THE NORTH STAR IS NEARER

This continues, and amplifies, the personal biography begun in Every Month Was May (Harper, 1947) and takes the author from the age of seven and delighted interest in hell to her war reporting job around the world in the past war. Here are some thoroughly engaging episodes -- Grandmother's Victorianism, a High Church school in England and dual protocol with the Princess Marie of Roumania, being presented at Court, having a baby in France, the farce of a literary cocktail party for a new author-; some of wider focus of travel in France; some of bitterer implications. The whole has a great deal of humor and much of personality and offers glimpses of a life story in casual touches.