Briefly Noted
As a useful service guide to its College Bowl Contest, General Electric has mailed out 40,000 copies of a brochure, BooksWorth Re-Reading, A List from DartmouthCollege 1968, containing more than 200 titles. The list was compiled after a 1967 questionnaire submitted to the faculty and administration. Requests for the brochure came from a variety of persons who heard it mentioned on TV: grandmothers and congressmen, travelling salesmen and college administrators, high-school dropouts and professors. Many letters expressed appreciation to Dartmouth College for making the list available.
Swept off their critical feet, the first reviewers of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien proved to be as full of praise and awe as they were of contradictions and questions about allegory, symbolic capacity and structure, and ultimate meaning. Tolkien has fared differently from other popular authors (Durrell, Cozzens, Salinger, Golding, Bellow, and even Mailer). Examined critically, Tolkien rises in estimation; others sink. Indeed, without boost and blurb, the extraordinary success of Tolkien is a phenomenon which has fascinated the critics. In Tolkien and the Critics, Essays on J. R. R.Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Neil D. Isaacs '53 and Rose A. Zimbardo have chosen 15 essayists to elucidate the meanings of the book. Mr. Isaacs leads off with "On the Possibilities of Writing Tolkien Criticism." Published by the University of Notre Dame Press, with 296 pages, the book costs $7.50.
With the help of 19 experts in the highway field, Daniel J. Minahan '37 has published a paper, a brochure of 87 pages entitled The Highway Spot Improvement Program, A Critical Review under the auspices of the Highway Safety Research Institute and the University of Michigan. The purpose is to eliminate or correct highway hazards by (1) geometric changes, (2) widening, regrading, relocating, or realigning the roadway, and (3) installing signs, signal control, and marking devices. The study shows that spot improvement programs in different states vary considerably in scope, standards, and flexibility and that highway safety criteria evolve not with forethought but with hindsight. Many existing hazards cannot be eliminated because of governmental sensitivity to political and economic pressures from special interest groups and by the shortsighted stubbornness of individuals.
Dedicated to William Patten (1861-1932), Professor of Biology at Dartmouth College "whose devotion to research, scientific achievements, and rich human understanding have been a never-ending source of inspiration," Human Embryology, third edition, has appeared with no fewer than 1430 drawings and photographs grouped as 498 figures, 55 in color. The author is the son, Bradley M. Patten '11; the publisher, the Blakiston Division of McGraw-Hill Book Company; the price, $17.50. In simple and readable form the book sets forth the phases of human embryology of special interest to medical students and physicians. Omitted is much comparative and theoretical material traditionally covered in embryological texts. Stressed are aspects of embryology important as background in other medical subjects: early stages in the formation of the embryo, the mechanism of its implantation in the uterus, and changes in the mother's reproductive organs so vital in gynecology and obstetrics.
Because of clinical importance, developmental anomalies are thrown into prominence. Dr. Patten has presented developmental processes not as a series of still pictures but as a story of dynamic events, with special emphasis on sequence and significance. To aid students' memories, he has interspersed freely functional relations with descriptions of developmental morphology. In dealing with the nervous and circulatory systems, one as coordinator and the other as purveyor, he illustrates the structural plan from a functional point of view. The text also emphasizes how important embryology is to an advancing student occupied with cardiac and pediatric surgery. Of the 651 pages, an extensive bibliography runs to 39 pages of small print and an index to 26.
Dr. David Seegal '21, who in New York used to be Director of Research Service at Goldwater Memorial Hospital, Attending Physician at Presbyterian Hospital, Professor of Medicine at Columbia, and Con- sultant in Epidemic Diseases for the U.S. Secretary of War, is now devoting himself to poetry and specializing in Haiku. The Annual Book Number of the Journal of theAmerican Medical Association has published seven of his poems. One is entitled "Before the Fall": Frog on lily pad croaks lordly omnipotence ripple upsets throne The Pharos has printed four poems, illustrated by cartoons drawn by Dr. Ernest Craige, Professor of Medicine at Chapel Hill. American Haiku has selected several more. Little Brown has excerpted 23 quotations from Dr. Seegal's writings for its volume Familiar Medical Quotations. Earlier Seegal productions are a chapter on hospital internships and residences in Trendsin Medical Education, a chapter on allergies in Agents of Disease and Host Resistance, and "Methuselah: Myth or Promise" in TheFrontiers of Medicine. Before retirement Dr. Seegal was co-editor of the Journal ofChronic Diseases.
With an index of nearly 600 names and another index of nearly 1000 subjects in a volume running double column to 630 pages, Selected Studies in Marriage arid theFamily by Robert F. Winch and Louis Wolf Goodman '64 is a formidable volume. In it one may find comment about mate selection among the Hottentots, premarital pregnancies among Negroes, mother-daughter ties among Jews, family planning among Pomo Indians, the use of contraceptives among Roman Catholics, the role of aged persons among Chinese and Eskimos, and illegitimacy in Caribbean countries. The main objective in this volume is to present the most comprehensive statement of the sociology of marriage and the family and then to give coherence to the sets of readings by organizing and introducing them. A second goal is to make the analyses preponderantly general (that is, culture free) but also to present information about the family in the United States. This third edition of Selected Studies in Marriage andthe Family, which appears 15 years after the first, presents 62 articles of which 42 are new. Robert O. Blood Jr. '42 is the author of a new essay, "Impact of Urbanization on American Family Structure and Functioning."
