THE YEAR'S BEST

WITH the publishing industry churning out a flood of un, anti, null- and non-books, it has not been a good year for genuine books. But a few emerged--although perhaps no single volume could pass the Robinson Crusoe test beloved of Sunday supplements (Which ten books, apart from a guide to edible fungi, would you take with you if cast away on a desert island?).

Two trends should be noted. One is that while middle-aged women of pious persuasion are novelizing as hugely as ever, adolescent girl threnodists have fallen into a decline. The other is that lately there has been less good fiction than good nonfiction.

NONFICTION

SHADOWS ON THE GRASS, by Isak Dinesen. The author, who is Denmark's finest writer and one of the world's best, writes a dry, elegiac reminiscence of the years she spent from 1921 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya. Miss Dinesen's principal theme is the feudal harmony of white master and black servant, making the book seem removed by centuries, not decades, from the present.

THE WHITE NILE, by Alan Moorehead. The last half of the 19th century saw the Nile traced to its sources and the vast, hostile area it drained subdued by such peculiarly Victorian heroes as Burton, Speke, Livingstone, Stanley, "Chinese" Gordon and Kitchener. A too-brief book that is the most readable of the year's popular histories.

FATE IS THE HUNTER, by Ernest K. Gann. Author Gann was an airline and Air Trans port Command pilot before he became a bestselling storyteller (The High and the Mighty], and he writes convincingly in this excellent memoir of why he quit flying--his growing belief, supported by all too much chilling evidence, that he had pressed his luck too far. Not recommended for above-sea-level reading.

RESISTANCE, REBELLION AND DEATH, by Albert Camus. These actuelles, as the author called them, are short, passionate sermons on the theology of politics, justice and death, several of them written during World War II as editorials for the underground paper Combat. Camus thought as highly of them as he did of his novels and longer philosophical essays, and he may well have been right,

RING OF BRIGHT WATER, by Gavin Maxwell. A lyric bouquet in memory of the best pal the author ever had--a lovable, rubbery otter named Mij, who could clown like a dog, slink like a cat, and swim better than anything else that ever got wet. Maxwell respects his old friend's dignity, and never allows his recollections to become cute.

RUSSIA AND THE WEST UNDER LENIN AND STALIN, by George F. Kennon. Some of the author's arguments prove merely that almost everything about Soviet Russia is arguable; but much of his analysis--particularly his criticism of the Allies' World War II policy of unconditional surrender --is brilliant. Now U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia and long one of the State Department's top-ranking experts on Russia, Kennan writes in prose that is unfailingly graceful.

SUMER: THE DAWN OF ART, and THE ARTS OF ASSYRIA, both by Andre Parrot. These splendid books are the first two in a 40-volume survey of man's art. The project's guiding hand, as might be expected, is that of that homme perpetually engage, Andre Malraux.

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, by Hugh Thomas. The author is the first historian to write about this little-understood prologue to World War II neither as a partisan nor an embittered memoirist. His book is likely to be the definitive one for some years to come.

NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, by James Baldwin. Essayist Baldwin does not need the advantage of a black skin to give his work the cutting edge of indignation; his mind and style are sharp enough. As a Negro, he takes himself and his race as his subject matter, is always disturbingly provocative, though sometimes too bitter to be persuasive.

THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1960, by Theodore H. White. A superb job of reporting, tense as only a few novels are, by a journalist who let his partisanship for Kennedy be known, but did not let it cloud his judgment.

THE ROAD PAST MANDALAY, by John Masters. The author, a British officer in the Indian army in Burma during World War II and a professional novelist (Bhowani Junction) since then, writes with skill and passion of the many faces of his war.

AN ONLY CHILD, by Frank O'Connor. An account of the author's boyhood in a wet, ruined, pious, oppressed Cork slum. The heroine is O'Connor's mother; her son writes of her with eloquence and wonder.

THE CHILDREN OF SANCHEZ, by Oscar Lewis. From an unlikely source--tape-recorded interviews with five Mexico City slum dwellers--comes a work of pathos and drama. The language is fierce, rich and foul, and the folkways might startle even a resident of Tortilla Flat.

THE SUPER-AMERICANS, by John Bainbridge. Another excellent piece of reporting, this one a maliciously objective portrait of Texas by an observer sly enough to realize that this improbable area is its own satire.

THE AGE OF REASON BEGINS, by Will and Ariel Durant. The first of three projected volumes on the age of reason is one of the best in Durant's vast Story of Civilization.

THE COMING FURY, by Bruce Catton. The Civil War's ablest popularizer retreads the hallowed ground, this time tracing the nation's course through the outbreak of war. The author takes the reasonable view that the disparate leaders on both sides were less heroes and villains than men tossed about by a confusion of events.

Three mighty collections in progress for historians and readers of history: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (Volume III), edited by Leonard W. Labaree; The Adams Papers (Volumes I to IV), edited by L. H. Butterfield; and The Papers of Alexander Hamilton (Volumes I and II), edited by Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke.

FICTION

RADITZER, by Pefer Motthiessen. The title figure of this unusual war novel is a devious sniveler who is an irritation and a danger to the men around him, but who, by a claim based subtly on weakness, is able to coax and goad an exasperated stronger man into protecting him. The ending is powerful, the entire book impressive.

A BURNT-OUT CASE, by Graham Greene. A world-renowned architect, who has arrived at the feeling that fame and the love of many women are not sufficient to warm his cooling soul, finds the touch of life again among the inhabitants of an African leprosarium.

TELL ME A RIDDLE, by Tillie Olsen. These are four short stories, delicate as fugues, the most ambitious of which tells of the bewilderment of a pair of old radicals who reminisce about hunger and human rights while their grandchildren sun themselves in the cathode glow of the affluent society.

THE MOVIEGOER, by Walker Percy. The hero, a prosperous young securities salesman, spends most of his time watching movies because he finds his comfortable life weary, stale and flat, although profitable. What makes this familiar malaise noteworthy is that First Novelist Percy is a natural writer (and a Southerner, if this is not a redundancy) who makes his people look and sound as if they were being seen and heard for the first time by anyone.

FRANNY AND ZOOEY, by J. D. Salinger. Acclaim came early and loud for Salinger; now, as automatically as if they were operated by clockwork, critics pop out to say "nay." No matter; these two related stories about Franny Glass's flight into religious obsession are the artistic success of the year. There may be trouble ahead in the work in progress of which the stories are a part, but there seems at least a chance that the chronicle of the prodigious Glass clan will be one of literature's towering family sagas.

FACES IN THE WATER, by Janet Frame. The heroine of this touching and largely autobiographical novel spends nine years in a New Zealand insane asylum. The author's eye is cool and accurate, her evocation of madness unforgettable.

ASSEMBLY, by John O'Horo. The author would have been well served by an editor nervy enough to throw out a handful of these 26 stories, the worst of which merely prove that O'Hara's footing is uncertain in the soul's lower depths. But as an observer of sight, sound and mood he has few peers, and the stories in which he sticks to his franchise are among his best efforts in years.

IPPOLITA, by Alberto Denti di Pirajno. The novel is set in igth century Italy, and the wit and irony with which it deals with its themes--the raveling aristocracy, the Italian blood mania for land--suggest Giuseppe di Lampedusa's fine novel. The Leopard. Coincidentally, both books were written by Sicilian dukes of advanced years.

FIRST FAMILY, by Christopher Davis. The reader may be familiar with the genre--1 "hat happens when Negroes move in next door--but is likely to be surprised by the quality of this fine novel, which steadily honors prose above propaganda, whose characters are as complex as the issues that set neighbor against neighbor.

POETRY

THE ODYSSEY, by HOMER, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Within the limits he set himself--to render the violent old fable as a spoken-verse story in today's idiom--Fitzgerald has succeeded admirably. Almost inevitably, given the earthbound character of modern English, the translation contains more thought than thunder.

THE COMPLETE POEMS OF CAVAFY, translated by Rae Dalven, and POEMS, by George Seferis, translated by Rex Warner, brought to English readers the works of the two most highly thought of Greek poets of the 20th century. A Greek writer breathes the past; and perhaps because of this, both men are poets of defeat. The late C. P. Cavafy, whose Joycean audacity with language makes him the more difficult of the two to translate, takes the gloomier view. Seferis, who is Greek Ambassador to Britain, is a mystic who recognizes a man's fitful nobility.

COLLECTED POEMS, by Robert Graves. The songs of this bent-nosed Jove are clear, precise and passionate, and owe little to the century in which they were written. The author, who has filled some 70 books with several sorts of excellent prose, justifiably considers the poems his life work.

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