Hanover Browsing
APPARENTLY medical men are of two schools of thought over coronary heart disease. Dr. Paul D. White thinks that it is all right for people over forty to shovel snow, bicycle for miles, and run up and down stairs. In favor of his argument one thinks of King Gustav of Sweden and Edward Payson Weston, the walker.
Dr. Peter J. Steincrohn believes that exercise "is a waste of God-given energy." He points out that we are allotted about three and a half billion heartbeats when we are born. "Why dissipate them in wasteful, unnecessary energy? Why calisthenics? Why the bending, flexing, pushing, and grunting? Of what use, after forty, is it to have 'rippling biceps'?" Exercise is not good for everybody. It can KILL.
The title of Dr. Steincrohn's book is You Can Increase Your Heart Power.
Having experienced a severe heart attack eleven years ago, I can but say that I am of the Steincrohn school. Over-exercise and over-eating are our national curses.
Harold Nicolson, one of England's elder statesmen, has written a reasonably amusing and intelligent book called Journey to Java. For his 70th birthday he was given a two-months cruise from London to Java. He was accompanied by his brilliant wife, Vita Sackville-West, also an author. His book reflects an urbane and civilized point of view altogether rare in an age of B and K, Nasser, Mr. Nixon, and other world travelers.
Ralph Nading Hill '39 scored a big success with his book Window in the Sea. It was chosen in England by the Scientific Book Club and many read it here. A companion volume to this, and especially interesting to anyone who has seen the magnificent film o£ Rachel Carson's best-seller The Sea Around Us, is Noel Monkman's new book From Queensland to the GreatBarrier Reef.
Mr. Monkman is a scientist, a fine underwater cameraman, musician and writer. He also is a man apparently without fear. His book, a truly fascinating one for a naturalist, tells of man-eating crocodiles, wild pigs, mammoth turtles, ant-lions, cliffdwelling bees, hermit crabs, poisonous coral, and exotic spiders called Nephila. The book has colored and black and white illustrations; all of them add interest to the story. Highly recommended.
Robert Graves has many admirers over here and they will enjoy his latest book 5 Pens in Hand which is a collection of his shorter magazine pieces and some of his lectures. These include "Why I Live in Majorca," "The White Goddess," "Diseases of Scholarship, Clinically Considered," essays, stories, and many poems. Doubleday published this one.
Two of the most fascinating women of the Napoleonic and Romantic era were Mme. Récamier and Mme. de Staël. One, Juliette Récamier, chaste and married, was France's greatest beauty; the other, Germaine de Staël, was notoriously amoral. Between these two there sprang up a friendship which even Napoleon himself couldn't break up.
The story of these two women is brilliantly told by Maurice Levaillant (ably translated by Malcolm Barnes) in ThePassionate Exiles. Farrar, Straus and Cudahy published this. It came out in France under the title Une Amitie Amoureuse in 1956. The origin of the book was twelve public lectures given at the Sorbonne in the winter of 1938-39.
By now Alberto Moravia has a following in this country owing to his rather alarming understanding of women. His latest novel, Two Women, is a story of mother and daughter caught in the violence of war. How war degrades and how fundamentally fine character reacts is superbly told in this fine Italian novel. Maybe this is his best book to date.
Be on the lookout for the first English translation of Ivan Turgenev's LiteraryReminiscences, which Edmund Wilson in his prefatory essay says "is certainly of Turgenev's best, comparable in beauty and interest to Yeats' The Trembling ofthe Veil."
See also Second-Rate Brains, a critique of the present status of American education as the foundation for world leadership. This is a paperbound edited by Kermit Lansner.
Here endeth my 25th year as Hanover Browser. Pax vobiscum.
