The Borrowed Years by Richard M. Ketchum

That is mostly an illusion of artistry yet much of the story is indeed familiar, or used to be. As Ketchum stages it, the story of the borrowed years all but tells itself. In truth, however, Ketchum is a better historian - not so finely attuned to the absurdities, of which there were fewer yet seeing into more corners, under more rugs, into more closets. Allen also drew on the proposition that history is after all historia - story. The model, I suppose, is Frederick Lewis Allen's immortal Only Yesterday, a book about the American Jazz Age widely read and enjoyed 30 years ago. The cumulative effect is narrative at its finest. But Ketchum has read their memoirs and in countless cases interviewed them.

Others, for instance the atomic physicists, are even today less than household names. Some of the witnesses were great players - Chamberlain, Hirohito, Roosevelt and Hull and Hopkins, Churchill and Willkie and Lindbergh and George C. Ketchum, long associated with American Heritage and the school of narrative historians that publication has nurtured, set out to see these years as witnesses saw them - including himself.

For once in this age of needlessly thick, overblown books the length is warranted, not merely by the scope of the tale and the gravity of the theme, but by the superlative craftsmanship.

Ketchum takes a princely space to tell the story, but the art with which he does it illustrates the vast difference between length and longwindedness. A destiny foreseen by a few was evaded by the many at a high price in interest. $21.95 The There eventful years between Munich and Pearl Harbor were, for the United States, a grudging transition to a new age, a locust-eaten interval usefully called 'borrowed' by Richard Ketchum - in the sense of borrowed time. 896 pp., $29.95 ERNIE'S AMERICA The Best of Ernie Pyle's 1930's Travel Dispatches Edited with an introduction by David Nichols Foreword by Charles Kuralt Random House. THE BORROWED YEARS, 1938-41 America on the Way to War By Richard M.

The Borrowed Years by Richard M. Ketchum