Hanover Browsing
HAROLD LAMB, author of GenghisKhan, Tamerlane and other books, has written a new life of Charlemagne which is a reasonably full-length portrait of that amazing Emperor. He was the man who eventually brought the entire Western World under absolute control and saw his rule sanctified by the highest ecclesiastical authority on earth.
Charlemagne was a great hunter of wild animals. He was also a great leader on the battlefield. His Franks with their lances and swinging swords swept all their enemies before them. We discover in the book Charlemagne's amazing thirst for knowledge in a world not noted for this, his activities as a lover, diplomat, and warrior. Ancient France, Bavaria, and Northern Italy come vividly to life.
For a top-notch study of war (and all wars have been full of astounding blunders) by all means read Cecil Woodham-Smith's marvellously interesting: The Reason Why.
John H. Wilson's A Rake and HisTimes will also keep your interest. The infamous Duke of Buckingham, rake, wit, and rogue, was one of the truly incredible figures of the Restoration and of the curious court of Charles II. He was one who tried to excel in soldiering, gambling, playwriting, wenching, and pimping. He matched wits with the brilliant Dryden, dueled with his mistress' husband, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and killed him. Politically ambitious, with great capacity for intrigue, he was a genuine scoundrel, wastrel, and double-dealer. He could also be generous, brave, and a fair writer.
Gilbert Cesbron has written in Saints inHell a novel about the worker priests of France and has told a stirring story of faith in action. These worker priests have now been ordered to cease their efforts, but some, it is rumored, may disobey, and nobody now knows what will become of their movement. These dedicated men are sent into the mines, factories and mills to bring back to the fold those who have lost their faith, or who have been seduced by Communism.
This book in particular tells the story of one Father Pierre, who shared the sweat and labor of his fellow workers, and who brought the faith directly to the Paris slum of Sagny. He himself was the son of a miner and knew what back-breaking toil these men knew and understood well the tribulations of the poor. With the help of a frail girl, a young boy, a saddened anarchist, and an ex-prizefighter, Father Pierre battled for the souls, the bodies, and the wages of his flock. He planted the seeds of faith and hope in the barren ground of this slum. He was a good man.
All the royalties of Elder Olson's study of The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (University of Chicago Press) will go to the poet's family. This book will help the reader of Thomas understand his rather difficult poetry. There is a good bibliography.
I am indebted to John Hurd '21, old friend of Lucien Price, for the following words regarding The Dialogues of AlfredNorth Whitehead:
An exciting book appeared on May 10. Any person interested in Harvard University or Boston should read it; any person interested in England; in science, pure or applied; in Judaism, Hellenism, or Christianity; in immoral music or hard liquor; in false Freudians or the American Middle West as the only place where a great flowering of European culture may come.
Published by Atlantic, Little Brown ($5), the book is The Dialogues of AlfredNorth Whitehead (1861-1947), the English mathematician and philosopher, professor at the Imperial College of Science, London (1914-1924), and Professor of Philosophy at Harvard (1924-1937). The talk is expertly recorded by Lucien Price, a musical connoisseur and life-long student of Greek drama and philosophy, an author cherished by a distinguished group of poets and thinkers, and a newspaper man with the Boston Globe for forty years.
Whitehead was 63 when he came to Harvard ostensibly to write and on the side to teach a little. He did produce the masterpieces which the university had expected, but he also became the center of a teaching influence which the university had not. Once a week he and Mrs. Whitehead entertained students at evenings which changed the lives of many and left few untouched. Mr. Price's acquaintance began in 1932. For some six years he was only one of the dozens, the scores, the hundreds who drifted into the Whitehead establishment to listen and to talk about any subject. Then a friendship developed that resulted in this book of some 400 pages read and authorized by Whitehead.
The humor and the profundity, the variety and the richness, the solidity and the flexibility of the dialogues are so striking that one wonders how Lucien Price could have had the heart or the skill to have compressed them into such a readable compass. So encyclopedic is the subject matter that though the volume never suggests a cultural dictionary, few influential persons past or present in Europe, England, or America are omitted. There is a wonderful freshness about the ideas; indeed they are often so original that they shock. Open the book at random and you will find persons as far apart as Helen Hokinson and The New Yorker or Einstein and his epochal discovery of relativity. Disparate contemporary elements are nevertheless fused in the Whitehead and Price imaginations and relate to present and past civilizations, Hebraic, Greek, and Western European.
To read this book is a liberal education; from little selfish suburbia it leads us out generously into new intellectual and spiritual worlds.
