ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN

by BuddSchulberg '36. Random House, 1941. 303 pp.$2.50.

This smart novel about how a puny slum baby got to the top of the motion picture industry and what made him run is also thoughtful. Full, too, of gags, smutty cracks, liquor, women, brazen blitz strokes and big money, there is something in it for every reader. Many will nose out the hot passages and then raise a pious protest: this book no gentleman would share with wife and daughters. It is so timely in so many ways that it is dated. And that's too bad; for it touches issues that are of every time.

Sammy fascinates A 1 Manheim, the compassionate and compromising narrator, and fasci- nates the reader: brains, guts and no ideals. He is the incarnation of the universal tendency, today called fascism, to get ahead, ignoring all the qualities in human experience that can compose a life worth living. A 1 does a pretty good job at finding out what makes Sammy run. But he never suspects that Sammy would be allured to what is genuine if the sensitive and generous, like Al, were so sure what they wanted that they could disdain Sammy's tawdry triumphs and his sordid splurges. Al never sees that men of taste and kindliness hold open the way for Sammy by feeble emulation of his shoddy, spurious success. Just as the non-fascists share responsibility for fascism because they lack testicular faith in imagination, generosity and freedom, so Al, less lucky than Sammy in his glands, panders subtly all the time to Sammy's cheap- ness. The nearest to a wise person of all the typical but more or less animate people in the book is Al's steel-sweet woman, the honestly succeeding script-writer, Kit. And for all the wisdom as well as all the laughs Budd deserves the credit.

Price Research in the Steel and PetroleumIndustries; Prepared by the Conference by theCommittee on Price Research in the Iron andSteel Industry and the Committee on PriceResearch in the Petroleum Industry, has been published by the National Bureau of EconomicResearch. This is a book of 170 pages and sells for $2.00. Samuel C. Stratton '2O is joint author of this publication which is too technical to be reviewed in this magazine.