Potpourri

IS PARIS BURNING? (Simon and Schuster, $6.95) by LARRY COM.INS and DOMINIQUE LAPIERRK is more complicated than the usual Allies versus Axis war narrative. At Paris, everybody got into the act. The Allied command wanted to bypass the city, primarily to save gasoline for the push into Germany. De Gaulle wanted to take Paris in order to establish an unequivocally French government before the Communists could do so. The Communists wanted a quick and bloody rising to forestall De Gaulle. Hitler wanted the place blown flat, out of insane spite, which seems to have been what really saved it. Dietrich von Gholtitz, a man with a record of dutiful brutality on the eastern front, was selected to command the hopeless defense and needless destruction of Paris, and treated to a personal interview with Hitler to establish the importance of the commission. The general left the interview with three new ideas impressed upon his proper Junker mind: 1) the Führer was mad, 2) the war was lost, 3) the Von Choltitz family honor simply would not survive the renown accruing to a man who blew up Paris. Mr. Collins and Mr. Lapierre have made a coherent, exciting story out of all the confusion and cross-purposes, neglecting nothing — not even a tank crew’s dead duck.

(Atheneum, $4.95) is a sad, subtle novel by GIORGIO BASSANI. The first-person narrator of this story appears to be simply recalling the now vanished world of his youth. In fact, the book depicts the Jewish community of Florence in the 1930s, at the point where Mussolini found it expedient to take up anti-Semitism, and explains how even the virtues of these withdrawn, scholarly people worked against them.

ELIZABETH MARSHALL THOMAS, who wrote an excellent book about the Bushmen of the Kalahari several years ago, has since studied and lived among a tribe called the Dodoth, located in northern Uganda. She describes these people in THE WARRIOR HERDSMEN (Knopf, $5.95). The Dodoth are short on clothing and conveniences, passionately addicted to collecting cattle, and devoid of any formal government whatsoever, but they are by no means incomprehensible primitives. One of the many charms of Mrs. Thomas’ lively, sympathetic book is the constant appearance, among exotic items like witch doctors, cattle raids, and blood sacrifices, of perfectly familiar human types acting in perfectly recognizable ways.

JOHN LENNON, the literate Beatle, has tossed off another book: A SPANIARD IN THE WORKS (Simon and Schuster, $2.50). Mr. Lennon’s style is promiscuously derived from dialect, Shavian phonetic spelling, the Jabberwock, Mrs. Malaprop. and Constable Dogberry, and his point of view, when one has penetrated the linguistic brush pile, is tolerant exasperation with practically everything. At his best, Mr. Lennon can achieve overtones of satire, parody, obscenity, political comment, and literary reminiscence in a single cannily distorted word.

ROBERT CANZONERI, a native of Mississippi, discusses the Southern mind in “I DO SO POLITELY” (Houghton Mifflin, $4.00). The title is a quotation from Mr. Canzoneri’s cousin Ross Barnett, who was, when he said it, governor of the state and engaged in refusing James Meredith admission to the University of Mississippi. What riles Mr. Canzoneri is the hypocrisy, illusion, and inconsistency in segregationist thinking, and he exposes these absurdities with the ruefulness of a kinsman and the thoroughness of a lifelong acquaintance.

JOANNE GREENBERG’S THE MONDAY VOICES (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $4.95) is called a novel but hardly deserves even this flexible term. The book is, rather, a series of sketches, ingeniously interlocked in time and place but basically isolated studies of the clients of a state agency which tests and trains (or retrains) physically handicapped people in order to place them in suitable jobs. With the exception of an illiterate farmer who turns out, improbably, to be a genius with machinery, the characters and their troubles are plausible enough, but the impact of their problems on the official who supervises them is all that holds these disparate unfortunates together. The book thus becomes a scattering of shots directed at no identifiable target.