Here and there are lines whose meaning completely escapes one until the lines are read aloud. For Selby, stress, pitch, juncture and intonation are often more meaningful-as indeed they are in real speech-than words themselves. He must be given credit for having attempted to capture their meaning and even more for having succeeded as well as he has in doing so. As for the words themselveswell, there can be no doubt that Last Exit to Brooklyn, to quote the words of another reviewer, will capture the "obscenity sweepstakes for 1964." If your sensitivities are offended at seeing in print those four-letter words which everyone knows and for which there are no substitutes, then don't even glance at the pages of this book. But there is nothing more intrinsic in a man than the language he uses, and to put other words in the mouths of Selby's characters would indeed be an artistic abomination. But there is more involved in this use of words than just art. I do not know Selby's Brooklyn, but even so I have known more than one man for whom "the fuckinest sunset you ever saw" was not an obscenity but the most powerfully expressive reaction to beauty seen and appreciated that he could muster. This is not obscenity but poverty of the mind. Last Exit to Brooklyn is little concerned with poverty of the bodythere is no character in this book who cannot afford what he really wants; it is greatly concerned with poverty of the human spirit.

Marcel Martin

SHOW ME THE GOOD PARTS: The Reader's Guide to Sex in Literature by Robert George Reisner, N. Y., Citadel Press, 1964, 340 pp., $5.95.

Made aware, in his job as librarian. that many, if not most readers of fiction in our time are really interested only in the sexy passages of books, Robert George Reisner has set out to

compile a bibliography of those parts and those parts alone.

He has dissected 800 works of fiction, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and The Decameron to The Carpetbaggers and Another Country and has listed their erotic passages carefully under 33 general headings, from "Adultery" to "Homosexuality (Male)" to "Lesbianism" to "Voyeurism," neglecting no interesting variation in between.

There is an informative and amusing introduction to each section. Reisner is a wit as well as a scholar and has made use of some quotations from early writers that would have bemused them, to say the least, viz.: "Mercy to him that shows it, is the rule." William Cowper, The Task, Book VI, as a heading for the section on "Exhibitionism." To each section is appended a rich bibliography of non-fiction works dealing with the subject.

In addition, there is a substantial "General Interest Bibliography" of non-fiction works on sex, and there is a most useful pair of indexes, one of authors, one of titles. Naturally there are deficiencies. First, of course, one wonders why 800 books and not 1,800 or 8,000? The answer is doubtless physical: one man can read only so many books even if he selects library copies and investigates only those pages whose edges have been smudged by prurient fingers. Secondly, a book of 340 pages is convenient to handle and, covering only this much territory, printable in a type that, unlike the type in most reference works, is easy to read. Third, half a loaf is better than none.

This was a good book to do. Its frivolous usage is sufficient excuse for its existence, but it can be of serious use to scholars also. Its bibliographical apparatus is efficient. While there might be fewer listings under subject headings where only cross references