THE HONEST RAINMAKER.

By A. J. Liebling '24. Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1953.317 PP.$3.50.

Of this book about "Colonel Stingo" TheNew Yorker stated on February 21 that "much of the material in the book first appeared in this magazine, in a somewhat different form."

Doubleday states: "The Honest Rainmaker" was planned as a book written as a book." After it had been completed The NewYorker purchased three portions of the book. However, "it was a book before it was a threepart profile, even though the latter version was the first to appear in print." The case rests.

"Colonel Stingo" is an amusing cuss, a kind of combination of Barnum, Arcaro, W. C. Fields on a diet, Harry the Horse, and a boxing manager played by Gleason in the movies.

The book is full of racy stories, in the artificial Broadway manner, of horse racing, fighting, gambling, and rainmaking.

Liebling has made himself the spokesman for one side of New York life in which "tease" is money, and where the highest praise for a female is to call her a "Lissome." In this world "Colonel Stingo" lives his jolly and amusing life.

His sayings are wiser if not funnier than Goldwyn's. On optimism he says that, "If winter comes, spring must be moving up into a position of contention," and on religion, "It's the strongest thing man ever invented, with the possible exception of the Standard Oil Company."