Hanover Browsing
IT doesn't seem possible that Captain Sir David W. Bone, author of TheBrassbouncLer (1910), a recognized classic of the sea, is now retired and more than eighty years old. He began his ocean career in sail in the City of Florence, and ended up as Master of the great Anchor liners, the Tuscania, on which Joseph Conrad made his only trip to New York in 1923, and the Cameronia, which was torpedoed under him in the Mediterranean during the First World War. He retired in 1946 when he was awarded a Knighthood for his services in the Second World War.
If you happen to know his two fine war books, Merchantmen-at-Arms, about the 1914-1918 war, and The MerchantmenRearmed, which describes his experiences in the 1939-1945 war, you will especially want to read his interesting, understated autobiography recently published by Duckworth in England: Landfall at Sunset.
It has been said that "good sailing begins with careful stowage," something Captain Bone learned from Captain "Bully" Martin in the eighties. He has himself, learned to apply the same skill in his books. They are taut and shipshape.
I have long been an admirer of this sterling seaman, and am glad to hail him here, and wish him many more landfalls.
The Panglossian optimism of desperation, the all-too-shallow thinking of our time, is reflected in the enormous success of the vulgarization of Christianity evidenced in the books on "positive thinking" flooding the bookstores. The author of the most successful of this watered-down Coueism is deftly annihilated with some delicately persuasive negative thinking in a. recent Anchor Book anthology: The Reporter Reader, edited by Max Ascoli. The opening article by William Lee Miller is alone worth the modest price of the book, but there are other gems in this amusing mirror of the McCarthy age. In fact the entire collection is reason for a sane and hopeful optimism.
If you read The Lonely Crowd, -you will want to procure, in the Anchor Series, David Riesman's selected essays from his book, Individualisvi Reconsidered. Some of the chapters are "The Ethics of We Happy Few," "Some Observations on Intellectual Freedom" and "Freud, Religion, and Science."
There is a potent interest developing in Denis Diderot, the great French encyclopedist. Just out is Rameau's Nephew, and other selections from his work, deftly translated and edited by Messers Barzun and Bowen. This is another Anchor Book and a welcome addition to their excellent list.
If you are interested in the origin of many colorful and familiar expressions, such as "to be a piker," "skeleton in the closet," etc., you will enjoy browsing through C. E. Funk's Heavens to Betsy!, issued by Harper, which describes four hundred such expressions.
Alistair Mac Lean, a Scotsman, has written magnificently about a Murmansk convoy in H.M.S. Ulysses (Doubleday). For sheer narrative power this book is hard to beat. The author succeeds perfectly in getting across to the reader the killing cold, the exhaustion, the dangers to the ships and men: hurricanes, planes, submarines, COLD, and other horrors which dogged this convoy. The ships sink, blow up, burn, and there is no relief. No happy ending; no pretty girls. Just war; just sheer hell. This should be read by the Russians who in all the war never suffered as did these English seamen bringing them supplies so that they might carry on the war against the German enemy. This book is better, I think, in its descriptive power than either The Cruel Sea or The CaineMutiny.
If you read short stories there is an agreeable anthology of recent American fiction in Paul Engle's selection (with Hansford Martin): Prize Stories 1956. Here, among others, you will find the excellent Mr. Cheever, Richard Yates, Jean Stafford, William Faulkner, Robert M. Coates, and James Buechler.
I am a staunch admirer of Pogo and recommend Potluck Pogo, to go with the other six Pogo books which preceded this one. Walt Kelly is close to being a genius.
After many years Kenneth Roberts has given up, for the moment, the divining pencil, and turned once again to historical fiction with Boon Island. Boon Island is off the coast of Maine. In the winter of 1710 the ship Nottingham Galley, several weeks out of Greenwich, beat itself to death against this reef. Its tale includes terrible suffering, cannibalism, heroism (and its opposite), and other glories and failings of human nature under stress. Mr. Roberts has told the tale sparsely and dramatically, but I cannot agree with the publisher's blurb which says this may be Kenneth Roberts' finest book. It isn't by a long chalk, but Roberts' readers will recognize the authentic flavor.
Immanuel Velikovsky, author of Worldsin Collision, has written what appears to be an important book: Earth in Upheaval. This book presents much documentation of global catastrophes in prehistorical and historical times: the clear, unequivocal testimony of bones and stones which indicate that the great disturbances which rocked our globe were caused by forces outside the world itself. I found this tremendously interesting.
