Notable

A YOUNG MAN IN SEARCH OF LOVE by Isaac Bashevis Singer

Doubleday; 177 pages; $12.95

The world has vanished; Jewish Poland went up in the smoke of the Holocaust. All that remains in the minds of most readers is some pictures, histories--and the imperishable memoirs of Isaac Bashevis Singer. In this brief, exalted account of his youth and his country's decline, the author summons memories of Warsaw when intellectuals argued the merits of Marxism, Zionism, atheism and love--above and below all, love. The preternaturally shy Isaac had his difficulties with older women and young ones. But Sabina, Stefa, Gina were as much a part of his education as the volumes he held like a lover. ("I realized," he recalls of one liaison, "that in moments of desperation people forsake all reason.") In time, Singer was to find a greater passion: writing. It is the one truly requited affair in the book, and it makes every page shine with a wit and vigor that belie the author's 73 years. Further illuminations are provided by Raphael Soyer's nostalgic drawings and paintings, every one of which is a complement to the text and a compliment to the reader.

A FAMILY TRUST by Ward Just Atlantic--Little, Brown 346 pages; $8.95

In reportage and fiction, Ward Just has kept keen watch on the combat of war and politics. Here he extends his reach, trying for a Great American Novel of the heartland. The ingredients of A Family Trust are the stuff of saga. Amos, patriarch of the Rising clan, ascends with his newspaper, the Intelligencer, to the position of flame keeper for his insular Midwest town. His son tries to hold a fort that expands into shopping centers and tract houses. The grandchildren mislay the faith while inheriting the wealth that comes as an ironic dividend of cheapening values.

The author succeeds in conveying a sense of loss without bathos. But his characters are familiar archetypes, and the family's newspaper gives off no scent of soul or sweat; too often the novel suggests the aroma of mothballs. The theme of A Family Trust demands a major treatment; it receives only a compelling outline. As a novelist, Ward Just is still promising rather than delivering.

A SPECIES OF ETERNITY by Joseph Kastner Knopf; 350 pages; $15

Old World naturalists believed that the newly discovered land to the west was inhabited by spiders the size of cats, beasts more cunning than anything in mythology, and plants capable of curing most of the ills that befell man. The field naturalists who began studying North American flora and fauna in the 18th century proved that the realities were in some ways as unbelievable as the fantasies. The amateur collectors and skilled scientists fanned out into the New World gathering animals, insects and plants by the bushelful. By the end of the 19th century, they had succeeded in writing not merely a new chapter but a new volume in the annals of natural history.

The discovery of America's rich, teeming natural world was the work of more than a dozen brave, persistent and often eccentric individuals who were at least as interesting as the specimens they collected. Joseph Kastner, a former editor of LIFE, has not only captured but also resurrected them all in this entertaining and eminently readable book. Kastner offers portraits of people like John James Audubon, whose pictures of birds transcended science to become art; Alexander Garden, who gave his name to the Gardenia; and William Bartram, whose descriptions of Florida helped inspire Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Nor does Kastner ignore such outlandish figures as Thomas Nuttall, so driven by his passion for specimen collecting that his Canadian voyageurs christened him lefou (the madman), or the gullible Constantine Rafinesque, who was able to discover what did not even exist. In the course of his studies, notes Kastner, Rafinesque "found" a dozen fish that Audubon, whose approach was not always objective, had invented as a joke.

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