Hanover Browsing
BIRDS return with the coming of spring but we have been feeding bluejays, woodpeckers, chickadees, and many varieties of sparrows all winter long. I never cease to enjoy watching birds. They, like angels, have wings, and are airy creatures of great beauty. Even the humblest sparrow has a certain charm.
Richard H. Pough's Audubon WesternBird Guide is now out. This book completes his covering of American birds; his Audubon Bird Guide (about small land birds of Eastern and Central North America) and his Audubon Water Bird Guide have already been published. This newest volume is pleasantly illustrated, in color and in black and white, by Don Eckelberry and will certainly suffice all but the professional ornithologist and maybe him, too. These books are sponsored by the National Audubon Society. Doubleday issues them.
I am grateful to Howard Dunham '11 for loaning me Miriam Underbill's GiveMe the Hills which tells, with gusto and charm, of a lifetime of mountain climbing from Idaho and the West, the Presidential Range in the Northeast, to the most difficult climbs in the Alps, in which Mrs. Underhill made several first ascents. The book is well illustrated and comes from London. Mrs. Underhill is the daughter of the late Robert Lincoln O'Brien '91, well known to Dartmouth men everywhere.
Negley Farson made a name for himself with his The Way of a Transgressor, but he has been known for many years for his reporting from London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Africa, and South America. Mr. Farson has been around and has known many famous (and infamous) people. I believe it a fair statement that if one desires to know the truth about politicians, of whom Mr. Farson has a distinctly low opinion (for politicians substitute statesmen for the words are interchangeable), one must go to an uninhibited newspaper man who, when he writes a book, is relatively free from censorship.
Such a book is Mr. Farson's latest: AMirror To Narcissus (Doubleday). The book is somewhat uneven in the writing but I can still agree with John Gunther who calls it "a brilliant, vital, burning book," which I could hardly put down. This is an autobiography covering Mr. Farson's life since 1935. It is really exciting and written with so high a sense of truth that the author, like the blind mule which ran into a tree, just doesn't give a damn. Here is life as he has observed it. Here are his frank opinions of V.I.P.'s everywhere. Some of them stand up less well than many an honest bootlegger.
The bargain hunter may, for $3.95, buy all the short stories of Mark Twain edited by Charles Neider and published by Hanover House. Here are the well-known favorites: "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," and "The Mysterious Stranger." For good measure the editor has included yarns of pure fiction found in Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad,Life on the Mississippi, and Following theEquator. There are sixty stories in this collection. The title: The Complete ShortStories of Mark Twain.
Many college men yearn to write a novel about their college years. Few succeed, but one who has is Charles Thompson, author of Harper's recently published novel: Halfway Down the Stairs. This is a full and brutal story of life at Cornell at one time or another which, it is assumed by a cautious publisher, no longer exists. I have an idea, which I trust does not unduly flatter the author, that he determined under any and all circumstances to write an honest book. That it might also have a wide appeal, because of its amazing verisimilitude, both to readers and possible movie producers, simply reflects that Mr. Thompson packs a lot of gear. He is cool. So is his book.
I recommend without reservation David Low's Autobiography which came to me from London. This book is full of marvelous cartoons and interesting letterpress describing his early life in New Zealand and his life as a controversial and influential cartoonist in London. No historian of the past thirty years can afford to neglect or dismiss Low, his cartoons, or his several printed books.
