Books
Browne, Richard J Purcell, Jerome G Kerwin, George Dangerfield, John Gilland Brunini, Gerald B Phela
BOOKS After Lexington The War of Independence: American Phasej by Claude H. Van Tyne. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Company. $5.00. PROFESSOR VAN TYNE of the University of Michigan, a recognized...
...They form valuable additions to the literature of modern internationalism...
...And all because the public which needed a drench has been served with a diet...
...Charles W. Wood, the author, tell what his book, The Passing of Normalcy, is all about: "It is a book about human life in America and what the modern business developments are doing to it...
...like the Rothstein case its murder is over a card table and the only witnesses, gamblers, refuse to talk...
...For the quarrel is not with the talkie or the radio but with public inability to behold the universe of harmony with earnest intelligence...
...Wood should not proceed forthwith to give us a book on Why God Loves Chain Stores...
...Somehow the habiliments do not become him...
...the Some One Who was glad that tears were shed when vile sinners went to confession even if they were shed on the wrong side of the screen...
...Some of his books one remembers with disappointment, others with distaste, and only one with pleasure-Lars Porsena, a literary cul-de-sac...
...Seabury, later an Episcopalian bishop, observed, "If I must be unslaved let it be by a king at least and not by a parcel of upstart, lawless committee men...
...3.00...
...PROFESSOR VAN TYNE of the University of Michigan, a recognized authority on the American Revolution and the author of acceptable volumes on the loyalists and on the causes of the Revolution, offers in The War of Independence a restudy of the period from Lexington to the coming of the French based upon recent monographs, E. C. Burnett's Letters of the Members of the Continental Congress, the English and French archives, the Library of Congress transcripts, and especially the Lord Germain and Sir Henry Clinton papers in the William L. Clements Library at Ann Arbor...
...This a Delaware Tory learned when forced to recant his observation that he would "as lief be under a tyrannical king as a tyrannical commonwealth, especially if the d-d Presbyterians had the rule of it...
...Inarticulate as the brutally treated poor of England were, their failure to respond made necessary the purchase of mercenaries and the outrageous men-snatching of "crimping gangs" in British ports to stimulate "enlistments" in the navy...
...How complex are its moods may perhaps be guessed from the following excerpt of four lines: We murmured with the wandering Israelite, This crown would rob us of the world's delight...
...A Sturdy Commodore Commodore David Porter: 1780-1843, by Archibald Douglas Turnbull...
...But the differences between Porter on sea and Porter on land are unhappily the differences between Mr...
...Even where the subject-matter is abstruse, the author writes entertainingly, keeping up his reader's interest by excursions into literature, art and music...
...Gerald B. Phelan...
...in fact, this entrancing new story of hers conies close to being an event...
...2.00...
...The story of Porter and the Essex in the Pacific makes brave, glamorous reading...
...Ameria Looks Abroad, by Paul M. Mazur...
...Of course he knew he was not really saying it...
...The American Peace Crusade: 1815-1860, by Earle Eugene Curti...
...Some of the chapter headings have a forbidding aspect...
...Bumping his head upon the hard ground he rhapsodizes, "that business, when it is operated upon the principle of service, constitutes just about the highest life there is...
...The writer bluntly asserts that "the summum bonum of self-conscious beings . . . consists in the cultivation of personal humanity through personal relations...
...Cast in a different environment Porter would have made an excellent and resourceful pirate...
...But, as Carlyle to Ruskin, one may be dogmatic and right where another is dogmatic and wrong...
...Ethicians and economists as well as philosophers receive their respective quota of criticism...
...The story swings from the rafters of vicarious newspaper life with its assignments to St...
...yet despite unemployment, enlistments were slow...
...But the book is not a compilation of technical studies in philosophy...
...It is, to the present reviewer's harassed mind, the only treatise on music which does not assume infinite comprehension on the part of the reader...
...The tone is admirable...
...In the second volume no doubt diplomatic relations will be stressed as well as the direct and indirect European aid which made it possible for an American minority to win the Revolution...
...Chain Stores and Ideals The Passing of Normalcy, by Charles W. Wood...
...This book divides itself naturally into three parts: prewar, war, and post-war...
...New York: The Century Company...
...This poetry is counterpoint rather than melodic line...
...New York: Henry Holt and Company...
...But there are indications in this volume which suggest that Professor Warner Fite might have been a philosopher had he not chosen to be a journalist...
...Dogma and Doubt The Living Mind, by Warner Fite...
...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...
...The Night Club Mystery, by Elizabeth Jordan...
...His history was colored with the elements of that struggle, and posterity, although it must admit he had right with him, could wish that he had been more submissive in order to accomplish greater good...
...New York: The Viking Press...
...So is the bilious blonde, "Puff...
...But there-one is so anxious to talk about the little Shepherd as to neglect mention of the other interesting persons in the story and the excellent complication of the narrative, which is almost a plot...
...Another generation of Americans may actually boast of descent from immigrant ships...
...Graves: there is a personal order in all his evasions, departures, irrelevancies: they are the measure of how dull the book would have been had it been written by anyone else...
...Instead he became one of piracy's greatest enemies as he was the enemy of any that sought to interfere with the shipping of his country...
...But if one looks more closely, both a personality and a method of unusual virility are revealed...
...Edythe Helen Browne...
...Parkhurst answers, correctly and beneficently we believe, that it can explain the structure upon which the great composer's tapestry of sound is based...
...Archibald Douglas Turnbull is no blind hero worshiper despite the fact that his sympathies are always with the Commodore...
...Certainly bigotry hurt the American cause in Quebec, and it took Washington to end Guy Fawkes's celebrations by the very men who now wanted to blow up James's anointed successor...
...The one exception is an introductory essay on Consciousness-What Is It...
...Wood finds that, "we must depend upon it [the new industrial life] also for our new spiritual life...
...A CHARACTER novel by Enid Dinnis is at least an incident in Catholic literature...
...He sat down one evening, thought the matter over, and decided that life was different than it used to be...
...Wherever fighting history was being made there Commodore David Porter was in the van and his achievements, based on a fundamental love of the flag, transcended the victories of war with the more permanent and happy diffusion of peace and progress...
...3.00...
...Corrupt officers resigned when detected in returning false payrolls, and the returns from confiscated loyalist estates were not large...
...Luckily Washington was made commander-in-chief, as politicians like Hancock were set aside...
...And his honesty, which has been called "sensational" but is merely honest, compels him to say what he thinks of quite a lot of people...
...The poor were suspicious of the war...
...That is, perhaps, the highest ideal a humanist may hold up to humanity...
...Accustomed to command and to act effectively and immediately in exigencies, he had only contempt for bureaucracy...
...It is also a book about art and culture and patriotism and sex and sin...
...Turnbull when describing a naval hero and a citizen of the United States...
...Presbyterian-Puritans, like the Irish and many Whigs, sympathized with the rebels...
...In consequence one side-it is true, the historically more important side-of Porter's character is emphasized and the other thrust into obscurity...
...It is neither apologia nor entertainment nor "foot-note to history": it is a catharsis...
...Professor Fite takes up his position on the ground of a humanistic theory of life supported by an appeal to the everyday, common-sense opinions of his fellow-men...
...Yet anyone who looks forward to a future with fewer international misunderstandings and a growth of toleration must welcome candid history which replaces lessons in nationalism and the divine right of the state...
...An up-to-date reader of this type of literature may find one or two of the essays a wee bit stale and musty...
...Wood, expert, has left the stage, presently to return wearing a fireman's helmet, a coat of mail and a hoop skirt...
...And thus the book continues with a good interpretation of the failure of the Howes, the slow growth of the spirit of independence, the self-sacrifice of the continentals, the valor of the Presbyterian Irish, not so long from the holds of flax ships returning from Derry or Newry, a commonplace account of Burgoyne's campaign, of the Congress and committees of correspondence, and some account of our relations with France leading up to the alliance...
...This impartiality is one of the finest qualities of the book...
...On the other hand the dignity of the flag of the United States was protected by Porter's "interpretation" of departmental orders...
...Parkhurst, in his enthusiasm, may stress the importance of musical theory somewhat unduly, he has striven valiantly to combat the heresy that melody is nothing more than a source of ear pleasure...
...from which the reader learns, inter alia, that there runs through the subsequent chapters "a rather definite trend of motive or convergence upon one all-comprehensive question...
...The first part might be read together with Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, after which one need not bother very much about English school literature...
...and while the Patriots fought well, eye-witnesses saw parties of Yankees scurrying to the rear...
...All but one of them first saw the light beween the years 1908 and 1918, in one or another of a half-dozen American periodicals...
...Characterization is Miss Brush's star virtue...
...Act of Faith The Shepherd of Weepingwold, by Enid Dinnis...
...Professor Fite deals with weighty matters but his touch is light...
...but the extreme realism with which they treat their subject, tends, as their public grows more general, to turn that subject into the old abstraction of human suffering and heroism, which Mas been variously treated from Scamander to Sedan...
...It is only surpassed by the excellence of the descriptions of marine engagements and adventure...
...When Ann argues that each should have "dates" as safety-valves against boredom, the story takes its first curve of plot...
...There follow cheers for the business man, more cheers for his methods, and most cheers for the civilization which the business man has brought to us...
...It is the problem of the preservation of human dignity, through a recognition of mind and conscious life, against the inroads of materialistically minded scientists who would make of man a mechanical robot after the likeness of Judson Herrick's human automaton...
...Toby becomes juicy with sentiment on a "date" with a young siren, "Puff" Randolph, also too disposed toward the flask...
...It is a book about the reader and the reader's children and about what make them get that way...
...And surely, without knowing rather intimately that "chastely cold Lady Faith," Brother Kit could never have espoused so entirely that warm and vibrant Lady Charity...
...England was indeed divided...
...and merchants feared for their old trade and their uncollected debts...
...Nevertheless, the dominant theme of the book is still actual...
...In England, too, there were war profiteers who founded new families...
...Wood is deadly serious when he talks about business, for to him there is nothing quite so important either here or hereafter...
...We have been given on both sides the opinions and sufferings of private soldiers, sergeants and lieutenants, those overwhelming obscure who are the body of war...
...A Platonic realist shaking his fist at a cigar-store Indian" is a rather picturesque description of Mr...
...New York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith...
...distrust brews in Ann, who confines her "dates" to collegiates in 'coon coats, and she leaves Toby for Hollywood...
...One has, of course, to learn all over again how many oaths, how much rum, weariness, endurance, cowardice and courage go to make the adjective "epic...
...Dialogue is colloquial, breezy, neatly trimmed to the requirements of character...
...If we were a musicians' union we should be tempted to order a thousand copies and distribute them as strategically as possible...
...New York: Farrar and Rinehart, Incorporated...
...3.00...
...3.50...
...The plot, of the intangible fabric of character rather than of action, is sharp with journalistic encounters, and the supplementary characters have the dash and stride of a latest edition...
...His book is a well-written, conscientious exposition of the scale, the principles of musical anatomy and such relatively intricate developments as counterpoint...
...New York: The Century Company...
...3-50...
...In all charity it should be said that the extravagance of these claims is due to the fact that Mr...
...He does not succeed in half-lights...
...After five days' courtship, Toby and Ann are married...
...and "the machine has not been represented to them as holy...
...But our doubting author slips a little surreptitious dogmatism into his discussion of pragmatism and a still bigger dose of it into his essay on Birth Control...
...Sir Evan's spirit is, perhaps, meditative first of all, but he clothes his meditations in images and rhythms which are never tactless and humdrum...
...Thus encouraged, however, Mr...
...A great deal of this is slush...
...With $3,000 in his pockets he went to Marion, Ohio, and found all the necessary information on the influence of business in connection with all the important phases of life...
...We have here a series of articles reprinted in book form...
...But, to a reader who likes gladiators, this book lays itself open to the criticism that its style is rough, sometimes flat and frequently irrelevant...
...This phase of his character is vividly developed by his present biographer...
...Donne and 1930 The City of Canals, by Evan Morgan...
...when she deserts him he suffers collapsing remorse...
...Trade was bad...
...1.25...
...Loyalists and Patriots are described, and the rebel regime is seen as more despotic and powerful than kings' governors ever were...
...Wood seems to believe in deep sincerity, but one may still have great respect for the author as a person who knows business and business trends...
...On the wrapper of this volume its author is described as "a doubter among dogmatists, a cautious Socrates in philosophical circles where the blind seek to lead the blind...
...Advertising as a field for psychological study, experimental research on psycho-physical processes and the whole method and procedure of behaviorism get scant sympathy from this champion of consciousness...
...One More Soldier Goodbye to All That, by Robert Graves...
...Few impartial men, British or American, will object to the interpretation, though Sons of the American Revolution may find portions as distasteful as a modern Tory would a study of the plantation system in Ireland...
...3-50...
...Thus, goodby is frequently a word with which one introduces oneself to oneself...
...Psychoanalysis, he concedes, may be an art (not a fine art nor even a very respectable kind of art to cultivate) but its claim to scientific status is sheer buncombe...
...The central topic...
...One chapter (dealing with his German memories) is entirely beautiful, and is probably doomed to the more intelligent prose anthologies...
...A MERICANS should be grateful for this biography of one of the early builders of our navy...
...Van Tyne shows in illuminating chapters...
...TOBY is a chivalrous gentleman of the press, a sports writer with the germ of the novelist in him...
...also about his church and his religion and his hope for a life beyond...
...Ann is a newspaper woman supplying the daily trickle for a movie column...
...is mind or consciousness...
...Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press...
...This intention, of course, was not to re-create a stench, a pool of blood or a pile of corpses, but a person...
...John Gilland Brunini...
...The book will stand until new material becomes available or a new generation rewrites its own history...
...There has been an honest and natural desire to state exactly what did occur between 1914 and 1918 in terms, not of politics or strategy, but of mud and blood and disaster...
...Here is a book unfailingly conscious of the antithesis between sin and regeneration, between light and darkness...
...On this modern economic problem the book is profitable reading...
...stabilizing the steel industry was a greater service than the institution of public libraries...
...Montgomery thought the troops "exceedingly turbulent, even mutinous . . . the privates all generals...
...The second part, by its contrast with what is commonly considered good war literature, confirms one in certain conclusions about the latter...
...Good attention is given to authenticity of setting and dialogue...
...Wood that there has been little place for either spirit or sanctity in a crushing machine age where greed has ruled and has been flattered with the name of service ? Mr...
...Though Mr...
...Among other things Mr...
...for these ladies are really mother and daughter so long as they must live in this world...
...George N. Shuster...
...Sister M. Eleanore...
...Bertrand Russell fuming against fate...
...They lead the lives of newspaper folk, tearing around town on stories, loaning one another for dancing partners, getting better acquainted at noon breakfasts...
...And better treated, for the ax was not so large...
...Richard J. Purcell...
...His defense of chain-store expansion is a challenge to those who charge that this new merchandising system is undermining all business in the small community...
...When, however, Mr...
...Follows the climax when the trail of romance leads to a satisfying and logical conclusion...
...A measure of disappointment is, therefore, attendant upon one's first reading through a volume which associates varying moods and styles without attaining to immediately impressive originality...
...The Growth of International Thought, by F. Melian Stawell...
...this machine age . . . created the most tender-hearted lot of successful folks in human history...
...Like John Halifax, its hero, Barry Cabot, is sans peur et sans reproche...
...JL HESE books, each very good in its own way, have been referred to editorially in the present issue...
...The hand that wrote so discriminatingly on Eucken, Schiller and Russell had lost some of its cunning when it penned this article for the International Journal of Ethics...
...Wood speaks with certainty and conviction...
...Wood admirably shows the growing dependence of one part of the world upon another-a portion of the book that might be read with profit by America's isolationists...
...Schuyler observed that "the licentiousness of our troops is not easy to be described...
...To assert it, however, is to be dogmatic...
...Should we tell Mr...
...One observes, on the other hand, that the manner is exactly suited to the intention, and that the intention is exactly fulfilled...
...Fashions in philosophy change so rapidly in these days...
...Psychology and psychologists get a rather severe drubbing at our author's hands for attempting to reduce to scientific laws the elusive behavior of animals and men...
...Even at Bunker Hill, there was British pluck...
...To go on a pilgrimage one usually makes elaborate preparations...
...Not that a little healthy dogmatism is out of place in philosophy today when doubt and indifference to logic reap harvests of sterility...
...A readable volume, if not a monumental work bristling with novel viewpoints and facts, has resulted from these laborious researches...
...Putnam was a man of courage but hardly "inspired by God Almighty with a military genius...
...W HAT can a book tell you about music ? Mr...
...action is his metier...
...Wood decided, however, that he would write about this grand mutation in a semi-humorous vein...
...2.00...
...Toby loves Ann...
...Psychologists are not, however, the only offenders...
...The author, that is to say, in order to walk from himself, has first to create the person he wishes to walk away from...
...industry is not explained to them [youth] in spiritual terms...
...Louis: B. Herder Book Company...
...One may entertain doubts about the philanthropy of big business, about its leaders working their lives away in slavery for the benefit of mankind, about the overpowering desire of our great monopolists for increased wage scales for the workers, all of which Mr...
...The author notes that social disease was not unknown...
...INGREDIENTS from the Rothstein murder case, George M. Cohan's Gambling and John Halifax: Gentlemen have been thoroughly mixed to produce The Night Club Mystery...
...New York: B. C. Forbes...
...If loyalists were Jacobites, the Patriot organization had some Jacobin characteristics...
...and, like Gambling, one is not particularly interested in the identity of the murderer but in the successful outcome of Cabot's love affair with Janet Stone...
...So is Shorty, with his wink for show girls...
...Surely, if he had not had great faith, that poor little Brother Kit, wrested from the security of his monastery and, despite the fact that he was not very bright, made into a priest and sent to take care of the very bad sheep of Weepingwold-surely he could never have said his first holy Mass so well...
...The moth balls are knocked off the "ideal of service," and it is lugged out and serenaded as if it had never been packed away among our souvenirs...
...This autobiography is his first good book, and it is a very good one...
...the Some One Who got help in the difficult task of making men do penance for their sins, even if the fasting were done and the discipline were taken by a little priest who had no sins to expiate...
...Socratic caution...
...on that subject Mr...
...New York: The Dial Press...
...They did not see that to boxing, wrestling, fox-hunting, bull-fighting and other forms of Roman holiday, there would now be added a call for gladiators, nor did they foresee the wrapper of one English book which says, "This is better than a hundred German war stories," with the consequent threat of a European war of war books...
...Jerome G. Kerwin...
...2.50...
...About a third of the book is so written, and then Mr...
...Petersburg with the Yanks and Corona knees in the Yankee Stadium...
...Our modern war writers did not foresee that their propaganda, implicit or explicit, would awake this response from the public: "We shall continue to take pleasure in hating war, so long as you allow us to enjoy what makes us hate it...
...Wood finds that, "someone discovered that business is service...
...e.g., The Agent and the Observer, Intellectualism, Eucken's Philosophy of Life, Pragmatism and Truth...
...The book in the main, however, has to do with chain stores...
...Propaganda, which outdid Mr...
...2.00...
...Against the Pavement Young Man of Manhattan, by Katharine Brush...
...That it remains, however, the work of an artist is proved not merely by the poems themselves but also by the introduction, worth reading for its own sake...
...Creel's late bureau, kept the faint-hearted warlike and fearful of reprisals in case of failure...
...Wood and what happened to him when he tried to enlighten the world about religion, the life hereafter, sex and sin...
...Some One else did it for him...
...Hid in the shadow of the Golden Calf Some one amongst us heard the tempter laugh...
...The prestige of pundits does not prevent our author from poking fun at them...
...It is a book about his marriage and what is happening to it, and about his wife and what is happening to her...
...There have been two or three good, almost very good, books...
...big business demands of its leaders, at least, that they first of all be human," and so on...
...Yet as unprepared as America was, England was scarcely more ready to subjugate a people so far removed and dwelling in such an extensive territory, as Dr...
...Wood begins to tell us all about sex, "the churches," God, salvation, modern youth, marriage and birth control we feel that Mr...
...London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Company, Limited...
...The book can therefore be warmly recommended to all who are awakening to the importance of music through the kind instrumentality of the radio and the phonograph...
...6 Shillings...
...For a certain curious abruptness of conception and harmony the reader must be prepared...
...Concerning the raw militia there are the usual notes of criticism from the correspondence of Washington, and his chiefs...
...and one turns to its author's present volume with the eager hope that something like it may have been included...
...but this pilgrimage to mediaeval England requires only one happy-hearted act of faith...
...The Lexington fight is seen in its significance: gross charges of British atrocities, the rise of mob action, the enlistment of the Boston unemployed in the militia, the breaking down of British administration, the advance of new leaders, the destruction of Tory presses, the attack on loyalists, and the quill replaced by the sword...
...It is also a book about Mr...
...Toby and Ann was warmly real...
...Having set out to dwell in Elizabethan company, the companionship of Donne has had its evident effect...
...UP TO now, Robert Graves's work has been more promise than performance...
...Wood forgets himself when he comes to write about his god-modern business...
...George Dangerfield...
...Liquor shakes his self-respect and endangers his job...
...It may readily be, however, that this was the author's intention since Porter, when he was not treading the decks or scourging outlawry, was very much the caged and discontented lion...
...Graves's continuity is not one of events but of Mr...
...He sensed war with England long before 1812 since he himself had been made the victim of English empressement of American seamen, and he understood the necessity of an adequate navy long before the government was ready to do anything toward constructing or acquiring men-of-war...
...But the Patriot organization ruled even in Pennsylvania where the anti-English and hence patriotic Scotch-Irish outbid the Quaker aristocracy for control of the Dutch and hence of the colony...
...THE Eel was, to employ the diction of a hypothetical modern young woman, a "bang-up" poem...
...Graves's catharsis might be this drench, for Goodbye to All That is a very bad war book by modern standards...
...LET Mr...
...but the tenor of every line is modern, in tune with our present spiritual yearning and the attendant divine answer we are given...
...Briefer Mention The Anatomy of Music, by Winthrop Parkhurst...
...the Some One Who likes little childlike persons such as Brother Kit-or rather, according to his new dignity, Sir Christopher...
...A PROFESSOR of philosophy is rarely a philosopher...
Vol. 11 • April 1930 • No. 24
