Autumn Leaves

U.S. publishers figure that when Labor Day comes, Christmas shopping cannot be far behind, and try to get most of their wares into the shops sometime before December. Some of the books will become bestsellers, some will go unnoticed in the frantic publishing rush. Among new books now on the shelves:

HITLER, by Otto Dietrich (277 pp.; Regnery; $3.95), an authoritative close-up of the Fuehrer by his old "chief of press relations," who manfully avoids the sour self-pity of most Nazi memoirs and speaks with the incoherent sincerity of someone trying to explain an evil dream. Journalist Dietrich (he died in 1952 after a prison stretch in Landsberg for war crimes) sees his former boss as "sent by the Dark Powers," and, with the professionalism that never seems to desert the German, he complains from the grave that Hitler would not hold nice press conferences.

DOG DAYS, by Ross Santee (244 pp.; Scribner; $3.95), a thoroughly appealing autobiographical memoir of a Midwestern childhood by one of the best U.S. writers and artists of the American West. Mark Twain would have liked it and so will any man who grew up on a farm or in a small town.

PASSIONATE PILGRIM, by Lawrence and Elisabeth Hanson (291 pp.; Random House; $5), a life of Dutch Painter Vincent Van Gogh written by a team of popular biographers who always plow a straight furrow if not a deep one.

THE WOMEN OF PARIS, text by Andre Maurois, photographs by Nico Jesse (190 pp.; Bodley Head; $5.95), a picture book that leaves out most of the women who keep male tourists turning their heads on the Champs Elysees after dark, but has other virtues that are just as French and in other ways just as charming. There are the shrewd and individualistic market women of Les Halles, the young students, the old women of all classes who look as if they could tell a life story as robust as anything of Balzac's.

THE GODS WERE KIND, by Willliam Willis (252 pp.; Dutton; $4), an extraordinary survival story of a raft trip from Peru to the Samoan islands. Its author matched the Kon-Tiki expedition, and he did it alone.

LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS, by Jean-Paul Sartre (239 pp.; Criterion; $4), lighter stuff from France's erratically brilliant and fading existentialist--provocative pieces on French and U.S. writers, shrewd sense and off-the-cuff nonsense on America, some philosophical forays.

PRELUDES TO LIFE, by Theodor Heuss (183 pp.; Citadel: $3.50), recollections by the President of the West German Federal Republic, now 71, of his boyhood and student days before and after the turn of the century, a time when Germany and the Germans enjoyed what now seems a bland, near-Victorian existence.

THE PILLAR OF SALT, by Albert Memmi (342 pp.; Criterion: $3.75), a novel of life in Tunis, a city where the son of a poor Jewish father and a Berber mother is bound to take some hard knocks. The hero's experiences are not nearly as significant as the author supposes, but the fresh, exotic setting and the tensions of wartime North Africa give the book a highly individual flavor.

CASTLE GARAC, by Nicholas Monsarrat (258 pp.; Knopf; $3.50), a potboiler by the author of The Cruel Sea. The handsome young American broke on the French Riviera, the young blonde who learns to care, and the international bounders they tangle with seem to interest Monsarrat as little as they will admirers of his big book.

THE ANGRY HILLS, by Leon M. Uris (249 pp.; Random House; $3), a far cry from Uris's best-selling Battle Cry. The hero, who gets involved with the Greek underground when the Germans overrun the country, is described as an American "bread-and-butter writer." So, in this book, is Novelist Uris.

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