Books: The Editors Like

VAGRANT VIKING by Peter Freuchen. (Messner, $5.00.) The autobiography of a Danish author-explorer whose enterprises have taken him over a large part of the world. He liked it all, and so will any reader with a taste for free-wheeling adventure.

COMING DOWN THE SEINE by Robert Gibbings. (Dutton, $4.50.) The author follows the Seine from its source to the sea in a book full of delightful digressions, enthusiasms, and sly Irish humor.

NORTH by Kaare Rodahl. (Harper, $3.50.) Early explorations, recent discoveries, weather studies, methods of survival, problems of construction — a bit of everything rolled into a comprehensive report on the Arctic, by a scientist who has a vast knowledge of the region.

DOWN by Walt Grove. (Dell, 25¢) The rescue of a flier down on 1 he ice pack involves a whole Arctic air base in personal and professional uproar in this tense, irresistible adventure story.

THE PALM-WINE DRINKARD by Amos Tutuola. (Grove, $2.75.) A native West African novelist, is something new, and his book is quite rightly something unique, although its basic outline is the evidently universal myth of the hero who visits the world of the dead and outwits the local authorities.

THE DEAD BOY AND THE COMETS by Goffredo Parise. (Farrar, Straus & Young, $3.00.) Realistic detail, symbolism, and wild fantasy are combined here to depict the state of mind of Italian adolescents immediately after the last war. The method is arbitrary but effective.

THE COLOR OF THE DAY by Romain Gary. (Simon & Schuster, $3.50.) Sometimes touching, sometimes acidly bizarre, the love story of an idealistic adventurer and a movie star is entertaining even when it wanders into pseudo profundities.

AROUND THE THEATRES by MaxBeerbohm. (British Book Centre, $6.75.) A selection of the theatrical reviews Sir Max wrote between 1898 and 1908, proving that he is one of the best as well as one of the wittiest critics who ever enlivened an opening night.

THE ORDEAL OF GEORGE MEREDITHby Lionel Stevenson. (Scribner’s, $6.00.) This full-length, full-dress biography of Meredith succeeds in making lively reading of a life in which most events were purely cerebral.

THE POET’S TESTAMENT by George Santayana. (Scribner’s, $3.50.) The philosopher who began as a poet ended as one too. This collection includes the previously unpublished work which the author wished to have preserved, a number of suave poems, translations, and two plays in blank verse.