BY PHOEBE ADAMS

ALFRED DUGGAN’S latest historical novel, FAMILY FAVORITES (Pantheon, $4.50), concerns an “often outrageous emperor,”the boy Elagabalus, who was surely the most harmless humanitarian, the most amiable pervert, and the most charming nuisance among the many oddities that graced the Roman purple. As usual, Mr. Duggan employs a first-person narrator close to the action of his story but not intensely involved in it: Duratius, the butterfly emperor’s bodyguard, a landless Gaulish aristocrat turned legionary. A Gaul makes a good commentator, for nobody, including Mr. Duggan, can be quite certain what Gauls did believe, and it is possible to make the tartly witty, subtly contemptuous Duratius something pretty close to a modern observer without doing open violence to historical probability. As a team, Duratius and Elagabalus rather suggest Bagheera coping with Clovis Sangrail, and this bizarre combination manages to be both amusing and convincing.
NO LONGER AT EASE (Ivan Obolensky, $2.95) is the second novel by the Nigerian author CHINUA ACHEBE. it is less violent and picturesque than his first book, which described the defeat of an old-fashioned tribal leader by encroaching European authority, but in its quieter way, it is impressive — the bloodless, ironic, half-ludicrous tragedy of an Englisheducated African who discovers, when he goes home, that in everything that matters most to him, his conduct must still conform to the African superstitions that he has learned to despise.
IRVING WERSTEIN’S THE BLIZZARD OF ‘88 (Crowell, $4.50) should be some consolation to sufferers from the winter of '61. It concentrates on the troubles of New York City, reporting the death and damage inflicted, plus some astounding stories of luck, lunacy, and plain debauch, and makes clear that the big storm was indeed, as one weatherman put it, “a Jim-dandy.”
According to report, THE GOUFFÉ CASE by JOACHIM MAASS (Harper, $4.95) has been immensely popular in Germany and England and has received general critical acclaim. The first is understandable, for the book is a great walloping energetic hodgepodge of detective puzzle, fatal passion, child-bitch heroine, and picaresque journey. The second is mildly bewildering, for although the author has reinforced his tale with such fashionable elements as the death wish and the symbolic journey to the unconscious, he accomplishes nothing of any significance or originality with either. And when three French characters arrive at Saratoga Springs in the year 1890 and have no difficulty at all in chattering with the natives - ah, well, as an American, perhaps one should be flattered by Mr. Maass’s faith in the ancestral command of French.
THE AUTHENTIC MOTHHR GOOSE (Alan Swallow, $3.75 and $1.85) is largely devoted to facsimile reproductions of the first Mother Goose collection and the first English translation of Perrault’s fairy tales. The book has been edited by Jacques Barchilon and Henry Pettit, whose introduction stoutly defends both verses and tales from the libels of educators, librarians, and child psychologists. It’s high time, too.
HESKETH PEARSON has written A LIFE OF SHAKESPHEARE (Walker. $5.00) out of an intense love of the poetry, a theaterman’s respect for the plays, and a careful study of the known facts of Shakespeare’s life, which by now amount to quite a body of information. With no thesis up his sleeve about his subject’s identity, ancestry, religion, or abnormalities, Mr. Pearson has produced a pleasant, reasonable book, his only serious fault being a tendency to assume that any character Shakespeare played on the stage must represent some facet of the poet’s private character.
MODERN ART: YESTERDAY AND TOMORROW (Reynal, $10.00) is the fourth book in the Selective Eye series, a collection of articles, some reminiscent, some critical, some speculative, written by various authors and originally published in the review L’Oeil. The book begins with Berthe Morisot and the DegasManet-Renoir circle and ends in the very immediate present. Interesting and well illustrated all the way.
FRANK O’CONNOR’S partial autobiography, AN ONLY CHILD (Knopf, $4.50), covers the first twenty years of his life, beginning in poverty, working through an erratic self-education and the Irish civil war, and ending with the young man’s subtle rejection of the “introverted religion and introverted patriotism” of the world in which he had grown up. The writing is superb, Mr. O’Connor being a master of his trade; the people he knew were a splendidly eccentric, idealistic, and impassioned lot; the civil war is a muddle, alternately funny and horrible, and evidently as much a mystery to Mr. O’Connor at the time as it has been to non-Irishmen ever since.
THE HAPLESS CHILD (Ivan Obolensky, $1.75) is EDWARD GOREY’S parody of all Victorian child’s tearjerkers, a mean, hilarious synthesis of Sarah Carewe, Little Eva, Oliver Twist, and company, calculated to delight the cynic and give everybody else a sound jolt. The pictures are outrageously gloomy and altogether suited to the author’s malicious intent.
The two boxed volumes of SHELLEY AND HIS CIRCLE (Harvard University Press, $30.00), edited by Kenneth Neill Cameron, are the start ot a projected eight volumes containing the manuscripts collected by the late Carl H. Pforzheimer. The collection includes letters, diaries, formal papers, bills, and business documents from all sorts of people, the GodwinWollstonecraft circle. Hogg, and a parade of friends, relatives, and random connections. Much of the material has appeared in print before, and it does not, naturally, include all the surviving papers relating to Shelley, but backed by Mr. Cameron’s extensive notes, it is a positive treasure-trove for either scholars or simple amateur enthusiasts.
FOUR SCREENPLAYS OF INGMAR BERGMAN (Simon and Schuster, $6.00) includes the scripts of Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Magician. It is designed for Bergman enthusiasts and will probably serve them well. More objective readers will learn from it that the effect of a motion picture depends primarily on motion and pictures, the spoken dialogue being hardly more than an unfortunate practical necessity. Reduced to plain print, Mr. Bergman’s scripts lose completely the quality of mystery and excitement that distinguishes his films, while his reluctance to carry his themes to any conclusion is far more noticeable than it is on the screen.