BY PHOEBE ADAMS
H. L. MENCKEN’S THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE (Knopf, $12.95), which went through sundry revisions and additions during the author’s later years, has been converted into a onevolume abridged edition by Raven I. McDavid, Jr. Professor McDavid has inserted a little new material and has added some notes. Since nothing but mayhem and massacre could destroy the interest of the study, a pioneer in the field, or dent Mencken’s gingery style, the editor’s discreet meddling does no harm at all. If Mencken must be abridged, this is the way to do it.
LETTERS OF THE GREAT ARTISTS (Random House, $12.95) is an obvious gift book — two volumes, boxed, edited by Richard Friedenthal, and offering extracts from the correspondence of everyone who wielded brush, chisel, and pen from Ghiberti to Jackson Pollock. There are a great many pictures, not top-drawer as to color, but very well chosen to illustrate what the letter writers were doing and how. There is no pattern to the arrangement of material, except the chronological, but the letters do reveal that not all artists are good correspondents, and they also suggest that the independence of artists in general (the very great men, of course, had always been independent) dates from the seventeenth century.
DIARY OF A GERMAN SOLDIER (Coward-McCann, $4.50) was kept by a dutiful Nazi named WILHELM PRÜLLER who fought earnestly until he was wounded and then hoped for victory until the grim tag end of the war. Prüller was prissy, humorless, and unimaginative — the sort of loyal dog who could write: “We shall not lay down our arms until the Jugoslav Government in its present state is crushed; until that destructive herd, who set off the greatest blood bath of all times — the first World War — is ‘taken care of’” and mean every word of it. He sounds like something out of an uplifting Victorian book for boys. This dreary fellow was undoubtedly a good soldier, prompt, obedient, and uncomplaining, but since there is no guarantee that the German Army functioned primarily on men of this type, one cannot be certain that anything is to be gained by putting up with Prüller’s company for 186 pages.
The NONESUCH BIBLE (Random House, $45.00) reproduces the King James text, unmodernized and unmonkeyed with, in three volumes — two for the Old Testament, one for the New. The books are a good shape, of manageable size, with type that contrives to look antique while remaining splendidly readable.
WILLY LEY subtitles his WATCHERS OF THE SKIES (Viking, $7.50) “An Informal History of Astronomy from Babylon to the Space Age,” and this description is so accurate that further comment is hardly necessary. Professor Ley writes simply, briskly and with authority. He assumes that the reader knows a little something of astronomical procedures, which he does not always bother to explain, and nothing at all of Greek gods, for whom he always accounts in detail.
The Venezuelan writer ARTURO USLAR PIETRI, has also been a diplomat, a government administrator, and a teacher. His novel THE RED LANCES (Knopf, $4.95) concerns the War of Independence of 1811 in Venezuela, but it is designed to represent this war, and similar wars, at any time in any country. The action shifts rapidly from place to place and person to person, explanations are omitted, continuity is vague. One sees a world fall apart and another world growing like a stalagmite from the pieces. The technique suggests, in fact, cinema and is powerful if sometimes confusing in its effects.
THE LORE OF SHIPS (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $23.95) is beautifully made, presenting the history of ship design through plans and diagrams, with a minimum of text. The book has been put together through the cooperation of nautical experts from half a dozen countries, under the generalship (pardon, admiralship) of Tre Tryckare, and printed in Sweden. It is a fine thing for a really abandoned ship buff.
ERITIC POETRY (Random House, $8.95) is a stout, bustling sort of anthology, edited by William Cole, whose taste runs to comedy and satire as well as the more usual aspects of love poetry. He includes a large number of modern poems, most of them very good indeed.