Books in Brief

The Countess, by Hans Habe; translated by Catherine Hutter (Harcourt, $5.95). Countess Maria Nikolaevna O’Rourke Tarnovska (1887-1917?) was Anna Karenina done up in a fright-wig, schooled by Rasputin and turned out in the pages of Psychopathia Sexualis. She was the antenna of her age-and her kind in the artfulness with which she practised a variety of perversions and debaucheries, and she rounded out her private career by persuading one lover, with the aid of a second, to murder a third. Her public career centered in the courtroom: a long trial opening with a flurry of telegrams, obscene photographs and hypodermic needles disgorged from her luggage and closing with dark and perceptive announcements by several students of Sigmund Freud’s New Science. Herr Habe has attempted to build a novel in the grand manner around this unlovely woman. He might have brought it off, if he had been less interested in arranging a series of set-piece orgies to prove that Fellini’s Via Veneto was fifty years prefigured by Moscow’s Tverskaya Boulevard (his comparison). R. bemis

Disarmament: Weapon of Conquest, by Robert Morris (Bookmailer, $3). Is Washington really working on a scheme to disarm the United States and establish world order under a UN possessing overwhelming military power? In this short primer Judge Morris sets forth the case for the affirmative, quoting large chunks of State Department Document 7277 (“The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World”), analyzing the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and sketching the public development of disarmament rhetoric from sources such as the Rostow Memorandum. Relying on official documents and Congressional hearings, Morris gives a particularly valuable summary of Communist infiltration in the UN secretariat—a situation that should in itself be enough to wake up our sleeping idealists who are seized of the dangerous dream of peace while the enemy mines our battlements.

RB

About the Author

R. Bemis

WR

About the Author

W. F. Rickenbacker

Featured Tags

The Countess, by Hans Habe; translated by Catherine Hutter (Harcourt, $5.95). Countess Maria Nikolaevna O’Rourke Tarnovska (1887-1917?) was Anna Karenina done up in a fright-wig, schooled by Rasputin and turned out in the pages of Psychopathia Sexualis. She was the antenna of her age-and her kind in the artfulness with which she practised a variety of perversions and debaucheries, and she rounded out her private career by persuading one lover, with the aid of a second, to murder a third. Her public career centered in the courtroom: a long trial opening with a flurry of telegrams, obscene photographs and hypodermic needles disgorged from her luggage and closing with dark and perceptive announcements by several students of Sigmund Freud’s New Science. Herr Habe has attempted to build a novel in the grand manner around this unlovely woman. He might have brought it off, if he had been less interested in arranging a series of set-piece orgies to prove that Fellini’s Via Veneto was fifty years prefigured by Moscow’s Tverskaya Boulevard (his comparison). R. bemis

Disarmament: Weapon of Conquest, by Robert Morris (Bookmailer, $3). Is Washington really working on a scheme to disarm the United States and establish world order under a UN possessing overwhelming military power? In this short primer Judge Morris sets forth the case for the affirmative, quoting large chunks of State Department Document 7277 (“The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World”), analyzing the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and sketching the public development of disarmament rhetoric from sources such as the Rostow Memorandum. Relying on official documents and Congressional hearings, Morris gives a particularly valuable summary of Communist infiltration in the UN secretariat—a situation that should in itself be enough to wake up our sleeping idealists who are seized of the dangerous dream of peace while the enemy mines our battlements.