Hanover Browsing
IT IS difficult for a college professor to know how much time the average alumnus, particularly one who is in business, has for serious reading, and especially for keeping up with the world's events other than in the daily newspaper or a news magazine. It is more or less our business, as instructors in a modern liberal college, to keep up as well as we can, not only in contemporary literature and thought, but in contemporary history as well. Obviously, even if one could read all the time,, and only a blockhead would do that, he would have to read and choose judiciously. One follows the reviews, learned and otherwise, and sometimes one is helped by his friends.
Bill Lyons, one of my best friends in the Class of 1937, son of the late Dennis F. Lyons '02, is now working for the publishers Reynal & Hitchcock, Inc. In March Bill kindly sent me three excellent new books which I want to mention at this time.
Children of the Rising Sun, by Willard Price. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1938.
If you are one who has time for serious books, and if an exciting picture of Japan's struggle and bid for supreme overlordship in the Asian East means anything to your concerns, professional or otherwise, this straightforward, unbiassed, and revealing book on Japan is really indispensable. The often intense and natural indignation shown, and reiterated pleas for "action", "sanctions", and "boycotts", which one finds in such liberal weeklies as the Nation (and I like and regularly read this magazine) is revealed after reading Price as being just so much posh. It just doesn't mean a thing, nor does it do what it intends to do. It merely confuses by an excess of fine emotion. In Children of theRising Sun, the author first analyzes the Japanese character as revealed in Japan proper. Then in successive sections he discusses lucidly "Japan in Manchuria", "Japan in Korea" (where Japan has failed), "Japan in China", "Japan in the Pacific", and finally "Japan in the World." We may bewail Japan's imperialism, but the fact is that Japan's imperialistic advances in the East is in many instances already a faitaccomplis, and Japan in a highly practical, shrewd, and what might fairly be called a highly sinister manner, is threatening the domination of the Dutch in the Dutch East Indies, and the British in Australia and New Zealand. We, the United States, have already, Willard Price claims, turned over the Philippines to Japan through the passing of the Tydings-McDuffie Act, if not through war, by the process of economic penetration. The Japanese must not be under-estimated by the "superior" white races in America or elsewhere. Their religion, and their extreme nationalism ("Bushido") gives them a power, even as it does the Nazis, which makes them a very dangerous nation either martially or economically. Decidedly Mr. Price's book will give any American of sober intelligence much reason for thought. It should be required reading for our politicians in Washington.
The Lonely Debate, by Houston Peterson. Reynal & Hitchcock. 1938.
The author is a lecturer in philosophy at Columbia and Rutgers.
In this book he has taken, as an example of a soliloquy, Hamlet's well known "To be or not to be", which the author contends expresses in perfect form man's ultimate dilemma, and dramatizes for each one of us the baffled individual in the agony of indecision.
With this conception of a soliloquy as his starting point he has taken some fifty famous soliloquies which best reveals man in his solitary conflict. The writers included are Shakespeare, Cervantes, Racine, Milton, Goethe, Stendhal, Carlyle, Emerson, Tolstoy, Zola, Thomas Mann, Huxley, and others.
The result is a singularly rich anthology, thought provoking and emotionally stimulating.
Promenade, by G. B. Lancaster. Reynal & Hitchcock, 1938.
This is a genuinely stirring and moving novel of exactly five hundred pages which tells of the growth of New Zealand as a part of the British Commonwealth of Nations. History is interwoven with an appealing array of fictional characters: charming women, stiff colonials, sailors, soldiers, statesmen, planters, native boys, Maoris, blackguards, and so on. There is a plethora of love interest, lots of fighting and dying, and it deserves a place on the same shelf with Francis Brett Young's fine novel, previously mentioned here, TheySeek a Country. You will long remember Sally and Darien Lovel.
Have you ever read the late Thorne Smith's first book Biltmore Oswald? It will set you roaring.
Charles P. Livermore, of this year's senior class, has given me an interesting list of books he has recently read. I select those which may be least known to the alumni.
You Have Seen Their Faces, by Erskine Caldwell & Margaret Bourke-White. Modern Age Books. $.75.
In which the southern share croppers present faces you won't forget in excellent photographs which stubborn argument can't deny, or change. The words and faces of the South are integrated into a total sense and meaning by a Caldwell who finds such life tragic, but still not quite hopeless.
The United States, A Graphic History by Hacker, Modley, and Taylor. Modern Age Books. $.75.
A book of vital information about America's economic history so well printed and crammed with interesting graphs, easily understood, as to give the usually dull material a definite dramatic quality, topped off with an analysis of the forces at work in our present economic crisis. It is designed for people who want to get the important facts of five hundred years of economic history with a minimum of confusion.
Men Who Lead Labor, by Bruce Minton and John Stuart. Modern Age Books. $.35. A biography of several prominent labor leaders, plus the story of how they got to be leaders and why there is a disagreement between some of them. It is the first book on the subject with this point of view. There is no question about the subject being interesting.
The Chute, by Albert Halper. Viking Press. $2.50.
Life in a great mail order house is something much different than what we bargain for. Halper crushes such a multitude of impressions and experiences into this book that, again, the reader can't deny or refute it or, if he is eager, submit to it.
Mr. Livermore also recommended Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, and Thurman Arnold's The Folklore of Capitalism.
Mr. Hopkins recently recommended to me three books: particularly (1) TheHouse That Hitler Built, by Stephen H. Roberts, (2) Goliath-The March of Fascism by G. A. Borgese, and (3) Assignmentin Utopia by Eugene Lyons. Of Numbers 2 and 3, Dean E. Gordon Bill recently wrote: Borgese: "This is a profound and magnificent exposition of the rise of Fascism in Italy by a very distinguished Italian scholar and writer who now resides in this country," and of Lyons: "This seems to me to be one of the fairest and most discriminating appraisals of the Russian experiment by one who knows what he is talking about."
I hope to fill the June column, I might say at this time, from recommendations from the Administration.
Professor Hugh S. Morrison, of the Department of Art, author of an excellent biography on Louis Sullivan, has kindly written the following on "Recent Publications on Architecture" for this column.
Of the recent flood of books on the modern movement in architecture, the best for the lay reader are Frederic Towndrow's Architecture in the Balance, and Walter Curt Behrendt's Modern Building. Towndrow, an Englishman, modern in view- point but without the modernistic chip-onthe-shoulder attitude, has written a very sensible little book. More significant is Dr- Behrendt's book, published last year while he was at Dartmouth. Widely reviewed, the Architectural Forum's honor list for 1937 echoes the general critical sentiment: "Probably the best work on the subject in English."
Two extremely beautiful books on American Colonial architecture are Samuel Chamberlain's sensitive photographic record of old New England, particularly the seacoast towns, called A Small House inthe Sun and the new book by John M. Howells on The Architectural Heritage ofthe Piscataqua.
The architectural magazines occasionally publish special issues which are books in themselves. Notable recent examples are the Architectural Record's excellent job on "The Restoration of Colonial Williamsburg" (Dec. 1935) and the Forum's superb issue on the recent work of Frank Lloyd Wright (Jan. 1938). House builders will also like the Forum's 1938 Book ofSmall Houses.
Of particular interest to Dartmouth is Lewis Mumford's The Culture of Cities, just arrived on my desk, and apparently a worthy sequel to Technics and Civilization.
