Ernest Hemingway and His World

by Anthony Burgess Charles Scribner’s Sons, 144 pages, photographs, $10.95

A biography of Ernest Hemingway seems an unlikely project for the British author of A Clockwork Orange to undertake, but it’s a combination that works wonderfully well. In this brief, richly illustrated book, Anthony Burgess tells us much that’s important, fascinating, distasteful, and sad about Ernest Hemingway. Burgess has little sympathy for Hemingway the hunter, forever banging away at some wild creature; for the personal war Hemingway seems to have conducted while ostensibly working as a war correspondent during World War II; or for his tall sexual tales (he once boasted of sleeping with Mata Hari although he first arrived in Europe a year after she had been shot as a spy). But Burgess never overlooks what’s really important- that Hemingway was an original, a writer who conceived and produced a new kind of spare, taut prose which has influenced three generations of authors—whether they hated or admired his work.

The Guns of Lattimer, The True Story of a Massacre and a Trial, August 1897-March 1898

by Michael Novak Basic Books, approx. 245 pages, $10.95

A tragedy that has been almost entirely unrecorded, “a gap in history,” occurred at Lattimer Mines, Pennsylvania, in 1897, Michael Novak reveals in this engrossing book. When a posse of deputies fired upon four hundred unarmed, striking miners, nineteen men were killed and another thirty-nine were wounded, making this one of America’s half-dozen bloodiest labor disputes. The reason so little has been written about Lattimer, Novak believes, is that the strikers were Slavs, “the most silent, and most invisible Americans,” the voiceless bottom of the ethnic heap. Many were recent immigrants, but they knew enough of their new country to believe their demonstration was legal, and they marched proudly carrying two American flags. Most of the victims were shot in the back as they cowered or fled from the guns, yet six months later, the deputies were totally exonerated of wrongdoing by an equally bigoted, Slavhating j ury. This grim history of prej udice is told with the excitement and pace of a good novel.

Woman’s Proper Place. A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present

by Sheila M. Rothman Basic Books, approx. 297 pages, $12.50

In this clearly organized and crisply written history of women in America, Sheila Rothman discusses an overheated subject in a cool voice. A hundred years ago, woman’s “proper” role—her only proper role—was “virtuous motherhood.” Rothman describes what forces have hastened and what have impeded women’s emergence from the nursery. One of the obstacles, she argues, was the belief of nineteenthcentury doctors that “God first made a uterus and then built woman around it,” a persistent bias that has slowed every liberating step women have tried to take. An admirable and informative book.

The Bold and Magnificent Dreami America’s Founding Years, 1492-1815

by