The New Republic

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Mahatma Gandhi and his Apostles by Ved Mehta (Viking; $14.95)  Gandhi and Civil Disobedience by Judith M. Brown (Cambridge University Press; $32.50) The elephant is like a rope, says the blind man. It is like a tree-trunk, says another. No, it is like a snake, says a third. Thus Ved Mehta assembles his idiosyncratic reports on the elephant's epidermis, while Judith Brown meticulously measures it inch by inch. READ MORE >>

India: A Wounded Civilization by V.S. Naipaul (Knopf; $7.95) READ MORE >>

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Jacques Prévert, France's most popular poet of the 20th century, died this past spring, and there should be some memorial or festival of his work to mark not his death but his aliveness. What a remarkable person he was. Known in America principally as a pop lyricist ("Autumn Leaves" and "Ne Me Quitte Pas" in particular) and as screenwriter for the film classic Les Enfants du Paradis, he was truly a people's poet. READ MORE >>

By program count, I went to 81 theater productions in the 1976-77 season lately concluded. I reviewed about 20 of them. Some others I might have reviewed, space permitting, but most were beneath comment. At season's end, here are some notes on theater matters worth discussion. READ MORE >>

An old professor of mine used to divide the books of this world into two categories: those that were serious and those that were not. Most of the world's books, he assured me, were not worth reading. Since he was a most learned man, his words had weight with me. His distinction comes to mind whenever I contemplate bulging bookshelves, bookstore windows or publishers' catalogues. It is a comfort to know that there are thousands of books you can do without. READ MORE >>

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Nabokov's Dark Cinemaby Alfred Appel(Oxford University Press; $14.95) READ MORE >>

Dog Day Afternoon (Warner Bros.) At least once a week there's something in the newspapers that is believable only because it actually happened. And in the current strained relation between fact and fiction in our culture, fictionmakers of prose and film sometimes let life do the inventing for them, then use fictional techniques of conviction on the nearly incredible material. The producer Martin Bregman sponsored Serpico (TNR, Jan. 19, 1974) which was made in that impulse; out of the same impulse he now presents the much-superior Dog Day Afternoon. READ MORE >>