Books: Uppie's Goddess

SOUTHERN BELLE (407 pp.) — Mary Craig Sinclair—Crown ($5).

Mary Craig Kimbrough Sinclair, 74, is probably the only woman still living in the U.S. who can claim to have been described as "svelte" by Mrs. Jefferson Davis. Hers is a truly romantic as well as a wonderfully goofy story—the memoirs of a Southern belle who married a notorious radical. It is husband Upton Sinclair for whom the belle has now told all, and her revelations carry his strangely sentimental imprimatur ("My Southern belle remembers tenderly those dear dead days . . ."). The book,...