Recent Books

THE SILENT DUCHESS--Anne Green--Harper ($2.50). Unusually trustworthy times-&-manners fiction about France be fore the Revolution, by the sister of Julian Green. Miss Green's Duchess breaks silence in old age to describe her century with a fine grandmotherly wit, telling her tales about as well as they are told in the sources (Saint-Simon, Voltaire, et al).

HUDSON REJOINS THE HERD--Claude Houghton--Macmillan ($2.50). Convalescent Stephen Hudson drearily, dreamily tries to figure out why Millionaire Otto Steele shot him on second meeting. The fretful reader is apt to regret that it wasn't a clean killing.

Non-Fiction

MAUD--Edited by Richard Lee Strouf--Macmillan ($3.50). The Journal of Maud Rittenhouse, beginning in 1881 when she was the smartest and (nearly) the prettiest girl in high school in Cairo, Ill. What Maud confided to her leather-bound journal during the next 14 years makes as fascinating reading as was ever found in an attic.

ONE PAIR OF HANDS--Monica Dickens--Harper ($2.50). An engaging great granddaughter of Charles Dickens reports breezily on her adventures as a cook (a job she took on for adventure's sake). Her cook's-eye conclusion:"A kick in the Pants for allemployers." Novelist Compton Mackenzie contributes an appreciative foreword.

THE HUNDREDTH YEAR--Philip Guedalla--Doubleday, Doran ($3). The fateful year of 1936 (hundredth since Victoria's accession), when Hitler militarized the Rhineland, Italy conquered Abyssinia, Franco started the Spanish Civil War, Roosevelt was reflected and Edward Windsor left the throne of England, presented in smooth, newsreel episodes by the smooth author of The Hundred Years (TIME, Feb. 15, 1937).

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