Volume 33, Number 2 · February 13, 1986
A New Year Roundup
By Robert Craft
Vidal in Venice
by Gore Vidal, edited by George Armstrong, photographs by Tore Gill
Simon & Schuster, 160 pp., $22.50
Jean Cocteau and the French Scene
edited and with a preface by Arthur King Peters
Abbeville Press, 239 pp., $19.95
T.S. Eliot
An anniversary issue of The Southern Review
300 pp., $2.50
Tchaikovsky's Ballets
by Roland John Wiley
Oxford, 448 pp., $39.95
Arnold Schoenberg–Wassily Kandinsky: Letters, Pictures and Documents
edited by Jelena Hahl-Koch, translated by John C. Crawford
Faber and Faber, 221 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Vidal in Venice, the book of the television script, is part pocket-history, part waiting-room art, part tourist guyed. But the best parts are those in which Vidal compares Venetian and American political systems and arrangements. Good, too, is the chapter on Thomas Coryate, the early seventeenth-century 'Innocent Abroad,' England's first of the breed. And special mention should be made of the photographs, excellent in themselves, well-positioned as illustrations of the text, and successful in avoiding the over-familiar subjects and angles of postcard veduti.
Review, 4145 words
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