Books: The Editors Like

THE TARTAR STEPPEby Dino Buzzati. (Farrar, Straus & Young, $3.00.) An officer waits at an isolated outpost for the war that never comes, in this poetical disturbing allegory of human life. Translated from the Italian by Stuart Hood.

THE DISTANT SHOREby Jan de Hartog. (Harper, $3.50.) After skippering a seagoing tug during the war, the captain has trouble settling down to peace, and no wonder, for the tugboat war has a grim humor and excitement hard to beat..

MARCH OF THE HEROby Richard Lee Marks. (Appleton-Century-Crofts, $3.50.) Revolution in a mythical South American country is the nerve-racking background for Mr. Marks’s study of the demoralizing effect of power on an idealistic amateur politician.

THE ILLUSIONISTby Franchise Mallet. (Farrar, Straus & Young, $3.00.) The author handles an adolescent girl’s Lesbian love affair with understanding, good taste, and exceptional literary skill, but the book is not for the squeamish.

OF PLYMOUTH PLANTATIONby William Bradford, edited by Samuel Eliot Morison, (Knopf, $6.00.) The first complete, modern edition of Bradford’s on-the-spot history of his colony is a highly readable book, for Bradford, shorn of antique spelling and punctuation, proves to be a first-rate reporter.

THE LETTERS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELTedited by Elting E. Morison. Volumes V and VI. (Harvard University Press, $20.00.) This monumental record of Roosevelt’s ideas and activities runs from the Russo-Japanese peace negotiations to the close of his administration.

HEAR THE TRAIN BLOWby Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg. (Dutton, $12.75.) Two enthusiasts celebrate the gaudy history of American railroading with a short, lively text and an enormous gallery of pictures.

THE BIG TOPby Fred Bradna, as told to Hartzell Spence. (Simon & Schuster, $3.95.) All about the circus by a man who really knows, having been Ringling’s equestrian director (stage manager, to the layman) for forty years.

THE GLITTER AND THE GOLDby Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan. (Harper, $4.00.) The American heiress who didn’t want to be Duchess of Marlborough recalls Edwardian elegance with a pleasant lack of nostalgia and a good deal of dry humor.

HERE’S A HOW-DE-DOby Martyn Green. (Norton, $3.75.) Quite properly for a comic lead, Mr. Green concentrates on the oddities, absurdities, and confusions of his thirty years with the D’Oyly Carte Gilbert and Sullivan company, and makes no forays into serious theatrical history.