Hanover Browsing
IN order to recommend some of the better books I have read since the June issue I must write but little about each volume. Here is a rapid survey of books I think readers of this column, now in its twenty-second year, might enjoy.
Expedition Tumuc-Humac, by Francis Maziere (Doubleday, 1955). This tells in the simplest terms of the first successful crossing, from North to South, of a mountain range, the Tumuc-Humac, in French Guiana in the spring of 1952.
This is a good account but not up to Nesbitt's classic, Desert and Forest, about the first crossing of the Danakil country in Abyssinia, which I hope you will look up and read.
The Great Story of Whales, by Georges Blond (Doubleday, 1955). The author is a Frenchman, whose sympathy, rightly, is with the whales, and who points out how greedy men can be in destroying everything in sight if it will bring in a dollar. This book contains a portrait of the early period of whaling drawn from Nelson Haley's diary written aboard the CharlesMorgan, a New Bedford whaler, in 1849.
Lincoln Wilson '13 gave me two whaling logs last winter in San Mateo, California, and if any are interested in seeing them, Baker Library will be happy to show them to you on your next visit to Hanover. Important and original Americana. Also, as I write this in the summer, there are less than a dozen copies left of George C. Wood's In a Sperm Whale'sJaws published by the Friends of the Library at This will become a collector's item. President Eisenhower has a copy and wrote a kind letter about it.
As I read Francois Mauriac's novel Flesh and Blood, translated from the French by Gerard Hopkins, I was reminded of another century, another age. There is something old-fashioned about this well, if stiffly, written story of sensual passion. The publisher is Farrar, Straus and Company, 1955.
Certainly Robert Graves is one of our greatest, most prolific, and most interesting contemporary writers and his Collected Poems 1955 is a volume well worth possessing and reading. Graves has been writing poetry since 1914 and this is the fourth time he has selected the poems he wants to be remembered by. They are rich in rhythmic patterns and word colors, with a subtle sense of humor, and some have a satiric touch as well. Doubleday has done poetry lovers a favor in issuing this book.
I am sorry that James Street died so young. He was one of the best of the current crop of Southern writers (which perhaps isn't screaming over the roofs of the world with a barbaric yawp), and his last book James Street's South I found myself reading like a fast-paced novel. It is full of candor and penetrating information about the South, including that fabulous desert called Texas.
A Room in Paris by Peggy Mann is a novel about love in Paris for the young who still have illusions left. Not as suave as Paul Bonner's studies of Paris, it nevertheless has the honesty and penetration of youth.
If you are going abroad and like to eat and drink you will find helpful Bob Misch's ('25) Foreign Dining Dictionary, Doubleday.
A book "with a difference" is Rom Landau's Personalia (Faber and Faber, 1949) which an English friend sent me from a "remainder" shelf. This is an autobiography containing intimate sketches of Count Keyserling, Mrs. George Bernard Shaw, and Paderewski.
Keep an eye out for the Anchor books. One of the best of the most recent is Wylie Sypher's Four Stages of RenaissanceStyle, with 32 pages of illustrations. A bargain for $1.35.
A Book Society Choice in England last spring was We Die Alone by David Howarth (Collins, London) and I suspect that perhaps before this is in print it will be out here. This is the story of Jan Baalsrud, only survivor of twelve saboteurs who, in 1943, tried to destroy a German air base which was attacking English and American convoys to Russia. After incredible sufferings and miraculous escapes, both from the stupidities and barbarities of the Germans, as well as from avalanches and terrible cold, he, with the aid of several simple and heroic Norwegian countrymen and women, finally made the eighty miles to Sweden in two ghastly months during which he showed superhuman endurance and courage. There is a happy ending as he. married a charming American girl, and is now doing well in Norway. Good luck to them both.
I also enjoyed the late Dr. Wyman Richardson's book of essays about a part of Cape Cod called The House on NausetMarsh. Has good honest writing and a no nonsense point of view.
Congratulations to Richard Chase '37 for his excellent new book: Walt Whitman Reconsidered (Sloane).
Carl I. Wheat when I visited him at Menlo Park, California, last winter gave me a copy of The Shirley Letters (Knopf) which he edited. Dame Shirley (Mrs. Fayette Clappe) when she was living in the mining region of the Sierra in California in 1851-52 wrote a series of 23 letters to her sister "back in the states." Here is an authentic picture of the California of that time. I am glad, at last, to have met this wonderful Dame Shirley.
Ralph Izzard has written still another book about the Himalayas called TheAbominable Snowman. Though his party did not see this creature so often reported, there seems to be evidence enough that there is one, "perhaps a type of ape or monkey," or "perhaps some new creature of the bear family." Doubleday is the publisher.
Poetry and Civilization, by George F. Whicher, is a memorial to him published for Amherst College by the Cornell University Press. It contains much to interest any Robert Frost lover, anyone interested in liberal education, in reading, and so on. It reflects a generous and intelligent mind.
