Hanover Browsing

Back to America this Month, Mostly 1939 Non-Fiction; Prof. Anderson's War Book Recommendations

PROFESSOR FRANK MALOY ANDERSON is the Hanover authority on the European situation so I have asked him to suggest books which best cover the present European War, and the events leading up to it.

I had my say last month, and what with Time, Life, and the New York Times I find myself glutted with contemporary news. So for awhile I shall review briefly books in other fields; books which, in the main, furnish entertainment, and perchance some enlightenment, too. 1 shall confine myself this month to books published in the U. S.

For autobiography there is FightingYears'. Memoirs of a Liberal Editor (Harcourt, Brace, 1939) by Oswald Garrison Villard. The author is an isolationist, a humanitarian, and a very decent gentleman and with many years experiences as a liberal editor he tells his reminiscences of the last forty years. Professor P. O. Skinner liked this one.

Charles Beard, who has returned after a long exile this year to give a seminar at Columbia, carries on his excellent Riseof American Civilization with America inMidpassage (Maemillan, 1939). A summary of events in the United States during the last ten years. Recalls the antics of the brokers and the bankers in the decade of the late twenties with considerable indignation. The author lost some of his savings in the crash, and so writes at times with what might be called a nonacademic detachment.

Invisible Empire: The Story of the KuKlux Klan 1866-1871, by Stanley F. Horn (Houghton, Mifflin, 1939), though occasionally dull going, is full of sound research and is probably the definitive book on the Klan. He tells the origin, growth, and how the Klan operated; the Realms of the Empire, in which he treats various states separately: Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, and so on.

George Leighton's Five Cities (Harpers, 1939) provides brief and somewhat hilarious studies of the doings of the early economic royalists (sometimes known as the robber barons) and their exploitation of men and natural resources in Shenandoah, Birmingham, Louisville, Seattle, and Omaha. The various chapters first appeared in Harper's Magazine as separate articles but I missed them there, and they are eminently worth book form. Leighton does a scholarly job, and he writes with the irony of a rational, well balanced, and perhaps somewhat cynical idealist.

I finally got to Walter Havighurst's Upper Mississippi: A Wilderness Saga (Farrar, 1937) the second of the Rivers of America Series. Here he describes how the Norwegians and the Swedes took their strength and their religion to the upper Mississippi basin and fought locusts, prairie fires, forest fires, and drought. That they succeeded in their struggle is attested by the fact that many of them subsequently sent their sons to Dartmouth.

Dartmouth men will be particularly interested in page 58 and note of M.A. DeWolfe Howe's Holmes of the BreakfastTable (Oxford University Press, 1939). The book reveals to our generation a fine gentleman of the old school, a wit, the autocrat of the breakfast table, a poet, and the father of the best beloved of all supreme court justices.

I recommend strongly J. W. De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion From Secession to Loyalty first published by Harpers in 1867, and now republished by them to a far more receptive audience than it had on its initial appearance. It is a story of the Civil War with superb battle scenes, but the novel itself could stand some rigorous pruning. Colonel Carter appears an excellent man and officer from our standards, and it is curious to note the differences of that time and ours in respect to the pure and perfect heroine being so mightily disturbed by her husband's conduct. Colburne appears to us as a bit of a prig, though worthy in spite of that. For a novel which was first published over seventy years ago it stands up remarkably well today.

I found Vardis Fisher's Children of God (Harpers, 1939) too long but with admirable and powerful scenes of the Mormon conquest of the West. Bulk seems to be necessary in a best selling non-fiction book, but not for me.

Richard Maury's The Saga of the Cimba

(Harcourt, Brace, 1939) will delight all those nautically minded. Maury, in a 35 foot sloop, sailed with a companion from Nova Scotia to New York, then to Bermuda (his stormiest passage), to Grand Turk, to Jamaica and Panama, to Galapagos, the Marquesas, Tahiti, Samoa, and finally to Fiji. Unassumingly written, the author in his book tells an honest and shipshape tale.

For those who like nature writing in small doses, Donald Culross Peattie in AGathering of Birds (Dodd, Mead, 1939) has gathered together a good anthology of such writers as Hudson, White, Kearton, etc.

I am perhaps the only person in America who cannot rave about the books of John Steinbeck. In his best selling Grapes ofWrath his effort to make the "Okies" all good hearted, and the very poor all generous souls (with the assumption that the rich are all hard hearted exploiters) is one of the great fallacies of "proletariat" writing. Some of his scenes are magnificent, and true, but the extreme sentimentality of the ending, and other parts of the book, do not for me ring true. It seems to me to be a Tobacco Road on wheels, and its success, as in the play, would baffle me unless I realized that many best sellers are highly sentimental.

Four good historical novels also recommended:

Next to Valour, by John Jennings. (Macmillan, 1939.) A good rousing tale of 18th century New England. The story begins in Scotland during the '45 rebellion, swings to Portsmouth and Suncook, New Hampshire, and ends with Wolfe's attack on Quebec. The hero is a dumb but an agreeable fellow who is battered about by a villain who is a villain. Indians and Roger's Rangers are suitable props for the exploits of the hero. Covers the Dartmouth terrain and is readable throughout.

Guns of Burgoyne, by Bruce Lancaster. (Stokes, 1939.) The year 1777. The hero: Kurt Ahrens, an officer of a Hessian regiment fighting for "Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne" in the American wilderness from Ticonderoga to Saratoga. Well written with pleasant love story thrown in for publisher's ballast.

Paradise, by Esther Forbes. (Harcourt, Brace 8c Cos., N. Y.)

The General's Lady, by Esther Forbes. Same publisher. Miss Forbes deserves some sort of an accolade for her fine novels of early American life. She writes exceedingly well, tells a good story, and her books are on a definitely higher plane than the usual historical novel (or any other kind of novel for all that).

Paradise is a story of Eastern Massachusetts (Concord) in the 17th century (circa 1640). The climax in the action is King Philip's War. One will remember Jude Parr, Fenton his son, and Ja7.an his daughter, for a long time. Miss Forbes knows her Puritan psychology, and creates real characters. Even better as a novel is TheGeneral's Lady, a tale of an adulterous passion during the Revolutionary War in the neighborhood of Worcester, Massachusetts. One of the best novels read in a long time.

PROFESSOR OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE