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THE CART AND THE HORSE by Louis Kronenberger. 212 pages. Knopf. $4.95.

Essayist Kronenberger is the coolest of U.S. society's critics; where others whack away with club and cutlass, Kronenberger sits back and throws darts, quietly but accurately. Among targets: "taste makers and pace setters" who, he believes, have failed to lead U.S. culture to greatness; the system that has seduced so many good writers and artists into working for corporations and their ad agencies, thus creating "a sort of debased intellectual class who, by way of their knowledge and skill, have become rather the writing hands of business, than outright businessmen"; and the great stress placed on the chap marks of education "with the B.A. a tollgate to a business career, the Ph.D. to an academic one." Essentially good humored and tolerant, Kronenberger charges other men with folly rather than outright evil, and recognizes that the very extremism that often makes the U.S. unbearable has helped to make it great. His conclusion: "We are a corrupted people but not a depraved one. We don't make pacts with Satan; what we try to do is to make pacts with God."

THE TAILOR AND ANSTY by Eric Cross. 223 pages. Devin-Adair. $3.95.

The tailor of the title, an old man living in the mountains bordering Cork and Kerry, was a local oracle who could sit by the hour streeling out Irish tales and songs. Anastasia, his "bitter half," was his chorus. When Eric Cross, an Irish short-story writer, first published The Tailor and Ansty in 1942, they were already something of a legend. Cross tells the stories and the occasional songs as he heard them. They are about talking cats; about the adventures of the "cabogues," itinerant laborers who used to help the farmers dig spuds in the autumn; about weddings and wakes and corpses that sat up in their shrouds. Yet the special charm of this book is that it manages to describe Irish peasant life without condescension or that peculiar quaintness which often produces a distinct aroma of poteen and formaldehyde. The book's other claim to fame is that (for reasons not even Fellow Irishman Frank O'Connor, who provides the introduction, can fully explain) it was banned by the government in 1943 as "in general tendency indecent." The ban has since been lifted.

BOTH SIDES OF THE OCEAN by Viktor Nekrasov. 191 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston. $4.50.

Considering all the nasty things foreign visitors have said about the U.S., there was no reason to expect anything different from a devout Russian Communist who spent two weeks in the

U.S. in 1960. But in these magazine articles, written on his return to Russia, Novelist Viktor Nekrasov said so many nice things about the U.S. and so many uncomplimentary things about his own country that he was denounced for "bourgeois objectivism" and threatened with expulsion from the Communist Party. The least controllable of the 16-man Russian delegation picked to visit the U.S., Nekrasov panicked the tour leader by always going off on little walks of his own. He marveled at Manhattan skyscrapers and abstract art, happily guzzled Coca-Cola, bought aspirin on the advice of TV commercials. In passing, Nekrasov takes a swipe at Russian restaurants ("rank odors and the waitress like a she-wolf"), Russian films ("The old worker always has exactly the right answer for anything you ask him") and Russian secretiveness ("Excessive caution does not bring people together, it drives them apart"). What would Marx and Lenin, say to this Communist traveler, who never dogmatizes and never claims to know all the answers?

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