Recent Books

A SIGN FOR CAIN--Grace Lumpkin-- Furman ($2.50). An excellently constructed, often moving story of the death of a Communist organizer in the South, written by one of the ablest of U. S. radical novelists.

FROM THE KINGDOM OF NECESSITY-- Isidor Schneider--Putnam ($2.50). Autobiographical novel of Jewish life on New York's East Side, packed with warm characterizations and bland anecdotes, by a well-known U. S. poet.

VALIANT IS THE WORD FOR CARRIE-- Barry Benefield--Reynal & Hitchcock ($2). Sentimental story of a bad woman of Crebillon, La., who is regenerated through the influence of a manly little 7-year-old. They befriend an orphan named Lady, succeed in the cleaning business in Manhattan and live with such aggressive goodwill toward mankind that mushy seems a more accurate word for Carrie and her friends.

HANDS--Charles G. Norris--Farrar & Rinehart ($2.50). Three generations in a San Francisco family, retelling the stock melodramatic situation of a man who married his cousin only to discover that, because of his father's sins, he had actually married his sister.

THE LAST CIVILIAN--Ernst Glaeser-- McBride ($2.50). A novel of the Nazi movement, original in that it describes how the National Socialist Party appears to intelligent members as well as to fanatics and opponents, by the author of The Class of 1902.

Non-Fiction

SOME AMERICAN PEOPLE -- Erskine Caldwell--McBride ($2). A collection of reports on conditions throughout the U. S.. including the grim account of starvation in Georgia that created a State scandal, led to an independent investigation that confirmed Author Caldwell's more extreme charges (TIME, March 25).

THE CAST-IRON MAN--Arthur Styron --Longmans, Green ($3.50). Long, tedious biography of John C. Calhoun, largely a vehicle for the expression of the author's generalizations on democracy.

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