Short Notices

CHRISTY by Catherine Marshall. 496 pages. McGraw-Hill. $6.95.

"Hain't it true, Teacher," asks the pupil, "that if God loves ever'body, then we'uns got to love ever'body too?" Christy Huddleston, the new 19-year-old mission schoolmarm, can handle that question easily, but God and the reader have their task cut out for them in this relentlessly uplifting honeypot. A first novel by the author of A Man Called Peter, this book tells of the Cutter Gap mountain mission in East Tennessee back in 1912: isolated mountaineers, moonshine, feuds, babies. Author Marshall concentrates laboriously on three priggish mission staffers: the dewy-eyed Christy, a saintly Quaker lady, and a bombastic young preacher. The women are courageous and silent sufferers, the men are boys, the children are rough little angels. To paraphrase one mountain woman, the book "sort of wears the bright off the day."

BABYHIP by Patricia Welles. 256 pages. Duffon. $4.95.

Babyhip is Sarah Green, who at 16 is no longer a teenybopper, not yet a hippie. She is in love with her looks, but her charm is all in her speech. Though she cringes when her middle-class Jewish family calls her mishugenah (crazy woman), she showers ludicrous language on parents, teachers, guidance counselors, lovers and lechers. The most feared experience she can anticipate is sex, for which she concocts a rather repulsive name: "making piggies." By book's end, she has made piggies defiantly from Detroit to Cambridge, Mass., and is looking forward to the Big Scene in Tompkins Square.

Patricia Welles is the pen name of Marjorie Morningstar--well, not quite, but almost. It disguises Patricia Kanter-man of Detroit, who, divorced and 33, seems far removed from the hippie scene. Her leading character undoubtedly was an adolescent in the '50s who thought that the Tennessee Waltz was George and swooned over Johnnie Ray before the author updated her hangups to the '60s. Nothing mishugah about that: Babyhip has already earned $100,-000 in movie and paperback deals.

THE SIX DAY WAR by Randolph S. Churchill and Winston S. Churchill. 250 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $3.95.

What a pair of bylines! But this account of last summer's Arab-Israeli war by Sir Winston Churchill's son and grandson only exposes the soft underbelly of the publishing world. A tedious example of quickie book-journalism, the book retells Jewish and Arab history from the Diaspora to 1967. Next, lengthy quotes from diplomatic and press dispatches trace the immediate prewar events at yawning length. The narrative of the war itself relies heavily on the turgid reports of field commanders, completely misses the sense of speed and surprise that made the Israeli victory possible, and even manages to make Moshe Dayan sound dull.

If Randolph had applied half the verve to this job that he devoted to his exemplary biography of his father, the book might have proved readable. As for young Winston, 27, he ought to recall that at his age, his grandfather already was a war correspondent who roused the Empire with his dispatches from the Boer War. "Don't you know that I put more than brandy into my speeches?" Winny once growled to Randolph. He also put more than padding into his books.

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