Potpourri

THE NEW YORK I KNOW (Lippincott. $7.50) is a handsome book in which MARYA MANNES describes New York C ity as it was in her childhood and contrasts her memories with conditions today. Inevitably, she iinds much to deplore, from the decline of honesty, cleanliness, and good manners to the increase of open perversity and the “cheap accidents of private greed,” but the book is by no means merely a lament for the good old days. Miss Marines finds some things to praise, and praises some things which she herself does not like, because, as she finally sums it up, “New York is for those without memory: the young.”Her observations are well supported by the photographs of Herb Snitzer.

W. A. SWANBEUG’S biography of William Randolph Hearst, CITIZEN HEARST (Scribner’s, $7.50), portrays the dragon of journalism with considerable sympathy. Professionally, Mr. Swanberg allows, his subject was a disgrace to the trade, using the power of his press almost entirely for the gratification of private whims. But personally, Mr. Swanberg has found him an engagingly humorous, if often infuriating, man, whose wildly varied enterprises provide his biographer with a gold mine of material, for he worked or fought with a procession of articulate notables, from Ambrose Bierce to Al Smith, and the book crackles with quotations.

ELIZABETH COXHEAD’S life of LADY GREGORY (Harcourt, Brace & World, $5.95) is a pleasantly uncomplicated portrait of the Irish playwright, gingered up by the author’s resentment of certain recent attempts to attribute Lady Gregory’s best work to her friends, Yeats and Hyde. Miss Coxhead puts down this antifeminist nonsense very neatly, but will probably make no impression on the type of mind that prefers to believe Bacon wrote Shakespeare.

In THE TOADSTOOL MILLIONAIRES (Princeton University Press, $6.00), JAMES HARVEY YOUNG provides a history of quackery, fakery, and patent medicines in the United States. The style is undistinguished, to put it politely, but the information Mr. Young has dredged up is seldom dull and occasionally hilarious.

The POEMS (Atlantic - Little, Brown, $3.75) of GEORGE SEFERIS have been translated from the Greek by Rex Warner. Full of questions without answers, mingling the paraphernalia of old legends with steamships and phonographs, these beautiful, disturbing poems are reports on a journey that never ends, through a landscape that is half modern Greece and half the darkest recesses of the human mind.

SHEPVRD RIFKIN’S WHAT SHIP? WHERE BOUND? (Knopf, $3.95) is a novel about a crew of volunteers trying to smuggle a shipload of Jewish refugees into Israel in 1947, when the British were blockading the coast. As a novel, it doesn’t prove a thing, but it is so fast-moving, so funny, and so full of eccentrically dedicated loons that its deficiencies are easily forgiven.

THE CHILDREN OF SÁCHEZ (Random House, S7.50) is subtitled The Autobiography of a Mexican Family, and I hardly know whether OSCAR LEWIS, who is responsible for it, should be referred to as the author or the editor of this remarkable book. Mr. Lewis, an anthropologist, became acquainted with the Sánchez family while he was studying life in the slums of Mexico City. He liked the tribe, won their confidence, and gradually persuaded Jesús Sánchez and his children to tell their various life stories to a tape recorder. Once they got going, they were very candid indeed, and the result of the project is a mass of material which Mr. Lewis professes to have pruned of repetition and sometimes rearranged to obtain a clear time sequence, but otherwise left as it was spoken. The Sánchez family, it turns out, possesses in general a considerable degree of intelligence and a formidable amount of resolution, combined with a curious aptitude for devoting these abilities to impractical ends. Considering the poverty of these people, there is surprisingly little complaint about money, but, on the other hand, there is a great concern with status and the necessity of swaggering in public. At first the standards of the Sánchezes seem utterly alien; then one realizes that our Elizabethan ancestors would have found them quite reasonable, if perhaps a trifle quixotic. Mr. Lewis has revealed a fascinating world.