BY PHOEBE ADAMS
Fearing that the wilder parts of South America will shortly succumb to civilization, PETER MATTHIESSEN has made a long, intricate, and interesting journey through them, which he describes in THE CLOUD FOREST (Viking, $6. 00). Mr. Matthiessen is a careful, precise observer who saw a vast number of strange birds and beasts, and met with wild Indians and wilder rivers. He has, however, achieved the ultimate refinement of objective reporting, suppressing not only his sentiments but his personality and even his person to such an extent that when he mentions a bouncing airplane or the deficiencies of Patagonian plumbing, one wonders how such matters ever came to the attention of this disembodied observer. Very good photographs.
THE ELEPHANTS (Macmillan, $3.95), by GEORGES BLOND, is a book calculated to annoy readers with strictly scientific standards and to please everyone who likes a good story about animals. The author, an enthusiastic admirer and student of elephants, has collected everything he or anyone else has ever discovered about the beasts and woven it all into a tale of the adventures of one small African herd. It is a highly artificial device, but it permits Mr. Blond to present his information in a pleasantly informal way.
THE OLD WEST IN FICTION (Ivan Obolensky, $7.50), edited by IRWIN R. BLACKER, is a laudable attempt to prove that westerns are so literature. The writers represented in this anthology range from John Steinbeck and A. B. Guthrie to Zane Grey and Ernest Haycox, and all Mr. Blacker has proved is that westerns can be literature when a good writer elects to write one.
GISELLE AND I (Vanguard, $5.50) is just what the title promises, ALICIA MARKOVA’S account of her experiences in connection with dancing the role for which she is most famous. It is only that, not being a true autobiography in any sense.
Prison history sounds like a grim subject, but the early pages of KENNETH LAMONT’S CHRONICLES OF SAN QUENTIN (David McKay, $4.75) are wildly funny. The prison just grew, so to speak, and the early settlers in California were remarkably reluctant to admit that this civic convenience was also a civic expense, a state of mind that produced a whole series of comic-opera financial experiments. The later sections of the book are less amusing, but reveal that even a respectably managed modern penitentiary has its bizarre moments.
GOYA (Thomas Yoseloff, $5.95) provides more reproductions of the artist’s tapestry cartoons than are usual in a book of this size, less of his black-and-white work, and a text by DINO FORMAGGIO, who attempts to prove that Goya was a forerunner of the existentialist philosophers. The book was printed in Italy, and the color is good.
A COMPANION TO MURDER by E. SPENCER SHEW (Knopf. $4.50) is a handy encyclopedia for devotees of genuine British crime. It lists judges, lawyers, innocent bystanders, and notable murderers, the last accompanied by brisk summaries of the accomplishments which brought them to fame and the eye of Scotland Yard. It covers only the years 1900 to 1950, which deprives the student of such lovable personages as Jack the Ripper, and Burke and Hare, but perhaps Mr. Shew will remedy this lack with a second volume. Incidentally, the book reveals that the characteristic British murder is the poisoning of an old woman by a man who has married her for her money.
JOHN HAWKES’S ingenious short novel, THE LIME TWIG (New Directions, $3.50), conceals behind its brilliantly evasive style a story worthy of Ian Fleming. Gangsters, a stolen horse, a bevy of nympho maniacs, a throat-cutting in a Turkish bath, a woman beaten to death, and an indeterminate number of shootings all arise from an idiotic premise. Mr. Hawkes’s world is actually the realization of the more perverse daydreams of his characters, and it gives the reader quite a jolt.
The Dutch novelist JAN DE HARTOG arrived in this country with a Dutch barge and sailed his unlikely baggage up the inland waterway from Texas to Nantucket, WATERS OF THE NEW WORLD (Atheneum, $5.95) records his impressions, which are unlike those of most European visitors, for Mr. de Hartog found poetry and haunted wilderness and seems to have missed billboards and commerce entirely.