Suggestions

DR. ARTHUR M. WILSON, a former Rhodes Scholar from South Dakota, now instructor in the Department of Biography at Dartmouth, makes the following remarks concerning some biographies which have lately appeared: "No one can mention recent books of biographical interest without alluding admiringly to the definitive R. E.Lee, by Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman. Of less monumental proportions, although excellent of its kind, is the work of another Virginian, Stringfellow Barr's Mazzini: Portrait of an Exile; this engaging book, adorned by unobtrusive scholarship, really conveys the impression that Mazzini breathed and had life in him, and I can assure you that that is an achievement. Another biography which has vitality is Milton Waldman's Joan of Arc, which gives to the modern reader a most plausible and satisfying explanation of Joan's psychosis. Still another excellent biographical study is Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, which particularly interested me because my own childhood was spent on a cattle ranch in that section of Nebraska. I greatly enjoyed Gina Kaus's Catherine, the Portrait ofan Empress; Irving Stone's Lust forLife; and Harold Nicolson's DwightMorrow.

"Your readers may be interested in the following fairly recent biographies, all of which I assign currently to my classes, and which I earnestly recommend to the attention of the general reader. What is more, the first four are very short: Andre Maurois, Voltaire; John Buchan (now Lord Tweedsmuir), Julius Caesar; A. E. Taylor, Socrates; Alan Pryce-Jones, Beethoven; E. F. Benson, The Life of Alcibiades; Ulrich Wilcken, Alexander the Great; Ernst Kantorowicz, Frederick the Second,1194-1250; Lucien Febvre, MartinLuther: A Destiny; Reginald Somerset Ward, Robespierre: A Study in Deterioration; and F. M. Kircheisen, Napoleon."