Notices Cecilia Sternberg, TL· Journey: An Autobiography. New York: Dial Press, 1977. 576 pp. $12.50. The journey takes Cecilia Sternberg, with husband and daughter, from a beleaguered life in Czechoslovakia under the Nazis and the Communists; through a fresh start in the United States; on to Jamaica, where her husband dies; and back to England, the land of her birth. Good autobiography requires an arresting narrator, with a complex personality relating events which are either intrinsically gripping or are made so by the biographer. Cecilia Sternberg's life has apparently always been polarized. An aristocrat in a world where the qualities of the aristocracy have become irrelevant, she is aware that most of her crowd are functionally archaic. Symptomatically, a social schizophrenia affects the most honest among them. More honest than most, the author combines numerous oppositions in her point of view: she is fastidious and coarse; mischievous and responsible; snobbish and democratic; and so on, depending on her needs. And she is critically proud of her romantic and mercurial vacillations. Certainly, these are part of her human appeal. A more consistent and homogenous person would have emerged as a pathetic, ultimately boring refugee rather than a vital, if unpredictable, adventurer. The social and psychological ambivalence naturally affects structure and style. Usually the account moves deftly from present or recalled action to reminiscence. But sometimes the narrative texture is erratic: hurried or drawn out. The social politics become tedious or the aaion is rushed. And so with style. The anecdotes are usually witty and sometimes perceptive. The description of the Countess of Ebba's throwing up into the King of Sweden's topper at the races is a 90 biography Vol. 1,No. 4 found poem. At other times, the deadly chattersome grace takes over with its conventional modifiers and we are told of a beauty's nose: "The only imperfect feature in an otherwise flawlessly beautiful face, it added a sort of piquant charm to her good looks." Fortunately, such lapses are not common in this witty account of a social order under terminal care. Bill Cole, John Coltrane. New York: Schirmer Books, 1976. 264 pp. $12.95. A biography of the great sax player. The treatment emphasizes his musical development, but includes some discussion of the forces which sustained his craft. A comprehensive chart of recording dates with personnel and their instruments is appended. Nan Heacock, Crinoline to Calico. Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1977. 242 pp. $7.95. A professed fusion of biography and fiction to produce an account of nineteenth-century Iowa life. Dorothy Kemball Walker, Room, Path and Walking Water. New York: Vantage, 1978. 331 pp. $8.95. An account of the author's life at Sea Cairn in Maine over a forty-year period. A. M. F. ...