THE MANY WORLDS OF HERBERT HOOVER

...enters the small world of juvenile publishing. The Herbert Hoover Story, told with clarity and understanding by Catherine Owens Peare last year (1965, p. 830-J284), is told again for the same age group and the two are so similar in content and point of view that comparison is inevitable, and difficult. The chief difference is in style, Peare being more precise, Terzian being more allusive and colloquial. Here's how each handles the same small incident, the return of Hoover to his birthplace to make a campaign speech--Peare: ""West Branch hadn't changed much, if at all; it still had only 745 population. But on the night of Mr. Hoover's address something like 15,000 farmers from all over Iowa and Illinois tried to crowd into the gigantic tent to hear him."" Terzian: ""His old home town hadn't changed much... The population was about the same...(but) West Branch that day became a metropolis as 15,000 people from miles around came to see the local by who had made good."" In only a few instances does the judgment of the two differ, as when Terzian looks with somewhat less sympathy on Hoover's inaction during the early days of the Depression and his reasons for opposing American entry into World War II. It's an altogether acceptable treatment, but it lacks the supplementary value that the title suggests.