THE MOST AMAZING BUT TRUE.

ByDoug Storer '21. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1966. 159 pp.$0.50.

In fewer than 160 pages, Doug Storer, sky comber, earth delver, and ocean diver, compiles his "fascinating compendium of documented wonders." For only a half dollar he gives you a million dollars' worth of adventures, rescues, macabre coincidences, and brushes with death.

Men escape from a sunken submarine. Torpedo victims exist 133 days on a raft. Buried underground by an earthquake, a sinner is catapulted by a second tremor into the air, plops into the ocean, and lives to tell the story of his redemption through the grace of God. A Scot hates his housekeeper, at a party promises to marry her just to heat up her financial lust, commits suicide in the belief that he has humiliated and impoverished her, and dies, not knowing that under a peculiar Scottish law she has inherited ]his fortune. An American who never married or had a home of his own writes "Home Sweet Home," the most popular song in the English language, requested by Abraham Lincoln at "all" White House recitals, sung by Charles Dickens to his wife as he played an accordion, and wept over by Queen Victoria "each time" she heard it. An Italian, Niccola the Third of Ferrara, fathers "almost" 300 children.

The Chase Manhattan Bank exhibits the pistols used in the duel between Aaron, then Vice President of the United States, and his political enemy, Alexander Hamilton, once Secretary of the Treasury, which resulted in Hamilton's death and the death of duelling. Without firing a shot, 20,000 Germans in World War II surrender to an American photographer. Perfectly cut and polished, a diamond "the rarest in the world," with 58 facets, is so tiny as to be invisible in Doug Storer's hand until he views it under a miscroscope.

At the back of his book is an advertisement for one costing ten cents less. Entitled "Spitting on the Sheriff and Other Diversions," it is supposed to appeal to persons enjoying prisons, graveyards, whippings, hangings, and assorted sadistic horrors. Giving full scope to ghoulish fantasy and "gore galore," these promises of "screamingly funny torture-chamber gags" and cartoons in a tortured vein" by Charles Rodrigues are an amazing but true anomaly within the pages of Doug Storer's carefully documented" facts.

Professor of English Emeritus