Dartmouth Authors

Kimball Flaccus '33, A Poet's View. Dorrance & Company, 1984, $10.00, 60 pp. This volume, assembled in the poet's memory by his wife, Alice Pennock Flaccus, and his brother, David Perry Flaccus, brings together some 40 poems uncollected and primarily unpublished at his death. One is a paean to New Hampshire written as the poem of the Class of 1933 and first published in the Alumni Magazine two others are written to Edgar Lee Masters and Thomas Wolfe, and five are youthful works dating from the poet's childhood and adolescence.

Edwin Drechsel '36,The Paquebot Marksof Asia and of Japan's Sea Posts. ChristieRobson Lowe Ltd., 1984, 61 pp. Under Universal Postal Regulations proposed in 1894 but not formalized for another three years, passengers and crew aboard ships on the high seas are allowed, to post mail bearing stamps of the ship's country of origin, at that nation's domestic mail rate. The receiving port, to explain this departure from usual procedures, stamps the word PAQUEBOT or NAVIRE (French for "ship") on these pieces and processes them in the normal way. Tracing the use of these marks from port to port along the world's coasts provides a capsule history of the shipping industry as new ports come into prominence and old ones hold steady or decline in response to the carriers' needs. A lesser-known branch of philately deals with these marks, collecting them and documenting which ports have used them, which may have them gathering dust, and watching as, surprisingly, new marks are created to satisfy international postal demands as ship routings change. Edwin Drechsel has been a passionate collector and cataloguer of PAQUEBOT marks for more than 30 years, and this third volume, supplementing catalogues of Scandanavian and African PAQUEBOT marks, extends the scope of his work from Constantinople, along the Indian Ocean, through the Southeast Asian archipelago, and north along the mainland and Japanese coasts to the Bering Sea a formidable piece of work in a discipline this editor scarcely knew existed.

William F. Stark '50, Along the BlackHaivk Trail. Zimmerman Press, 1984, 213pp.The Black Hawk War of 1832 began with an act of headstrong but benign defiance. Encouraged by the false promise of aid from the Canadian British, the able but volatile Sauk warrior, Black Hawk, led a party of twelve hundred braves, women, and children across the Mississippi to northern Illinois, intending to spend the summer raising corn in the Rock River area. It was land from which the Native Americans had only recently been uprooted, evicted in accordance with provisions of the Treaty of 1804. Clearly, Black Hawk hoped that when the growing season was over, he could establish his band's right to remain in the region, by force if necessary and with British help. Events quickly took on a life of their own, however, as a variety of provocations and misadventures between Black Hawk's followers and the disorganized U.S. militia precipitated a three-month war that resisted all opportunities for peaceful settlement.

There are few heroes here. To Black Hawk's credit, he attempted to negotiate a peaceful retreat both before and during the war; once hostilities started, however, he could not rein in his desire for vengeance. On the U.S. side, lackadaisical command served to draw out what might have been a much shorter engagement, and the drive for ultimate victory only took place when the starving Indians were in full retreat towards a tragic massacre on the banks of the Mississippi. The provocations and reactions, just and unjust, deliberate and accidental, could serve as precis of the entire Indian Wars, and are here chronicled in straightforward manner by William Stark '50, and copiously illustrated with photographs by Don Davenport of the battlefields, markers, and memorials that today delineate the path of Black Hawk's ill-fated expedition.

Alden Guild '52, Stock Purchase Agreements and the Close Corporation Professional Partnership Purchase Plans BusinessPartnership Purchase Agreements. NationalLife Insurance Company, 1984, 301 pp. inthree, volumes. In 1960, National Life Insurance Company of Montpelier, Vt. commissioned Alden Guild of its legal department to revise and enlarge a work on life insurance and business purchase agreements originally assembled by George B. Young and revised by Deane C. Davis. The project grew to encompass three volumes, which here appear in their fourth edition and seventh printing. As the prefaces to all three clearly state, these are not meant to be sources of legal advice, only introductory texts for the businessman and non-business lawyers on the theory and advantages behind the three types of purchase agreements covered. The books are clearly written; the theories easily apprehensible and illustrated with entertaining case studies.

Robert L. Bloomfield '73 and CarolynF. Pedley, Mnemonics, Rhetorics, and Poetics for Medics, Volume 11. Harbinger Medical Press, 1984, 167 pp. Mnemonic devices rhymes and riddles, anagrams and acronyms that aid in the recall of information crop up at nearly every level of academic and professional life. Schoolchildren remember Every Good Boy Does Fine to identify the lines of the musical staff, astrophysicists learn Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Now Sweetheart to remember star classifications, and various versions of the "righthand rule" aid in everything from turning a screw in the right direction, to remembering torques, to dealing with subatomic particles. The medical profession, where the need for large quantities of instantly accessible information is great and the penalties for inaccurate diagnosis can be severe, is rife with thent, and Dr. Bloomfield and his colleagues have taken to collecting them, and inventing new ones where needed. This is the second volume published for the edification of beleaguered cohorts. Its contents range from a complicated device involving pies and German shepherds for remembering the pathways of entry of amino acids into the Krebs Cycle, to a simple acronym T-I-C-K F-E-V-E-R delineating the symptoms of Rocky Mountain spotted fever (spread by ticks). Others range from a variety of A-B-Cs, to the symptoms of amphetamine intoxication (spelling out S-P-E-E-D). Available only from the publisher (Box 17201, Winston-Salem, NC 27116).

David Smith, Orwell for Beginners. AWriters and Readers Documentary ComicBook. Illustrated by Michael Mosher '77Distributed by W. W. Norton and Company,1984, $4.95, 192 pp. To call this series a McLuhanesque set of the Cliff notes sells it short, for the text is a serious, highschool level biographical analysis of George Orwell and his writings. The visual presentation, however, is geared to students who, the publisher presumes, have a video-conditioned attention span and may not have yet graduated from picture books. The imaginative graphics, which range from cartoon-like illustrations to photo collage, to at least one image from Orozco's Dartmouth frescoes, are by Michael Mosher '77, whose feel for the project is certainly what the editor must have desired. And if the series is as successful among educators as the dust jacket claims, one can't fault his complicity.

Professor William C. Scott, Musical Design in Aeschylean Theater. University Pressof New England, 1984. 228 pp., $20.00. "Our lack of knowledge about the chorus [in Greek drama] seems so nearly total that it is difficult not to resign ourselves simply to reading Greek plays silently and in solitude." So saying, Professor Scott of Dartmouth's classics department launches into a scholarly (and handsomely printed) study of the "words, shapes, structures, and placement of choral songs in Aeschylean drama." His analysis is designed to lead other scholars and directors toward new strategies in dealing with the problem of staging classical drama in ways that will relate to modern audiences while retaining both the emotional power and the essential Greekness of the original. He focuses on The Oresteia, mirroring the prevailing sentiment that the works of Aeschylus represented the quantum leap in the evolution of Greek tragedy that paved the way for the later works of Euripides and Sophocles. Scott's metrical and thematic analysis (treating words and strophes in the musical sense) of the choral odes in these works makes possible an educated guess at the sound and emotional effect of musical settings long lost to us and unheard for two millenia.