Magic Carpets

RUSSIA (152 pp.); FRANCE (176 pp.); ITALY (160 pp.)--LIFE World Library ($2.95 each).

Thomas Jefferson once said that France was every American's second country. The sentiment has a strangely parochial sound to the contemporary U.S. ear. Since World War II, every American's second country has been the world. In Athens and Tokyo, in Addis Ababa and Zanzibar, there is sure to be an American--quiet or noisy, ugly or handsome, but always as insatiably curious as his camera's eye.

In a fresh publishing venture, Time Inc. is issuing armchair passports to this new U.S. breed of cosmopolite. The LIFE World Library (three books out, an indefinite number to come) is a series for the reader who has more than a tourist's interest in a foreign land but less than a specialist's. The volumes (available through subscription, not yet in book stores) are a long way from the usual non-books consisting of pasted-up magazine articles. While they use many pictures previously published in LIFE--as well as many new ones--the three volumes are written afresh, and from scratch, by authors of talent and distinction.

P: Russia, by Charles W. Thayer. Author Thayer, an old diplomatic hand at the Kremlin from the early days of the five-year plans, has a feeling for the steppe-like sweep of Russian history and offers a carefully balanced account of the Soviet regime. He places Stalin in the succession of grandiose tyrants who either demoniacally (Ivan the Terrible) or pragmatically (Catherine the Great) have ruled Russia with the knout. One memorable vignette: Secret Police Chief Beria reviling the comatose Stalin as a monster on his deathbed and then dropping to his knees in slobbering sycophancy as the unconscious dictator raises an arm in eerily imperious command. Most striking photographs: the corps de ballet of the Bolshoi company dancing Swan Lake as if in shimmering blue moonlight; a row of Leningrad citizens in bathing suits, queuing up for a bit of winter sunshine.

P: France, by D. W. Brogan. Like an aging actress. France has lived on the memories of past applause, at Versailles with the Sun King, at Austerlitz with Napoleon, in the Age of Reason with Voltaire. As distinguished Historian Brogan sees it, Charles de Gaulle is gradually teaching his people the importance of living in the 20th century. For the first time, France is borrowing culture: existential philosophy from Germany, film making in the laconic U.S. documentary style. The transitional ferment will continue, predicts Brogan, as France has more youngsters than oldsters for the first time in a century. Most striking photograph: Pablo Picasso, bare to the waist and bronzed, with a flower behind his ear, the eternal Pan.

P: Italy, by Herbert Kubly. This book is written con amore. No visible distance separates Author Kubly (American in Italy) from the Italian spirit. Kubly captures the native moods, sensuous, skeptical, volcanic, and the native pieties--toward nature, the family, and Il Papa. Italy is poor, except that it has been left Michelangelo, Raphael and Dante. The Italian's lot is sad, yet he sings in his chains. Italy is a relic of history, says Kubly, yet no people lives more fully and joyfully in the present moment. Most striking photograph: Venice's cemetery isle of San Michele, with hundreds of white crosses under tall cedars, muted in the morning mists off the Adriatic.

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