Books: The Editors Like

MARY LINCOLNby Ruth Painter Randall. (Little, Brown, $5.75.) Mary Todd Lincoln, pursued by slander and tragedy in her lifetime and persecuted by historians since, has waited a long time for justice. It’s a pleasure to report that Mrs. Randall’s defense is successful as well as sympathetic.

THE HONEST RAINMAKERby A. J. Liebling. (Doubleday, $3.50.) True or not (and one has doubts), the reminiscences of Colonel Stingo, a journalist moderately occupied in covering horse races, are a comical farrago of wit, wisdom, and piracy.

THE BUFFALO WALLOWby Charles Tenney Jackson. (Bobbs-Merrill, $3.00.) Mr. Jackson grew up in Nebraska in the eighties with nothing but good food and unlimited elbowroom, and his memories of his frontier boyhood will fill all but the most cynical readers with envy.

FEVER OF LOVEby Rosamond Harcourt-Smith. (Longmans, Green, $3.00.) This is a clever, frankly trivial affair in which the British gentry swap wives and husbands in a flurry of bright conversation, all to no purpose but amusement.

COTILLIONby Georgette Heyer. (Putnam, $3,50.) A resourceful heroine, dodging the matrimonial offers of a stuffy parson and a batty peer, stirs up a great pother in Regency London. Miss Heyer is an artist at these historical meringues.

NINE DAYS TO MUKALLAby Frederic Prokosch. (Viking, $3.00.) Four Europeans travel dangerously to nowhere through what the author calls Arabia, although this shimmering world, seething with color and full of enchanting bilingual natives, can hardly exist outside a poet’s imagination.

A KINO RELUCTANTby Vaughan Wilkins. (Macmillan. $3.50.) Mr. Wilkins’s theory of the fate of the lost Dauphin begins with an improbable balloon, holds a fast pace through sundry exciting misadventures, and ends with an improbable French invasion of Wales which is, of all things, fact.

OUT OF RED CHINAby Liu Shaw-Tong. (Duell, Sloan & Pearce-Little, Brown, $4.00.) An involuntary Chinese Communist describes the operations of the party, a vast, brutal, erratic bureaucracy, in venomous detail.

I JOINED THE RUSSIANSby Count Heinrich von Einsiedel. (Yale University Press, $4.00.) Bismarck’s grandson, captured at Stalingrad, joined the anti-Hitler German officers organized by the Russians. His account of his conversion to Communism and eventual deconversion is thorough, sometimes funny, and perhaps more revealing than he knows.

FOREIGN POLICY WITHOUT FEARby Vera Micheles Dean. (McGraw-Hill, $3.75.) Mrs. Dean surveys the failures and successes of recent U.S. foreign policy and offers some levelheaded suggestions for correcting the first and increasing the second. Her arguments are lucid, dispassionate, and convincing.