Potpourri

Three brief book reviews

The Little Blue Light, by Edmund Wilson. Farrar, Straus, $2.75.

Hecate County, for all its wickedness, was a suburb of heaven compared with the U.S. circa 1960, as satirically pictured in Mr. Wilson’s three-act play — a gruesomely intriguing fantasy. The twoparty system has broken down and the citizenry is bullied by giant pressure groups, one communist, one fascist, and one clerical. Spying and blackmail are almost universal and murder lias been simplified by the invention of a selfoperating gadget which causes the victim to incinerate himself. The characters include a magazine editor who is making a last stand for independent thought; his restless, attractive wife and well-bred young aide; a neurotic writer of horror stories centering on the monster god Shidnats Slyme; and a moralizing gardener, who starts out as an Italian, develops a marked Irish brogue, and ends up as Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.
Out of My Later Years, by Albert Einstein. Philosophical Library, $4.75.

Sixty excerpts (averaging four to five pages) from Einstein’s articles, addresses, and letters of the past fifteen years. Grouped according to subject matter, these pieces deal with ethics, science, religion, world government, control of atomic energy, socialism, the Jews and Zionism, and “personalities (Mme. Curie, Gandhi, and others). The most striking thing about Einstein’s thought in the nonscientific essays is the ever present and intense concern with moral values; the book’s cumulative impression is of a quality which can only be described as saintliness.

The Stevens America, by Marion and Alden Stevens.Little, Brown, $5.00.

A first-rate handbook for travelers on the highways of the U.S.A. —clearly organized (into twenty-eight TransAmerica Tours) and encyclopedically informative. Unlike a good many travel writers, the authors steer pretty clear of press agentry; and the text, without overstraining for liveliness, is briskly readable. There are thirty-five maps and a fiftypage “route finder,” which tells the motorist the beat way to get from wherever he is to wherever he wants to go.