Books: Too Much, Too Late

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MR. BARUCH (784 pp.)—Margaret L. Coit—Houghton Mifflin ($7.50).

Pulitzer Prizewinning Biographer Margaret Coit (John C. Calhoun) has entered the supply-and-demand cycle of Baruch books at the critical phase where supply becomes glut. The truth is that the wily old (87) speculator has cornered the market with Baruch: My Own Story (TIME, Aug. ig), which has a grip on the No. 1 nonfiction spot of national bestseller lists. The first half of Mr. Baruch (Book-of-the-Month Club choice for December) is a blurred carbon copy of Baruch's own book, concerned mainly with his South Carolina boyhood and his stock market coups. Biographer Coit labored with Baruch's blessing amid the "huge chaotic mass" of his papers, but they parted company in 1955 over questions of "interpretation." Her interpretation of Baruch's role as elder statesman is, in effect, that Baruch preferred to wield power indirectly without elective responsibility. He could hold down his famed park bench of authority without running for it every,,two, four or six years.

Biographer Coit tells in full and flattering detail the nature of Baruch's services to the U.S. from his days as "czar"' of Woodrow Wilson's War Industries Board to the days when he presented to the U.N. the U.S.'s "Baruch Plan" for control of atomic energy. She also uses Baruch as a peg on which to hang gratuitous, chapter-length histories of Woodrow Wilson's Administration, World Wars I and II. the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, etc. Standing at the cribside of modern history, Author Coit is footnotoriously conscientious, but the $7.50 tag her publishers have placed on her services is a steep rate even for a scholarly baby sitter.