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FIVE PLAYS (473 pp.)-John O'Hara-Random House...
...remind themselves that Wagner and Beethoven were considered far out in their day too. Just how much a listener will unquestioningly endure was acknowledged last week by the British Broadcasting Corporation. On its highbrow Third Program, it recently broadcast a musical "composition"' consisting of twelve minutes of random noise -and received no complaints...
Called Mobile for Tape and Percussion, the thing was identified to the audience as the work of one Piotr Zak, a young avant-garde Pole considered "one of the most controversial figures in contemporary music." Zak's "work" was a dreadful cacophony punctuated by rattles, bangs and random blows on a xylophone. Next morning the music critics passed learned if mystified judgment. Wrote the London Times: "It was certainly difficult to grasp more than the music's broad outlines, partly because of the high proportion of unpitched sounds and partly because of their extreme diversity." Agreed the Daily...
...RISE AND FALL OF ADOLF HITLER (by William L. Shirer; Random House; $1.95) is not, as might be supposed, merely an instant, small-package version of Shirer's massive bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. This book is more sharply and dramatically focused on the man rather than the world he terrorized. Shirer writes with dignity, authority and a total lack of adult condescension. Without blinking the problem of evil, he captures the demonic fascination of Hitler, whose life was essentially the success story of a monster. Like most of the Landmark series, this book...
...STORY OF YOUNG KING ARTHUR (by Clifton Fadiman, illustrated by Paul Liberovsky; Random House; $1.50). Like the actor who plays Hamlet, no author can wholly fail when telling the Arthurian saga. While no Malory or even a T. H. White (The Once and Future King) Author Fadiman is a cut above Lerner & Loewe (Camelot). His grave young hero seems to sense that he is on the threshold of a mythic destiny. Fadiman's Merlin is a wiser Polonius. His courts and tourna ments are a pageant of medieval glory as if they had been clipped from the film sequences...