Books: A Second Look

Publishers flooded the market with more than 30,000 fiction and nonfiction titles during the past year. Inevitably, many worthwhile volumes were passed over by readers and critics, TIME'S reviewers included. Some of the books deserving a second look:

WILLIAM JAMES by Gay Wilson Allen. 556 pages. Viking. $10.

For all that has been written about William James, psychologist, philosopher, teacher and author, nothing as good as this full-length biography has appeared before. Author Allen, an English professor at New York University and a skilled biographer of Walt Whitman, presents James's complex character with the ease and clarity that distinguished his subject's own style. There is no understanding James's skeptical temperament without understanding his extraordinary family. Using unpublished papers, Allen weaves a rich account of the restless, tightly knit clan. As for William, his character is best expressed in his own words: "My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will. I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power." That power was constantly being sapped by physical and mental illnesses. That he overcame them to produce such works as The Will to Believe, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe seems almost miraculous—even with such an excellent guide as Professor Allen to offer explanation. As for James's influence today, Biographer Allen notes that after a generation of neglect, psychologists are making sympathetic re-evaluations of James's belief in the need for values and disciplined thinking.

FIVE YEARS by Paul Goodman. 257 pages. Brussel & Brussel. $5.

What William James called the "rich thicket of reality" is thoroughly explored in this book, which is subtitled "Thoughts During a Useless Time." Its author, Paul Goodman, is a novelist, poet, essayist, psychologist and social critic whose book Growing Up Absurd gave him guru status with a large segment of American youth. Five Years is a self-analytical journal of random thoughts, jotted down from 1955 to 1960, when Goodman was between 45 and 50 years old. It is a ruthlessly honest confession in the manner of Rousseau: Goodman recounts how he scrounged for food, sex and love while materially and spiritually down and out. During that period of his life, he was, he remarks, "a citizen of nowhere, but an animal of the world." Nothing stands between the reader and Goodman's loneliness and despair, his frank involvement with homosexuality, his yearning for "a very bread-and-butter kind of paradise." Goodman's moral utopianism and his commitment to rectifying personal and social ills have been encountered many times in his numerous works. Five Years offers a harrowing look at the dark and anguished roots of that commitment.

THOMAS BECKET by Richard Winston. 413 pages. Knopf. $10.