Thursday. March 26, 1964 University Daily Kansan
Page 7
Nizer, Wilson, FDR, and Assassins
MY LIFE IN COURT, by Louis Nizer (Pyramid, 95 cents).
At the top of many best-seller lists for many weeks was this nonfiction book, an autobiography by a famous trial lawyer. It is still being talked about, and one of the cases Nizer depicts, the Quentin Reynolds-Westbrook Pegler libel case, has moved successfully to the Broadway stage.
It is tribute to say that a book reads like a novel, but this one does, with the eternal fascination of courtroom drama. Louis Nizer singles out some fantastic cases—the Reynolds-Pegler affair, sordid and ugly; the "War of the Roses," Billy Rose and divorce; the "Rum and Coca-Cola" comedy; the marital mixup of John Jacob Astor, and the Loews' proxy battle.
The book is always interesting,
always absorbing. There is nothing
cheap here, nothing sensational.
It deserves a wide audience.
OLD JULES, by Mari Sandez
(Bison Bocks, $1.60)
The University of Nebraska Press has made a singular contribution in publishing this book in paperback. Since "Old Jules" appeared in the mid-thirties it has acquired special status as a story of the Midwestern frontier. Mari Sandoz provided a portrait in "Old Jules" that ranks with the people in Willa Cather's novels, and the book itself, though non-fiction, compares favorably with the classic Cather tales.
Nebraska is the setting, specifically the upper Niobrara country in western Nebraska, which is something of the Midwest and something of the West, too. The setting becomes almost as important as Jules Ami Sandoz itself, and the author's intention was to tell the story of a community as well as of her father.
So we have here a story of primitive life, of violence, of hunts, of accidents, of the drama of nature, the winds and the isolation that other writers—O. E. Rolvaag and Hamlin Garland come to mind, and John Ice of Kansas, who wrote of the pioneer life of his family—also have recorded.
THE ASSASSINS, by Robert J.
Donovan (Popular, 60 cents).
Timely and exciting is this book by the author of "PT 109." Robert J. Donovan has added a chapter on the assassination of President Kennedy, and this will give the book even greater notoriety and sales, in all likelihood. Readers of the New Yorker will recall some of these stories as having appeared originally in that magazine.
The reporting is accurate, the style fast-moving. Donovan deals not only with the four men who murdered Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, but also with the attempted assassinations of Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Truman.
In inevitably the best of the chapters concern the successful assassins — Lee Oswald, John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, and Leon Czolgosz.
EDISON, A BIOGRAPHY. by Matthew Josephson (McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, $2.55).
Schoolboys growing up in the first three decades of this century knew Thomas A. Edison as one of the great hero figures, and this is the way Matthew Josephson, author of "The Robber Barons," presents Edison in this excellent biography.
Edison invented the carbon microphone, the electric light, the phonograph, and developed the motion picture camera. Beyond these he busied himself with many other inventions, made a fortune, became the darling of conservatives, and gave us aphelisms ranking with those of Poor Richard of the 18th century.
He was never a philosopher, or would-be philosopher, like his contemporary Carnegie or his friend Ford. He was largely a symbol, a folk hero, never a great original thinker, a practical tinkerer who worked out of pragmatism rather than pure science. Josephson's biography is full-scale, possibly the best book yet on Edison.
This is a special and unique kind of history. One president wrote a diseeming and compassionate book about another president, a member of the opposition party under whom he served in World War I. This makes "The Ordeal of Woodrow Wilson" distinctive from most other books about Wilson.
Hoover was head of Belgian relief, food administrator of the United States, and a member of the President's American War Council. He worked closely with Wilson, and after the war was director of relief and reconstruction of Europe and a member of the President's Economic Advisory Council in Paris. All of this made him an insider.
And a sympathetic insider. He does not try to offer a full-fledged biography of Wilson; rather he describes Wilson as war president; negotiator at Versailles, and earnest pleader for the League of Nations and ratification of the peace treaty. Hoover sees Wilson as a liberal of the 19th century stamp, not a doctrinaire liberal of the 20th century, and to Hoover "socialistic," variety.
NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS (Dolphin, 85 cents).
In 1845 a young American of only 28 published his autobiography. This point in itself would seem unimportant, but the young man was a former Negro slave who only recently had obtained his freedom. He was Frederick Douglass, and his narrative is a landmark in the history of the Negro in America.
Douglass became the first Negro newspaper editor and the first significant leader of his race in America. He was a man of genuine intellect, and his book is no random document by an untrained writer. Beyond that he was a man of depth, and his story is moving and perceptive.
THE ORDEAL OF WOODROW
WILSON, by Herbert Hoover (McGraw-Hill Paperbacks, $2.25).
NOTHING TO FEAR, by Franklin D. Roosevelt (Popular, 75 cents).
Here is a collection of Roosevelt speeches, first published in 1946, with a preface by Roosevelt's close friend and aide, Harry Hopkins, and a special introduction by Allan Nevins. The editor was Ben D. Zevin.
For many readers, this book will recall those 12 years when Roosevelt was the dominant individual in American life, for those who loved him, those who admired him, and those who hated him. His speeches illustrate why he struck such emotions in his listeners, and in newspaper readers. There are 62 different speeches, ranging from the convention address of 1932 when he brought forth the "New Deal" idea to the speech he was to have delivered April 13, 1945, at a Jefferson Day dinner.
THE INHERTORS, by John Tebel
(Popular, 60 cents).
Hearst is one of the men portrayed in this story of the great American fortunes. There are also portraits, and descriptions of the spending and high life, of the Astors, the Dodges, the Dukes and Reynoldses of tobacco fame, the Vanderbiltts, Hearst, the Du Ponts, the McCormicks and Fields of Chicago, the Drexels and Mellons, the Guggenheimis and Morgans, the Carnegies and Rockefellers and others who have been, in the Tebbel term, "Lords and Ladies Bountiful."
A historian whose special interest has been the men Matthew Josephson calls "the robber barons" is the author of this entertaining and valuable work, John Tebbel also has done histories in American journalism, including a biography of William Randolph Hearst.
GOOD READING, edited by J. Sherwood Weber (Mentor, 75 cents).
Now comes the 19th edition of a popular bibliography that should be on the shelf of every University of Kansas student. This work is revised, updated and expanded, and was prepared by the Committee on College Reading.
HITLER'S SECRET BOOK, introduction by Telford Taylor (Evergreen, $2.45).
What the book is, apparently,
is an unpublished book by Hitler,
confiscated in May 1945 by an
American officer in Germany. It
had been dictated in 1928 and
placed in a Nazi safe.
This is billed as a sequel to "Mein Kampf," and it has an introduction by a retired brigadier general who was chief counsel at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.
Hitler sets forth his foreign policy and gives his rationalization for war. There are attacks on the Jews, the French, the Bolsheviks, and so on.
This giant of a book contains nearly 1,000 pages and misses nothing, it would seem, in the life of this 20th century giant. It is difficult to see how anything else needs to be said about Eugene O'Neill.
O'NEILL, by Barbara and Arthur
Gelb (Delta, $3.75).
The authors present the youthful O'Neill, the years at sea, years which contributed so much to the later plays, the gold expedition in Honduras, life in Greenwich Village, and life in Provincetown. The books that made their imprint on O'Neill are treated, and the playwrights, Strindberg and the classical Greeks who are so evident in O'Neill's plays.
The authors set out to do a conventional biography, but found O'Neill was too mighty for that. His life was so entwined with his plays that much had to be said to explain the man and his work. Furthermore, his early years, and the backgrounds of his parents, also were too relevant to be ignored.
The authors give us a picture of the parents, the neurotic mother and the twisted, flamboyant father who had played Monte Cristo so long that he almost lived the part in real life. This segment of O'Neill's life is known to those acquainted with that posthumous masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey into Night."
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