Best Reading

The White Nile, by Alan Moorehead. In a highly readable history the author sketches--sometimes too sketchily--the exploits of the remarkable Victorians, including Stanley, Livingstone, Gordon and Kitchener, who traced and pacified the upper reaches of the Nile.

A Middle Class Education, by Wilfred Sheed. A dour fictional view of Oxford in the welfare state, its collegians less likely to be lords' brats than middle-class academic grubbers, less interested in oysters and champagne than in security and pensions.

Parodies--An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm and After, edited by Dwight Macdonald. With wit and a leaven of malice, the editor has compiled and annotated the best collection yet of that curious art in which the pen is wielded while the thumb is fixed firmly to the nose.

Among the Dangs, by George P. Elliott. Whether the author tells of a weird anthropological expedition or a totalitarian solution to the race problem, his excellent short stories have this in common: they were not written to soothe.

Shadows in the Grass, by Isak Dinesen. Crystalline recollections, by Denmark's greatly gifted author, of a decade (1921-31) spent in Kenya; her theme, written as an elegy, is the relation of master and servant.

The Collected Short Stories of Conrad Aiken. The author may be a little old-fashioned--he writes of inner torment without becoming mired in Freudianism--but his short stories are all well cut, and the best, of them are brilliant.

To a Young Actress, edited by Peter Tompkins. More letters by G.B.S., this batch directed at an American actress, Molly Tompkins, for whom he tried without much success to provide a Socialist's Guide to Being an Intelligent Woman.

Greek Gods and Heroes, by Robert Graves. A Zeus Who for young readers, written with charm and skill.

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