Recent & Readable

SALUTE TO SPRING-Mer/c/e/ Le Sueur -International ($2). Stories in which moments of human ripeness are contrasted with various famines, emotional and physical, found in the Middle and Far West during a caved-in decade.

Several stories are dark with proletarian mysticism; several sustain their fervor with uncommon grace. Meridel Le Sueur has seen a few things around Kansas and Illinois that nobody else has put down; she puts them down hard.

CECILE PASQUIER -Georges Du-hamel-Ho/f ($2.75). Herein, in books 6, 7, and 8 of his Pasquier Chronicles, Georges Duhamel continues to outline not only a family but the city of Paris, the civilization of modern France. Chief characters are Sister Cecile, pianistic genius.

Brother Joseph, munitions crook, Brother Laurent, biologist. Best sequences: ratlike professional jealousies between two of Laurent's superiors; Laurent's innocent involvement in a cumulative scandal culminating, on the brink of World War I, in the ruin of his career. Worst: goo-goo over Cecile and her baby. The book's literary style, if any, is murdered by a have-you-seen-the-garden-of-my-aunt translation.

OH, PROMISED LAND-James Street -Dial ($3). The huge. Indian-fighting Georgia cracker Sam Dabney and his sister Honoria, a burlap knock-off of Scarlett O'Hara, start at the bottom and work their way up. Also involved in these 816 pages are Tecumseh, the Natchez Trace, the cotton gin, the Battle of New Orleans, the opening up of Alabama and Mississippi. For readers to whom vivid frontier data is cheesecake, there are enough exposed bosoms,-vengeance motifs and brutalities to go round.

THE DISCOVERY OF MAN-Stanley Casson-Harper ($3). In this quietly excellent history of anthropology and archeology, Stanley Casson also traces the blinding strength of pride & prejudice, the slow development of man's ability to look at himself and his past detachedly.

In itself the material is of great though specialized interest. But the book shows how, from the first maps collaborated on by Greek navigators to the elaborate precisions of 20th-century archeologists, there are abundant lessons of the value of man's knowledge of man.

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