Books: The Editors Like

EAST OF HOMEby Santha Rama Rau. (Harper, $3.00.) The daughter of India’s first Ambassador to Japan writes a happy interpretive chronicle of a year’s adventure in Japan, China, Bali, and Southeastern Asia.

THE UNITED STATES AND JAPANby Edwin O. Reischauer. (Harvard University Press, $4.00.) The author, who was horn in Japan, speaks the tongue, and who has been long resident there in his maturity, gives a fair, authentic picture of Japan past and present, of her national character and psychology, and of the recent successes and failures under the MacArthur regime.

THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTStranslated by Sir Richard Barton. (Chanticleer, $3.00.) Most of us know the “Arabian Nights” only through the Bowdlerized version for children. This new unexpurgated selection from Burtons 16-volume translation has vastly more savor and is a far cry from erotica. Amusing illustrations.

NIGHTRUNNERS OF BENGALby John Masters. (Viking, $3.00.) This novel, a Literary Guild selection, is an exciting if slightly Hollywoodish tale of love and desperate adventure during the Indian Mutiny of 1837.

LETTERS OF RICHARD WAGNERedited by John R. Burk. (Macmillan, $10.50.) Some 850 unpublished letters from the jealously guarded Burrell Collection. The correspondence with Wagner’s first wife, the material on the operas, and the comments on art, music, politics, and philosophy make this a significant addition to our knowledge of Wagner.

F.D.R.: HIS PERSONAL LETTERSedited by Elliott Roosevelt. (Duell, Sloan it Pearce, 2 vols., $10.00.) In F.D.R.’s ease, the voice at the mike was mightier than the band with the pen. Even so, his correspondence from 1928 to 19-15 is a fascinating selfportrait, full of revealing sidelights on history and intriguing trivia, human and humorous.

THE LETTERS OF EZRA POUND, 1907-1941,edited by D.D. Paige. (Harcourt, Brace, $5.00.) These letters are mostly about (lie arts, written to Santayana, Eliot, Mencken, Hemingway, and others, by a brilliant, humorous, exasperating mentor before he became (as Mark Van Doren puts it) “permanently beyond reach.

OLD FRIENDS AND NEW MUSICby Nicolas Nabokov. (Atlantic-Little, Brown, $3.50.) Impudent, refreshing, and lyrical is this study of Diaghilev’s workshop, Prokofiev before he went into captivity, Stravinsky as he composes in California, Balanchine the choreographer, and Koussevitzky in the Berkshircs. An artistic, highly amusing autobiography.

BEHIND THE GOLD CURTAINby Mary Ellis Peltz. (Farrar, Straus, $2.50.) The temperamental story, with its financial undertones, of the glamorous Metropolitan Opera (1883-1950), with thumbnail sketches and striking photographs of the immortal Nordiea, Melba, Caruso, Farrar, Chaliapin, and the contemporaries.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAWby Edmund Fuller. (Scribner’s, $2.00.) This compact, sensible discussion of Shaw’s plays and thought is one of the soundest items in the vast literature on the late maestro of paradox.