the unheard warnings of the Secretary of Commerce during the ‘20s, the innovations of his Administration, the sickening Democratic campaign of 1932, Roosevelt’s wanton dalliance with catastrophe during the interregnum, the fourteen years of vilification, the vast production of Hoover’s later years, and the happy welcome a nation gave when it returned to its senses and found the great man at his desk laboring in its interest as he always had. Hoover, by the way, didn’t get the name “The Chief” while he was President. The name had stuck with him ever since a bunch of rough miners gave it to him in Western Australia when he was only 23. Quality has a way of being discovered, and eternally rediscovered. A fine biography, and a pleasure to read.

W. F. RICKENBACKER