Books: Current & Various: Jul. 30, 1965

YESTERDAY IS TOMORROW by Malvina Hoffman. 378 pages. Crown. $7.50.

"You have the damned American facility for making sketches," growled Sculptor Auguste Rodin. She also had a facility for making friends, so Malvina Hoffman, daughter of English-born Pianist Richard Hoffman, combined both, carved herself a career as a fashionable sculptor. Rodin, Gutzon Borglum, Ivan Mestrovic were her teachers; Mrs. E. H. Harriman was a patroness; and some of her best friends were subjects: Pianist-Statesman Ignace Paderewski, Dancer Anna Pavlova, Surgeon Harvey Cushing, Paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. In addition to portraits of the wealthy and the famous, the indefatigable Malvina accepted commissions for the monument to English-American friendship at Bush House, London; 104 life-size studies for the Races of Man series at Chicago's Natural History Museum; the American War Memorial at Epinal, France; a flagpole for IBM; a road marker for Milliken Mills. Now 80, she tells all about everything in this book of leisurely, ladylike reminiscences. To judge from the illustrations, the style of her sculpture is public monument modern. To judge from this book, Author Hoffman thinks that her life as a Murray Hill bohemian has been interesting and imagines that everyone else will find it so.

THE SEAT OF POWER by James D. Horan. 438 pages. Crown. $5.95.

Now assistant managing editor of Hearst's New York Journal-American, James D. Horan has spent much of his 35-year newspaper career as an investigative reporter or "digger." In this labyrinthine novel, he describes the city's seamy side vividly, if repetitiously: the sticky-fingered cops who protect the numbers racket; the Mafia-type Italians in East Harlem who run it, along with sundry other unsavory businesses; and bought judges who sanction it all. With other specimens of the "inside" novel genre, this one has several characters whose real-life models are familiar —the rabble-rousing, white-hating black fanatic named the Prophet, the Italian rackets czar named Vito, the acquisitive, balance-sheet-conscious newspaper owner. Horan is best at sketching in the details of corruption. It is a picture so shocking that it would strain credulity—were it not for the fact that most of the scandals he telescopes into a brief winter in the mid-1960s happened, over a longer period, in New York City. In Koran's book, however, the scandals get solved and the villains get caught.

A MAN'S WORLD by William Camp. 191 pages. Lyle Stuart. $3.