ALL THE BEST IN GERMANY & AUSTRIA.

By Sydney Clark '12. New York:Dodd, Mead & Company, 1957. 559 pp.

With even greater youthful enthusiasm and even soberer sophistication, Sydney Clark, Dean of World Travellers, has turned out perhaps the most useful and the most delightful in his long series of travel books, this one about Germany and Austria.

Common-sense romanticism, like his, can be lyrical and objective in just the right moments. He has sound convictions why travelling in Germany is delightful: German cleanliness, financial honesty, self-respect, tipping system, love of sport, and unaffected naturalness. Equally sound are his convictions about Austria: Alpine grandeur, alluring Vienna, enchanting smaller cities, long heritage of great music, peasant costumes, squares and village inns, friendly and gracious chattiness, and pervasive gentle happiness.

Keenly sensitive about historical and cultural values, Mr. Clark has a startling and refreshing modernity about him as travel guide. Planes and night clubs, liners and hotels, passports and money, clothing stores and mountain lakes, music and drama festivals, vineyards and river boats - a 1957 American will have difficulty in thinking up something concerning a 1957 approach to Austria and Germany not found in this comprehensive and detailed volume. Heights of mountains? Of course. Useful maps easy to turn to? Why, naturally: end papers front and back.

The Clark book appeals on many levels from the seasoned and slightly haughty traveller who always has difficulty in remembering how many times he has been abroad down to the humble and nervous beginner fearful that he may not get home alive. (He will.) It contains information about almost any place in the two countries anyone has ever heard of. It contains a couple of million facts, but each fact seems chosen because it has a lustre practical or romantic, mundane or spiritual, fundamental or frivolous. The lustre is the criterion.

For all his informativeness, Mr. Clark himself is bright, amusing, worldly, effervescent. One could meet him in a cocktail bar, in a church, on top of a mountain, anywhere, and instantly feel in accord with him. Mr. Clark and his book can be all things to all travellers. What more can be said in praise? Even a Francophile will enjoy All the Best in Germany and Austria. And why not? The Germans had a wonderful time in All the Bestin France.