Books: One Week: The Literary Overflow

EVERY year about 30,000 new titles are printed in the U.S. Putting aside paperbacks (about 7,500), textbooks (more than 2,000) as well as thousands of specialty volumes of limited interest, that leaves some 5,000 hard-cover books which each year come to TIME'S Book Section for examination and possible review. Choosing between them week by week as they arrive is an often agonizing, always time-consuming process, even though many swiftly prove 1) badly written, 2) wretchedly edited, and 3) largely unnecessary. In this issue, instead of choosing, we attempt to give the reader a...