Books: Blood & Bones

THE BREATHLESS MOMENT — The World's Most Sensational News Photos— Knopf ($3).

This book will provide one more meal of blood & bones for that sector of the U. S. public which feasts on gruesome newspictures. Philip Van Doren Stern hunted high & low through press morgues for the most gushy examples of tabloid journalism. For photographs selected by their death-&-disaster appeal Herbert Asbury has written brief captions to explain the what, why, where, when, who.

Purchasers of this gaudy red volume will have within one set of covers such sensational camera trophies as: Ruth Snyder squirming in the electric chair; the slanting deck of the sinking S. S. Vestris; Leo Frank swinging from a Georgia tree; the "Rolphing" at San Jose; a Nebraska Negro crisply incinerated; Chicago's St. Valentine's Day Massacre; William Warnecke's famed shot of Mayor Gaynor wounded; public executions in the Chinese manner (strangulation), the French manner (guillotine), the Mexican manner (shooting), the Persian manner (interment), the Abyssinian manner (dismemberment), the Japanese manner (decapitation), the British manner (gallows), the U. S. manner (lynching). Amid the welter of dead and dying, more gentle readers will find relief in such shots as those of a cat carrying her kitten across a traffic-jammed city street; the Catholic Shrine at Lourdes; a swarm of locusts in Kenya Colony, B. E. A.

Most curious shot: a Union official holding an umbrella over Mary Surratt to keep the sun off her face as she waits on the gallows to be hanged (July 7, 1865) for Lincoln's assassination.