AMERICANS ARE PEOPLE. By Gerry Neyroud. (Herbert Jenkins, 12s. 6d.)
AMERICANS are friendly; their fried food is awful; San Francisco is beautiful; highway signs are not. This is the range of Mr. Ney- roud's gestures as a social critic, and his publisher's remark that he is 'one of the very few reporters capable of interpreting for British readers the intricacies of American politics' is unfair to him. It is not Mr. Alastair Cook, much less Mr. Geoffrey Gorer, that be is com- peting with, but Mr. Elliot Paul. The techni- color Bohemia that used to be called 'Paris' in Elliot Paul's books Mr. Neyroud calls 'New York' or 'Washington.' It is just barely recog- nisable to an American, but it all goes down like a pint of mild and will hurt nobody. The cast includes a carnival fat lady and rogues with names like Ludovic Pym, Little Leo, and Judas Iscariot. Mr. Neyroud is raffish, per- sistently arch, and sometimes funny. His best anecdotes are about Prohibition days, when compressed wine-bricks were sold under cover of reverse instructions: 'Do not allow this mixture to stand for two weeks or it will ferment and result in the formation of five gallons of intoxicating wine of matchless
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