BY PHOEBE ADAMS
THE HANDS OF CANTÚ (Little, Brown, $6.75), written and beautifully illustrated by TOM LEA, is a book out of some lost world of innocence. It tells the very simple story of how, in the year 1580, Don Vito Cantú, the finest breeder, trainer, and rider of horses in New Spain, led a small expedition north from the borders of the known world into a strange wilderness where he recovered from the aborigines a stolen herd of horses. The importance of this affair lay in the perfectly sensible desire of the Spaniards to keep the Indian on the ground; its great charm and interest lie in the skill of Mr. Lea’s narration. Without resorting to archaisms or elaborate grammatical liberties, he has contrived a prose that suggests translation from an old Spanish chronicle. He has also created in Don Vito, the obsessed explorer Teclo Paz, and the renegade Basilio Ro as convincing a set of well-bred frontier ruffians as ever entertained a reader.
STRAIGHT HERBLOCK (Simon and Schuster, $5.95) covers the past five years of history in the ferocious, witty, intelligent cartoons with which HERBERT BLOCK enlivens the political pages of newspapers all around the world. In some respects the book is oddly consoling: one comes across impassioned illustrations of some long-extinct crisis and thinks, with relief, Well, that one was a false alarm. In other respects, the drawings are as fizzy as they ever were. Herblock on Goldwater, or Nixon, or race relations, or greedy corporations, is firing on a live target.
CHRISTOPHER JACKSON’S MANUEL (Knopf, $4.95) is a report on the life and conduct of a particularly miserable juvenile murderer in Chile. It is compiled and written not by a sociologist, as one would expect, but by a professor of philosophy with literary inclinations. Mr. Jackson became interested in Manuel because both the boy’s crime and his conduct after it seemed so utterly inexplicable. In a long series of interviews, he got the history of the garrulous Manuel, and fitted together a pitiful story of neglect, abuse, confusion, and poverty. That Manuel should have become a criminal seems inevitable except that so far as Mr. Jackson could discover, his brother and sister, brought up in similar circumstances, turned out to be honest, well-behaved young citizens. In the long run, then, the book settles nothing, but it does offer a close view of a bleak slum world not very different from the equivalent milieu here.
AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF ENGLAND (Viking, $20.00) is a big, gaudy, cultural cream puff— ANDRÉ MAUROIS’S perfectly pleasant, absolutely orthodox, reliable old one-volume work somewhat cut and thickly bedizened with everything from an aerial view of Stonehenge to a color shot of Queen Elizabeth II reviewing busbys.
With all its ornament, the Maurois book can at least be read, which is more than can be said of THE ISLAND RACE (Dodd, Mead, $27.50), a one-volume butchery of Winston Churchill’s four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Along with certain necessary explanations and transitions, the anonymous cutter has excised almost everything characteristic of Churchill, which seems pretty silly until one perceives that nobody is expected to do anything with this book but look at the frequently irrelevant illustrations. Too heavy to carry, too awkward to hold, too large to read comfortably even on a table, this thing is not a book but a status symbol.
In case anybody still whiles away winter evenings with ghost stories, two collections are available — the neatly plotted, morally irreproachable BEST GHOST STORIES (Dover, $2.00) of J. S. LE FANU, and the eccentric, disorderly, exasperating, but far more interesting GHOST AND HORROR STORIES (Dover, $1.00) of AMBROSE BIERCE. Electric lights and good glasses have dissolved more apparitions than science and education, and the rappings of the poltergeist have been drowned out by the whirrings, chirrings, purrings, and clankings of modern household machinery, but Bierce, operating in an ambiguous twilight between the supernatural and the demented, still raises a chill.
In ROSA AT TEN O’CLOCK (Holt, Rinehart and Winston), MARCO DENEVI has cleverly disguised an old theme in a neat, beguiling, fourangled plot.