Books: NON-FICTION

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—FROM THE SOUTH SEAS—Margaret Mead—Morrow ($4). Dr. Mead's three books, Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing Up in New Guinea, and Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, are here reprinted in one volume, with a new preface. These gently acute, strongly persuasive studies of the power of custom are well known to every anthropologist and to many thoughtful laymen. Their usefulness, particularly to those who are most directly responsible in the training of children, is by no means yet exhausted.

CAPTAIN ABBY AND CAPTAIN JOHN—.Robert P. Tristram Coffin—Macmillan ($2.50). Mr. Coffin, who loves his native Maine, made this "story of a plain Yankee home that went to sea" out of "the bare bones of fine and brave and godly living." The bones: logs of the voyages of Maine Sea Captain John Pennell; three diaries minutely inscribed by his wife Abby; her letters to her mother. Compiler Coffin appropriately fleshes these bones in hearty, homey, dash-a-tear language.