Fiction: Recent Books: Dec. 13, 1937

Non-Fiction

THIS IS MY STORY—Eleanor Roosevelt—Harper ($3). Offered as "probably the most fearless and revealing of all modern autobiographies," this one is also remarkable for the fact—rare among wives' memoirs—that it contains nothing to embarrass the husband. First published serially in The Ladies' Home Journal (TIME, March 8), and now among the ranking bestsellers, This Is My Story is told without literary pretensions. Several cuts above her columnist style, but with the familiar homely, philosophical asides, This Is My Story traces Mrs. Roosevelt's successful struggle to achieve self-sufficiency, a social conscience, against the heavy inhibitions of a strait-laced socialite environment, awkwardness, homeliness, family cares, fears ranging from burglars to not being able to have babies. Not entirely because of conscious tact, but also, the reader gathers, because her victory was won independently of her strongwilled, busy husband does Mrs. Roosevelt's story portray F. D. R. as the dimmest character of all.

MADAME CURIE—Eve Curie—Doubleday, Doran ($3.50). Unusual among biographies of parents for its combination of tenderness, good judgment and good writing (excellently transmitted in Vincent Sheean's translation), this is an unforgettable first full-length biography of the delicate, blonde Polish girl who rose from a governess to the world's greatest woman scientist. Famed for her hard-won discovery of radium, Madame Curie here emerges as most deserving of fame for her incorruptible stand against cashing in on it. Known for an emotional self-discipline as strict asher public reserve, her response to the accidental death of her husband-collaborator is told in one of the most affecting and dramatic scenes in the biography.

Fiction

THE YOUNG MEN ARE COMING!—M. P. Shiel— Vanguard ($2.50). High-pressure fantasy about an English scientist who is taken for a ride through space by some unpuritanical interplanetary visitors, recovers his youth, gets mixed up in an attempt to establish a fascist government in Great Britain—an odd, involved book, written in an exclamatory prose, that is a little like H. G. Wells's political-scientific satires, a little like James Branch Cabell's arch allegories.