RECENT & READABLE

Fiction ACCOUNT RENDERED -- Brittain-- Britfain --Macmillian ($3).

Francis Keynsham Halkin, young musical prodigy, is so sickened by the horrors of World War I that he afterwards "blacks out" in moments of great emotional strain. When the German bombers come over in 1940, his breakdown has tragic results. This is the story of his penance and redemption. Though slow-paced and often superficial, it should nonetheless be enjoyed by readers who liked the poignancy of James Hilton's Random Harvest.

BRIDGE TO BROOKLYN--Albert E. Idell --Holt ($2.75).

A continuation of Centennial Summer and the adventures of the Rogers family. Boisterous Papa Jesse moves them from Philadelphia to Brooklyn, where he is to take part in building the bridge. His daughters' beaux, servant troubles, domestic tantrums, excursions keep things quaint and lively; there is also some slight recognition of the political and social history of the 1870s. The material is old family album, and the mood is gay.

HARD FACTS--Howard Spring--Viking ($2.50).

The title refers to life and to a penny paper, Hard Facts, that achieved a phenomenal success. The scene: an English industrial city in the 1880s (presumably Manchester). The chief characters: Theo Chrystal, a handsome young curate; Elsie, the girl Theo thought he loved; Alec, Elsie's disillusioned poet-brother, now the jeering editor of the penny paper. There is a touch of bitterness in the story, a sense of the variance of the church and its precepts, a real understanding of life's injustice to the poor. Unpleasant at times, but impressive.

General

LOST WALTZ--Bertita Harding--Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

The family of Archduke Leopold Salvator, of the Austrian Habsburgs, furnishes a musicomedy plot from real life. Exiled by war and revolution, the Archduke and his wife and children learn to sweep floors, take care of their own clothes, earn their bread the hard way. But with what seems an American flair, they succeed as automobile mechanics, airplane pilots, inventors.

THE GREAT UNION--David Cort--Union Press ($1).

A brief, eloquent restatement, written from the added perspective of five years of war, of the plan for a world federation of the democracies which Clarence Streit advanced in Union Now in 1939. The author is LIFE'S Foreign News Editor.

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