JOURNEY OF AN AMERICAN.

By AlbionRoss '29. New York: The Bobbs-MerrillCompany, Inc. 346 pp. $4.30.

If I have ever seen a book which qualified as a "running commentary," this is it! Mr. Ross runs through his life and around out earth with equal speed and equal superficiality. We never stop long enough to know either our man or our world.

This is too bad since it is clear that the author has powers for quick observation and pertinent comment. But in this book his observations all too rarely lead to sustained or illuminating interpretation, and his comments gallop at too fast and staccato a pace to contribute much to our understanding.

The book covers Mr. Ross's years as a reporter in Europe for the New York Post and later The New York Times and in San Francisco for the San Francisco Chronicle. He gives us a rather good picture of pre-war Germany but comes to few conclusions about the problems it faced or the threat it posed that have not been stated many times already. In his quick circuits of our globe thereafter he sees and brings out the problems faced by American foreign policy but succeeds, I fear, merely in leaving us with the conclusion that this is a complicated world and a distressing age. We are told that our nation is not using its strength or its traditions to its own and the world's best advantage.

It seems to me that what concrete value there is in this book is to be found in the author's conviction that the average American is a homeless, restless, and uprooted being who is constantly seeking the sort of peace, security, and continuity which his world, his time, and his own characteristics keep him from finding. In particular, the American lacks that reassurance which the patterns of life in simpler times and less complicated communities have supplied to men in their struggle to go calmly and bravely through their lives. Here Mr. Ross makes a real and important contribution, one which helps us to understand the reasons for the failure of our nation to play the role in world affairs which it should and which it alone can.