"I Write From Washington"

MARQUIS W. CHILDS is one of the bright, hard minds among the Washington correspondents. He has an independent paper behind him, strong enough to let him get around and willing to have him follow a story where it leads. It leads here by a number of interesting threads through the complicated political pattern of the past ten years.

It is a book well peopled with politicos, large and small. Wendell Willkie is a large and favored figure, Boss Pendergast a less favored one. The New Dealers and their friends and foes are all seen through Mr. Childs’s slightly fishy eye. He generally shares the suspicions of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. These are usually worthy suspicions. He deftly psychoanalyzes our national mind in the years from depression into war and shrewdly estimates some of the forces and motives at work in Washington at war. Somehow a good deal is revealed of the structure of government, of the characteristics of Congress, of the inwardness of the power issue at home and oil abroad. A brisk style, an extensive acquaintance, and a curiosity for detail and incident make Marquis Childs an entertaining and instructive guide to the capital’s politics and their meaning to the national life. The book has life, personality, and the warm prejudices of an able reporter. If it is not so deep as a well, it is not heavy either. It is best in its character sketches of people the author enjoys or detests. L. M. L.