THE ASTONISHED MUSE.

By Reuel Denney '52. Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress, 1957. 264pp. $4.50.

The title of this book is more "popular" than much of its diction, which — at least when Professor Denney is being analytical — tends to be the language of his discipline, sociology. All the reader need do to overcome this difficulty is to decelerate enough to realize how carefully the terms are being used to yield significant insights. Perhaps I should call them brilliant, too, for the various chapters (which examine college football, styles of TV acting, skyscraper architecture, comic strips, and other evidence from our popular culture) constitute a sort of line upon which the judgments and suggestions of a highly trained, widely read, obviously bright mind may be hung. The whole book grinds out no one thesis. Instead, it provides opportunities to exercise intellectual curiosity, and its most exciting quality for laymen is the serious consideration which it pays matters that we are likely to take for granted.

One cannot finish without a heartening new consciousness of one's self as a thoughtful critic in the mass audience. The author again and again detached his reader from the daily plenitude of American popular art and lets that reader observe freshly the patterns and implications in which he has been involved. Nor is Professor Denney's general attitude the squeamish hopelessness that so frequently characterizes discussion of these materials. His great tolerance is best felt in his rapid, clever, and fair narrative explanations, such as those on Pogo and hot-rodding. The antique muses may be astonished at what goes on, but Professor Denney clearly is amused — and musing, for as a man of taste he is quite willing to voice his deliberted advice to both producers and consumers of our mass culture. Often this advice is approving.

Of particular interest to many Dartmouth men will be the dedication of the book to the late Professor Sidney and Alice Cox.