BY PHOEBE ADAMS

PAMELA HANSFORD JOHNSON, wife of C. P. Snow, is an accomplished novelist in her own right. Her latest book, NIGHT AND SILENCE WHO IS HERE? (Scribner’s, $4.50), is clearly the result of personal observation of the academic world in the United States, but unlike most satirical novels on this topic, it reveals no personal grievance whatsoever. Miss Johnson simply thinks the whole outfit monstrously funny, and backs her opinion with a comic tale of life in a mythical university somewhere in the New Hampshire ski country. In addition to dismantling a dozen types of learned lunacy, she has invented, and solidly supports, a truly impressive piece of critical research. One of her characters is busily proving that Emily Dickinson was an alcoholic. This enterprise wobbles through the book, ridiculous, unlikely, and obliquely persuasive, for Ruddock’s rum theory, presented deadpan in a more suitable context, would in fact be respectable, bolstered as it is with interminable quotations from the poems. It is satire of a high order that gets its deadliest effects without resort to exaggeration.
In 1860, RICHARD BURTON, that unorthodox Victorian and irrepressible explorer of odd places and odder people, undertook to visit the Mormons in Salt Lake City. He had, after all, done rather well in Mecca and Harar, and the supply of holy cities is not unlimited. The book that he wrote about his journey, THE CITY OF THE SAINTS (Knopf, $8.50), has been reprinted, edited by Fawn M. Broclie, whose introduction is a good, sympathetic short biography of Burton. A sloppy but spirited and highly intelligent writer, Burton is still excellent reading, jumbling together practical advice, anthropology, descriptions of landscape, complaints of the weather and the cooking, references to Africa and the Orient, and comic asides. He is sometimes a bit like Dumas and again a bit like Twain, but essentially a nonesuch and well worth reviving.
HARRY M. CAUDILL’S NIGHT COMES TO THE CUMBERLANDS (Atlantic—Little, Brown, $6.75) is a quietly horrifying study of a region which it is flattery to call a national disgrace. A Kentuckian by birth, Mr. Caudill is a lawyer and state legislator, and well qualified to describe the bloody history and current misery of the Cumberland area. The district was first ignored by the authorities, the early settlers being a hopelessly lawless lot, and later stripped bare by irresponsible coal companies. That the ignorant, clannish, intransigent mountaineers connived inadvertently in their own ruin is no consolation for the poverty and hopelessness that have settled over the whole Cumberland Plateau. Mr. Caudill’s account of the situation is clear and knowledgeable and, considering the infuriating nature of his material, presented with great restraint.
HAL BORLAND’S WHEN THE LEGENDS DIE (Lippincott, $4.50) gives a frontier setting to the fashionable themes of rootlessness and isolation. His hero is an Indian boy whose childhood is spent in the Stone Age world of his ancestors. When his parents die, he is scooped into a reservation school and from there booted into the twentieth century, where he becomes a successful rodeo rider. The whole thing understandably remains an irrelevant bad dream to Bear’s Brother, and the book’s optimistic conclusion is its least convincing feature. The antique Indian life, however, is fascinating, the rodeo episodes are a lively muddle of action and chicanery, and Mr. Borland’s descriptions of Colorado scenery are enough to make one give up civilization forever.
In editing THE CONCISE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MODERN WORLD LITERATURE (Hawthorn, $15.00), Geoffrey Grigson ordered his contributors, an international assemblage of literary critics, to write their opinions of authors’ work and forget minor biographical details. The result of this editorial instruction is a collection of short literary essays, weak on mundane facts but strong on quotation and full of the kind of unbridled enthusiasm and uncontrolled malice that are normally printed only over a signature. Presented anonymously, this mixture of insult and adulation seems a bit unsporting, unless one simply blames it on Mr. Grigson, who candidly explains his responsibility for the nature of the book. Despite all this, the book has merit. One cannot read a page of it without being driven to think.