Briefly Noted
Recollections of the Grand Tour, the subtitle, sounds like an eighteenth-century memoir by a gilded English aristocrat, his pockets filled with guineas to buy statues and paintings for his London town house and his country estate. But Casablanca to theNeckar and the dates, 1942 to 1945, suggest those years redolent of blood rather than oil paint; World War II is indeed the subject. The author, Russell B. Capelle '36, "not particularly inclined towards things military" (though since 1954 he has been wearing a uniform as a member of the Norwich University faculty), has attempted to record only the "sunny hours," primarily for his wife Violet, who, when separated from him during the war, bore him a son. The 42-page memoir, published by the Leahy Press of Montpelier, Vt., reflects the impressions and experiences of a young citizen-soldier and officer in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, Southern France, and Germany. After he had survived the bitter days of Anzio and Southern France on D Day, he was badly wounded by mortar fragments on the Neckar. Mr. Capelle's Dartmouth reading stands him in good stead. He quotes the Bible, Coleridge, Robert W. Service, Oscar Wilde, MacLeish, Masefield, Dante, Villon, Shakespeare, and Chaucer.
The high reputation Dartmouth geologists enjoy is again shown in Studies of AppalachianGeology: Northern and Maritime, edited by James B. Thompson Jr. '42 of Harvard University and by three men of the U. S. Geological Survey, E-An Zen, Walter S. White, and Jarvis B. Hadley. Professor Thompson is co-author of "Paleozoic Regional Metamorphism in New England and Adjacent Areas" and with Peter Robinson '54 and two others of "Nappes and Gneiss in West-Central New England." John L. Rosenfeld '42 has contributed "Garnet Rotations Due to the Major Paleozoic Deformations in Southeast Vermont." "Stratigraphy of the Merrimack Synclinorium in West-Central Maine" is by P. H. Osberg '46 and two others. John C. Green '53 is co-author of "The Boundary Mountains Anticlinorium in Northern New Hampshire and Northwestern Maine." "Isotope Geochronology of the Northern Appalachians" is by Prof. John B. Lyons, Dartmouth College. Lincoln H. Page '31 has added "Devonian Plutonic Rocks in New England."
Farewell Old Mount Washington by Ed- ward H. Blackstone '12 is the story of the steamboat era on Lake Winnipesaukee from 1833 with the launching of the Belknap, 96 feet long, to the burning of the Mt. Washington, worth $100,000, in 1939, and her replacements the Chateaugay and the Mt.Washington II. The book is rich in rare photographs, more than 100, some of them full page, of steamboats, captains and officers, wharves, advertisements and time tables, sketches, maps and blueprints. These were the happy days when for $1 you could buy 65 miles of transportation about the lake on the Mt. Washington (50 cents for children) with views, luncheons, refreshments, music, and dancing to ensure a full day of entertainment. The book of 135 pages, published by the Steamship Historical Society of America, sells for $6 and may be obtained from Mr. Blackstone, Long Island, Center Harbor, N. H.
J. H.
