A MICHENER MISCELLANY, 1950-1970

To stomach James Michener you've got to have a brain made of cast-iron kitsch. These 25 "essays" — all published during the last twenty years in The Reader's Digest, most in shortened form — include such sappy little items as "This I Believe" (all men are brothers), "The Christmas Present" (carbon paper — the best gifts cost almost nothing?), "The Weapons We Need to Fight Pornography" (Michener "loathes" censorship but would censor "unfettered squalor" — some logic), "Don't Knock the Rock" (a square gets half-hip), and some longer pieces on various places like Malaya, Afghanistan, and naturally Hawaii, all of which use the same geosociopoliticohistorical clutter approach found in the big Michener novels. Actually these are "compositions" — "Why I Collect Art"; "My First Article" — and although they have received good marks at Pleasantville, we say D-.