Short Notices

THAT SUMMER by Allen Drury. 293 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.95.

It seemed obvious from the U.S. Senate press gallery back in 1959 that those 100-odd characters milling about and orating down below were just searching for some author to package them up in a novel. So Newsman Allen Drury wrote Advise and Consent. Of course there was a sequel--A Shade of Difference--but now the troubles have started for Novelist Drury; he has begun to write about ordinary people. They are the nice upper-middle-class inhabitants of Greenmont, Calif., a summer colony 6,000 feet up in the Sierras. Greenmont is slightly more exclusive than the U.S. Senate; residential memberships are restricted to 75. It is also much duller. The blurred argle-bargle of private thoughts is so much less interesting than even the most preposterous oratory; Drury's people are so ordinary that they could be sold to a public-opinion poll as an instant sample.

The intrusion of a U.S. Army major with vague psychological problems stirs the inhabitants of Greenmont from their smug torpor into some kind of malice. The major's crime is that he has seduced (or has been seduced by) a thirtyish spinster of the Greenmont tribe. Before the major can be pecked to death by ducks, he is mercifully immolated in a forest fire.

Drury seems to expect that his fictional enclave will be taken as a micro cosm of the world--or, as he puts it in his frightful prose--"an easygoing, wisecracking, self-centred distillation of all the busy bright uncaring of the world." Hardly.

DAVID SARNOFF by Eugene Lyons. 372 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

Papa wanted his first-born son to become a trader; Mama, who came of a long line of rabbis, was determined that he should become a scholar. So when Papa left the tiny Russian-Jewish village of Uzlian to try his luck in America. Mama immediately sent her five-year-old son off to her uncle, a penniless rabbi who lived several hundred miles away. For almost five years the little boy lived there. He was an only child among a household of grownups; he rose with them at sunup and for twelve or 14 hours a day intoned pages of ancient texts in Hebrew and Aramaic until he could repeat them by heart.

To this day, 75-year-old David Sarnoff, chairman of the massive Radio Corporation of America, Brigadier General of the Army in World War II and adviser to five Presidents, resents those years of everlasting drudgery and clammy poverty, and the denial of a normal family life. Eugene Lyons, Sarnoff's first cousin and a senior editor of the Reader's Digest, suggests that this deprived childhood sparked the insatiable drive for success which marked Sarnoffs public career. That is undoubtedly true, just as it is true that Sarnoffs success rests on his capacity for perseverance, his almost unique administrative genius and a bullheaded belief in the ever-expanding universe of electronics and communications.

Unhappily, Author Lyons has produced something closer to an excruciatingly detailed publicity release rather than a definitive and probing biography, a glossy photograph rather than an interpretive painting. Sarnoffs achievements deserve better recognition --and a better biography.

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