HANOVER BROWSING
BEFORE COMMENTING on books this month myself I want to dip into my mailbag and give the readers of this column some of the recommendations that have come to me from alumni.
Wm. D. Parkinson, long-time secretary of the class of 1878, writes that he enjoyed the Autobiography of John Hays Hammond, in two volumes, which appeared last year. It reviews, as Mr. Parkinson suggests, many of the issues of the era his contemporaries have lived through. This is an exciting book describing the life of a successful American engineer, who once in South Africa, was under sentence of death. Theodore Roosevelt, if I remember correctly, was the golden boy who rode up with a pardon in the, is it nick, of time. Mr. Parkinson also requested my comments on Charles Edward Russell's Bare Hands and Stone Walls (Scribner's, 1933). I located this ip the Baker Library and found it to be a lively autobiography of a reformer who lived through the exciting muck-raking days from Henry George to the recent emancipation of the Philippines. Those who enjoyed Lincoln Steffen's autobiography will enjoy this modest account of a side-line reformer who records here the major unsavoury events in the politics and nance of the last fifty-two years. In spite of the sorry stroke of things Mr. Russell believes conditions are slowly improving. I am grateful to Mr. Parkinson for calling my attention to this most interesting book. You will enjoy it, too.
Sid Hayward '26, secretary of the College, and with Bob Strong '24, ardent readers of books on travel and exploration, strongly recommends Fritz Bechtold's Nanga ParbatAdventure (Dutton, 1935). This book has had a world-wide success. The photographs are superb. You can't go wrong on this.
Mr. Hopkins mentioned to me one time during the winter that he had enjoyed Bliss Perry's And Gladly Teach, and Mary Ellen Chase's Silas Crockett.
Still another member of the administration has been kind enough to make some further recommendations. E. Gordon Bill, dean of the Faculty, sends in the following list:
(1) Heredity and the Ascent of Man, by Hurst. A perfect example of how an abstruse subject—genes and chromosomescan be made, by the omission of unnecessary detail and an exceptional lucidity, into a thrilling narrative.
(a) Out of the Rough, by Shaw. A delightful tale of the experiences of a lovelorn young American golf dub with an old retired Scotch golf scientist. The boy learned most of his golf by casting flies and swinging flails.
(3) Salt of Vermont, by Walter Hard. Full of 100 per cent hard-boiled Yankee humor.
(4) Gh.os.ts I Have Talked With, by McComas. A delightful story of the rather impartial investigations of mediums by a Princeton professor.
(5) Wild Birds at Home, by Herrick. Contains too much detail for the average reader, but is a delight to anyone who loves an intimate study of birds.
(6) Unsolved Problems of Science, by Hazlitt. Considerably above average.
(7) Blackfeet Indians, by Linderman and Reiss. Superlative reproduction in color of Indians, with a fine narrative by a sympathetic expert.
(8) Bird Flight, by Aymar. By all odds the finest bunch of flight pictures I ever have seen. The book is worth looking at just to see one picture of a Mallard drake about to land.
JAMES P. HOUSTON '84, wrote me a delightful long letter from his home in Traverse City, Michigan, in which he mentioned enjoying a charming book by Cecil Roberts entitled Gone Rustic. Simultaneously, it would seem, we had both reread old Sam Johnson's Rasselas, which Mr. Houston had found a '.'veritable mine of philosophy."
Harry Ackerman '35, prominent in dramatics in college, and stepping at once into the big-time radio broadcasting with Ray Knight in the Cuckoo hour, writes me that he recommends to alumni readers, Willa Cather's My Antonia, Wilson Mac Donald's (Canadian poet) A Flagon of Beauty, and W. H. Hudson's The Purple Land. Thank you, Harry, and "gooood night!"
Alfred E. Jones Jr. '31 writes an entertaining letter from Uniontown, Pa., in which he recommends to fellow alumni Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, F. P. A.'s Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys, "as droll and comical a work as ever I read, ever," The New Yorker Book of Verse, Peattie's An Almanac for Moderns, Anne Lindbergh's North to the Orient, Loederer's VoodooFire in Haiti, Beebe's Half Mile Down, Sheehan's Personal History, Duranty's I Write as I Please, and Somerset Maugham's Don Fernando. I am glad to note, too, that he is collecting the works of my friend Cunninghame Graham.
Richard H. Mandel '26, co-donor with his brother Frank Mandel '24, of the Mandel Prize in Comparative Literature, gave me during the Christmas holidays a list of books that had recently interested him. Dick, by the way, has a fine personal collection of books, and I am glad to print his list as representative of what a young alumnus reads for pleasure. His list follows: Cunninghame Graham: Portrait of aDictator-, Williamson: Devon Holiday, Gingerich: Cast Down the Laurel; Gutman: Seven Year's Harvest', Tolstoy's ShortStories; Wilder: Heaven's My Destination; La Farge: All the Young Men-, Byrne: TheAlley of Flashing Spears-, Wolfe's Of Timeand the River; Stuart: Things to Live For; Nesbitt's Desolate Marches and Hell-Holeof Creation-, Tomlinson: South to Cadiz and Below London Bridge; Cather: Lucy Gay-heart-, Lewis's It Can't Happen Here-, and Frieda Lawrence's Not I but the Wind.
IN FEBRUARY, 1936, a fine novel entitled The General (Little, Brown & Cos.) by C. S. Forester was published. This book describes the life of a "brass hat" from an engagement in the Boer War, through his triumphant rise during the Great War when he became a corps commander on the Western Front, to his bath-chair days at Bournemouth many years after the war. Although the author ironically describes the sawdust stuff of which the general's brains were made, he doesn't stack the cards but makes it clear that Lieut. General Sir Herbert Curzon was a brave and able leader in the Clausewitz tradition. His fault was a common one; he lacked imagination. The author follows the facts closely; his descriptions of Mons, First Ypres, Loos, the first and second Battles of the Somme, Passchendaele, and the German break through at St. Quentin (the scene, if you recall it, of Sheriff's play (.Journey's End) in March, 1918, are as accurate as Mr. Liddell Hart's history. The minor characters are perfectly drawn, and the psychology of the men and their officers has the verisimilitude of clas- sical tragedy. This book must take an hon- orable place among the half dozen best novels of the war.
I then turn and read the same author's novel The African Queen, published in 1935, and enjoyed it equally well, though the canvas is far smaller than in The General. I don't know who the author is, but he deserves to be watched closely.
Readers of poetry will certainly want to get and to read Unpublished Poems ofEmily Dickinson, though I must confess that for most of the poems therein I agree with Fred Lewis Pattee's judgment that they are but jottings, of a brooding mind, not meant for publication, and not worthy of survival. Some of them, however, are quickened by the authentic genius of Miss Dickinson.
The entire Arthur C. Tozzer (1902) family (and several friends), write, "by au means make your Faculty Departmental Recommendations a yearly feature." Some of their favorites have been: My Countryand My People (oft recommended here); The Road to Xanadu, that excellent study of Coleridge's creative imagination by John Livingstone Lowes; Moral Man in ImmoralSociety, Modern Education, by Otto Rank; Santayana's The Last Puritan-, The Asiatics; and Calvinism to Capitalism.
I have just finished Rachel Field's charming and wise book of poetry, Fear is theThorn, published by Macmillan in March of this year. I quote one short poem:
ONCE MOREOnce more the throbbing guttural of frogsSwells from the swamp at twilight as wepass,And now again the crickets have begunTheir frantic clamor in the meadow grass. So brief, so brief this little singing spanHow should we dare be less aware than theyThough summer never yet outwitted frost,And whistling never kept the dark away.
Some of these poems may be compared, and not unfavorably, with the very best poems of Emily Dickinson. This is a book to cherish, and all New Englanders especially will understand.
I wish to recommend, too, another of Mr. C. S. Forester's novels, The Gun, published by Little, Brown & Company in 1933. It is a remarkably fine tale of the Peninsular War in Spain, and tells how one gun was one link in the long chain of causes which not only drove the French out of Spain, but led eventually to their defeat at Waterloo in 1815. The author is a shrewd student of military history, yet he is a man of peace, as witness his novel The Peacemaker, 1934-
