TWENTY MODERN AMERICANS

By AliceC. Cooper and Charles A. Palmer '23. Harcourt, Brace Co., 1942, 381. pages. $2.00.

This book is for older youngsters. The auhors hope that through twenty short biographies, which are quite uncritically written, but with a pleasant inspirational tone, the boy or girl who reads them will come to view success subjectively "from the inside looking out." The authors hope that the child will then set his or her own personal definition of success: "to evision the goal which, when achieved, will give you—you—the particular sort of happiness and satisfaction you are seeking in life."

Among the twenty biographies about as divergent people as Walt Disney, Richard E. Byrd, Amelia Earhart, J. Edgar Hoover, Henry A. Wallace, George Washington Carver, Helen Wills, the Mayo brothers, Jane Addams, and Walter P. Chrysler, the authors find a common thread: "All of these people knew what they wanted." Most of them, I suppose, achieved it. though from my own knowledge of people I have yet to meet anyone who considered that he had got what he wanted and all of us find there is something still to grasp which lies always beyond our reach. I have always supposed that if one achieved success then there could be nothing further to seek. These sketches are competently enough done, and if they had less of the Orison Swett Marsden touch, they would be better still. There is an aura of the complacent twenties about them, and little of the humility of 1943.