Recent & Readable

TWO SOLITUDES--Hugh MacLennan--Duell, Sloan & Peorce ($3).

Tallard discovers the power of the village priest and French Canadian prejudices during World War I. Twenty-eight years later his son faces the same problems more successfully. Longish but excellent picture of French Canadian life.

THE TROUBLED MIDNIGHT-- John Gunther--Harper ($2.50).

Fast, fluent, implausible yarn of amorous and political intrigue inside Turkey, featuring an American girl with a past, a British intelligence agent, a Nazi provocateur, a Hungarian harlot, and the Lend-Lease Administration.

THE PRIVATE ADVENTURE OF CAPTAIN SHAW-- Edith Shay and Katharine Smith--Houghton Mifftin ($2.50).

When French Revolutionists seized Captain Shaw's ship, the stubborn New Englander braved Robespierre and wicked Paris to get it back. Humor and deft characterization lift this book a notch above the standard adventure romance. Co-author Smith is Mrs. John Dos Passos.

TELL SPARTA--A. C. Sedgwick --Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).

Free-lance Correspondent Sedgwick mixes a heavyhanded, occasionally brilliant burlesque of war correspondents with a serious story of the tragic Battle of Greece.

POOR CHILD -- Anne Parrish -- Harper ($2.50).

Martin Doyle, 12-year-old New York City orphan, hungry for love and security, finds only condescension and haunting insecurity in the lavish country home of Mrs. Henry de Rendon. An in tense, morbid, misty character study.

THE CAPTAIN OF ST. MARGARET'S--Ferenc Molnar--Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

Tragi-comic fantasy by the au thor of Liliom and The Guardsman. A modern Hungarian Munchausen makes himself the hero of every wild, romantic tale he has ever heard, but his own life is more bizarre than his fancies.

APARTMENT IN ATHENS--Glenway Wescott--Harper ($2.50).

Wescott's second novel in 18 years will disappoint readers who remember the youthful vitality of The Grandmothers (1927). The story of a bullying Nazi officer who moves in on a family in Athens (which Wescott has never visited), it is an uneven, over-literary tour de force, interesting chiefly for its suggestion that some liberated Europeans may, for a time, feel rather lost without their brutal conquerors.

General

THE JOURNAL OF MARY HERVEY RUSSELL--Storm Jameson--Macmillan ($2.50).

Labeled fiction, this is an obviously auto biographical melange of English Novelist Jameson's reminiscences and reactions to the war. Intelligent, sensitive and read able despite its overelaborate style.

LEYTE CALLING -- Lieut. Joseph St. John, as told to Howard Handleman--Yanguard ($2).

The cheerful, free & easy story of an American soldier who stayed in the Philippines to fight it out with disease, native bandits, and the Japs. All the better for its total lack of literary pretension.

DOUBLE TEN -- Carl Glick -- Whittlesey House ($2.50). Captain O'Banion, under General Homer Lea, organized and trained in America the Chinese army that over threw the Manchu Dynasty in 1911. (Double Ten is the Chinese name for historic Oct. 10 of that year.) Old China Hand Glick (Shake Hands with the Drag on) makes a rousing adventure yarn out of the memories of the only surviving leader of this coup d'etat.

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