Books

...Even with this limitation, however, the characters of Xenophon, Socrates, Clearchus and a few others are successfully brought to life...

...Particularly this is visible in the treatment of Russian history...

...The Englishman was determined to have the Indians' land, by hook or by crook...

...The Standard American Encyclopedia gives him a miserly seven lines, and even Parkman does not do him justice...

...In 1738 William, then twenty-three years old, left the genteel Johnson household forever and came to America to adventure under the patronage of his uncle, Peter Warren, a British sea-dog of New York who was rapidly enriching himself by privateering against French and Spanish vessels...

...Not to mention such a lapsus calami as the statement that Liibeck was founded by Russians, there is the assertion that serfdom was introduced in Russia in the middle of the seventeenth century, when it is a known fact that it was instituted by Boris Godunov in the last quarter of the sixteenth century...

...It is a fitting conclusion to the most complete, most readable story of polar exploration...

...In them the reader's mental nostrils will detect the elusive incense of Oriental bazaars...

...He was a great and lovable man, but he was also a timid, irritable, naive man, seldom well and always threatened with a curious feeling of discomfort when out of his element...

...As New York becomes more congested— or as the congestion becomes more expensive to obviate—business will be diverted to other centres where land, docks and streets are not so intensively used...

...Soon William was independent, prospering thriftily, laying the foundation of one of the greatest land fortunes in pre-Revolutionary America...

...Professor Gillespie's book is entertaining reading for a scholar, but does not, to my mind, fulfil the obligation and duty of a textbook, because it is overburdened by quite unnecessary details in the treatment of some phases of modern European history and gives in other instances a very summary and, I must add, not always an accurate presentation...

...Nevertheless this volume of Mrs...

...This was, as Mr...

...The Worst Journey in the World is a complete account of the ill-fortuned Scott Antarctic Expedition of 1910-13, written by an assistant member of the scientific staff who was at all times in close touch with events...

...We beg to differ...

...All five members of the polar party perished on the return journey...

...though more recent students will be found to agree with Francis W. Halsey, who says, speaking of the English struggle with the French in America, "Most historians now believe that the English alliance with the Indians, as fostered by Sir William Johnson, really turned the scale in English favor...

...New York: Richard R. Smith, Incorporated...

...Having spent his youth in the venerable study of philosophy, Xenophon devoted his old age to the lively and youthful pursuit of the chase...

...Regional self-sufficiency is another factor that subjects metropolitan fancies to a heavy discount...

...The story is interesting enough, and well enough told, to inspire the average youth with a desire to read more of the adventures of Xenophon...

...Indeed, the whole story of his later years hinges on this conviction...

...For the saga of Ella from the first sentimental paragraphs which phrase her childhood, to the last grave pages which pronounce on her maturity, is by turns a foolish, exasperating book, and a narrative made curiously moving by the intensiveness of its author's greed for lovely things...

...Our lives had been taken away and given back to us," is the simple entry in Garrard's diary...

...For three days they lay in their icy sleeping bags, covered by drifts, in a temperature of seventy degrees below zero, without food, but with only the thought that return was impossible without the tent...

...8...

...For this reason he must sometimes sacrifice details for a clear and simple treatment of facts...

...The Half-Breed, by M. Constantin-Weyer...

...Undermined Poetics Ella, by Elisabeth Wilkins Thomas...

...Garrard was a member of the search party which found their bodies—a discovery which he relates with simple vividness...

...Then he leaped dramatically out of the trader's role into a colonelcy in the King's militia, in which part he enrolled the Iroquois on the King's side and secured the Mohawk valley against French invasion in King George's War...

...For in this instance Viking has stooped to publish...

...What then was his surprise, after going to tea at an Englishwoman's home, to learn that a certain strange feminine guest there had been the astute Miss Gilder who would not be denied her interview...

...THIS is, the writer of the jacket copy remarks, "quite a different figure from the man with whom generations of students stumbled from protasis to apodosis through countless weary parasangs...

...New York: Charles Scribner's Sons...

...New York: The Dial Press...

...Dooley said of the Republican tariff reductions, "they became clear only after a long draw on a ball of hop," applies to the fanciful future sketched in this work as well...

...Towns like Roanoke and Des Moines have risen from a rural to an industrial status, supplying their territories with manufactures, credit and brokerage services...

...Richard E. Day has brought together all the known material on Johnson, giving us a vivid portrait of the man himself which is not likely to be surpassed...

...The author explains in a foreword that the book is intended for the general reader, and it is excellent for that, but it might be more particularly recommended for those who are beginning, or are about to begin, the study of the Anabasis...

...Toward the Pole The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard...

...back of them his mental eyes will catch glimpses of the mask-faced celestials who have dropped their masks long enough to repeat these charming, haunting tales which Mr...

...The Super City Mastering a Metropolis, by R. L. Duffus...

...Philosophically speaking, Hardy's last years confirmed his disposition to live as an agnostic, harassed both by the problem of evil and the reputed findings of science...

...This is the Xenophon who shows himself clearly in every page of his writings, though of course elementary students may lose much of his flavor through the difficulties of translation...

...But the saddest neglect is the omission of the capital work on Russian history by the greatest of Russian historians, Kluchevsky, whose History of Russia exists in an English translation...

...That is Johnson's essential significance...

...the heat of a bird's wing slurring rime from heavy boughs...

...the sound, shrill and sharp, of girl's voices through frosty air...

...AMONG the numerous contributions of polar exploration to the literature of travel and adventure are many books which lack literary merit, but none which present a dull or uninteresting tale...

...A little later Hardy was introduced, in connection with the same book, to the then unsual methods of American newspaperdom...

...Then the blizzard cleared, and by light "that just made the darkness visible" they found the tent below an icy slope a half-mile away...

...They were that close to death almost constantly during the six awful weeks of that trip...

...Jacks, but is of a piece with his character as here portrayed...

...The present collection includes four batches of letters written between 1866 and 1880...

...George K. McCabe...

...yet neither in blood nor essential characteristics was he Gaelic...

...No paucity of literary form can rob the story of a man's fight for life of its intrinsic gripping interest...

...As a result Johnson became the second English baronet in America, while other British generals were procrastinating and failing...

...and when later the Pontiac uprising threatened the whole frontier, it was Johnson who made peace...

...JL/ OVERS of Asiatic stories and sketches, particularly Chinese stories, are due for a treat in Winds of Gobi...

...These factors will not operate to detract from the present importance of New York but will surely slow up the rate of growth...

...The plain fact was that the Indians had more to gain from French mastery of America than from English...

...Johnson, now a major-general, directed the campaign against Crown Point which, though not totally successful, resulted in the defeat of the brilliant Dieskau...

...New York: The Macaulay Company...

...Eventually the persistent tide of English farmers would have rolled over both French and Indians anyway, but without Johnson the resistance would have been longer and bloodier...

...Jude had been most violently denounced in the New York World by Jeanette L. Gilder, who later requested an interview...

...It is a surprising, though a slight, loss to find almost no conversation in so lively a narrative...

...New York: Harper and Brothers...

...Here is the bold adventurer, the able general and leader of men, who, when he saw an ostrich for the first time, was disappointed at not beng able to catch it...

...But they were colorful events, surely...

...Doubtless the great emphasis laid on the importance of Spain in the sixteenth century and on that of the Netherlands in the first part of the seventeenth is of major importance to any treatment of that period and it gives a clear-cut picture of the development, rise and fall of these maritime and colonial powers...

...And Mr...

...Here one must admit that with all the fairness that the author brings in his treatment of the great religious conflict, he still stresses much more the Protestant point of view...

...Yet he was called on to perpetuate the victory by holding a mighty pow-wow of the Iroquois and Ottawa confederacies at Detroit the next year, to cement the British-Indian friendship...

...The book is an invaluable guide to Hardy's philosophical and literary opinions...

...So great was his influence with them that even when British fortunes were at lowest ebb and it was patent to the Indians that their advantage lay with the French, Johnson was yet able to hold them at least neutral...

...But of course the weight of the book is in the chapters dealing with the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation and the religious wars...

...Secondly, he overshadows the New York and Pennsylvania frontier of that period, and in examining his records we are able to reconstruct most of the significant trends of that time...

...Duffus admits the charge of his being visionary, the author has made a succinct analysis of the monumental material amassed by the New York Plan Commission and, even if we cannot follow him to see Bridgeport a new East Side, his book presents an attractive picture of an ideal Gotham...

...The author assumes that New York including the whole metropolitan area will grow at the same rate during the next 100 years as in the last century...

...WHAT Mr...

...and his meditations on the art and the public reception of verse produced the most interesting passages in his diary...

...In spite of these drawbacks, and Mr...

...To conclude, one must mention the attractive type and the sober, dignified general appearance of the book...

...Hardy's biography reveals, as did its predecessor, the great amount of Christian feeling not sloughed off by a man who in his youth had thought of taking orders and who, to the end, loved hymns, goodness and even the clergy...

...No review can do justice to this thorough picture of frontier America...

...The short, late glitter of winter sun on snow...

...Another Summary A History of Europe (1500-1815), by James Edward Gillespie...

...Garrard's book immediately assumes a front position in the literature of polar exploration...

...and, participating in Amherst's three-ply campaign against Montreal in 1760, Johnson was in at the death of New France...

...The trip had to be made on foot in the freezing blackness of the Antarctic winter...

...And that is why Mr...

...His uncle financed William in an Indian trading venture up in the Mohawk valley beyond Albany...

...Elation on the part of hacks is common enough, and an attractive jacket is an easy thing to come by, but one blinks the eye and gnaws the lip at the colophon...

...One plunges immediately into the controversy which grew up round Jude the Obscure—a debate every aspect of which is still profoundly interesting...

...In it Hardy resents being accused of believing that "the Power behind the universe is malign," and asserts that "the said Cause is neither moral nor immoral, but unmoral"—a conclusion which aligns him with the great German pessimists but which, as he concedes, does not even begin to make him a thinker...

...M. Constantin-Weyer has warped it into a tale of greasy passion and nasty insinuation in which he draws the half-breeds and clergy as treacherous fools, the English as cruel conquerors...

...New York: The Viking Press...

...Wilson and Lieutenant Oates, both of whom later died with Scott on the return from the Pole...

...Harry McGuire...

...Johnson was adopted by the Mohawks, and soon his reputation as an Indian pacifier spread to England...

...Xenophon's wonder at the river Marsyas, flowing from the skin of a musician flayed by Apollo, is not mentioned by Mr...

...The most interesting testimony bearing on this aspect of his life and mind is the correspondence exchanged with Alfred Noyes...

...Leonid I. Strakhovsky...

...Not only should such a book be historically accurate, but it must not omit anything of importance to the true presentation of the past...

...Hyde has succeeded in telling his stories as the Chinese themselves tell their tales...

...These things go to lift the novel out of the slough of a middle class...

...The paternal branch of his family moved from England to Ireland in the bloody occupation of Cromwell...

...For instance, there is no mention of Luther's marriage which is an important moral factor and there is not a word said about Luther's connivance in the polygamous marriage of Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, which is one of the major indications that if the Reformation was started on a religious ground it soon turned out to be of a much more political nature...

...5.00...

...It becomes obvious that Mr...

...William L. Engels...

...translated by Elizabeth Hill and Doris Mudie...

...Beyond any praise are the numerous maps executed by the famous German cartographer, F. A. Brockhaus, of Leipzig...

...The most laudable part of Professor Gillespie's work is the thorough treatment of the expansion of European life and a survey of the colonial development including a chapter on the American Revolution, which is an essential part of European history, a fact that so many historians seem to forget...

...Many of them were written at German health resorts, where the poor novelist shivered, detested the food, looked at the doctors with dark suspicion and despised the other patients...

...2.00...

...through them, the reader's mental ears will be intrigued and fascinated by the drollery of Chinese transpositions that stamps this work with the seal of authenticity...

...and as this broke up came news of Braddock's defeat and the beginning of the last act of the French and English struggle...

...Hyde has trapped and committed to paper...

...11 ERE, in the story of Louis Riel, who led a rebellion of half-breeds against the Canadian government in Manitoba, is splendid material for a heroic novel...

...To this Hardy replied negatively but magnanimously...

...Briefer Mention The Letters of Dostoievsky to His Wife...

...Johnson, the Indian's friend, seems to have believed sincerely that it was to the best interests of his Iroquois wards that they keep the "covenant chain" with the British...

...Scott eventually reached the Pole with four companions, only to find that Amundsen had beaten him by a month...

...But, on the other hand, the description of lesser European powers is very often not adequate...

...The ports of New Orleans, Baltimore, Newark, Boston and drowsy Philadelphia have lately bestirred themselves to attract with their cheaper handling charges import and export freight...

...Yet not too low—the glory has not departed...

...5.00...

...but awkward and uninspiring characters, petty issues and a general inertia of plot, serve to undermine Elisabeth Thomas's poetics...

...Possibly this side of his personality has as much to do with Hardy's greatness as any other...

...First he became a business success...

...Kenton Kilmer...

...Too many of the other white pioneers swindled the Indians ruthlessly...

...The basis of his success was that, unlike most traders, by fair play and by friendliness he earned the lasting confidence of the Mohawk tribes, and thereby of the Six Nations (Iroquois...

...All this jumble, historically without basis, is told in a turgid style which prevents The Half-Breed from being even a good adventure story...

...Because he died two years before the Declaration of Independence (which is too often roughly thought of as the beginning of American history) and because his son and other heirs fought on the side of the king and retired to Canada when their lands were confiscated, the significance of Johnson's work has been slurred over by American historians...

...To anyone who, like the present reviewer, is incapable of believing that The Dynasts is great dramatic poetry, the inside story of Mr...

...2.00...

...Then too the references for further reading on Russia contain the works of such unreliable historians as Alfred Rambaud, who still seems to enjoy high reputation notwithstanding the fact that he wrote Russian history without knowing the Russian language, and of that entertaining and prolific writer of "alcove" histories of Russia, Waliszevski, comparable only as "historian" to Emil Ludwig...

...It was torn from above their heads in the midst of a fierce blizzard and whipped away into the night...

...3.00...

...From the moment he was appointed by the crown sole superintendent of the Six Nations and their allies he became the keystone of British success against the French in America...

...Hardy's Last Years The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, by Florence Emily Hardy...

...but the Frenchman wanted only freedom to trade with, and, in a mild degree, to govern, the Indian...

...SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON is referred to in this splendid history as an "Irish immigrant...

...The attacks launched against this novel were deeply resented by the author who even wrote privately to a friend: "Did I tell you I feared I should seem too High-Churchy at the end of the book where Sue recants ? You can imagine my surprise at some of the reviews...

...Here is the youthful zest of the hero-worshiper who sat at the feet of Socrates, and took more compendious, and in many ways more interesting, notes than even Plato...

...It is all very foresighted and large visioned to talk of triple-decked streets, more tunnels, bridges, abundant subways and a second Grand Central at Mott Haven, but meanwhile the city is so hard put to it to finance present requirements that all bridges and tunnels must be subject to tolls and it is doubtful if the five-cent fare will support the Eighth Avenue subway...

...T ETTING the records speak for themselves is an art, and L' Mrs...

...Pounds' collaboration with Dr...

...William Johnson, while opening a way for the whites, stood all his days for fair play in establishing white rule for compensation, for proper surveys, for the sanctity of treaties, for the education of Indians as opposed to their extirpation...

...MANY diaries, letters and memoirs have now laid bare the course of poor Dostoievsky's private life that one confronts new sources of information with half a conviction that they will prove ineffectual...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...Leo Kennedy...

...TO THE loud huzzas of some low reviewing folk, elegantly bound, and honorably sponsored by the Viking colophon, a book by a new author emerges...

...As Pound says, "the English sought colonization and security for family life while the French would have been content with a redskin America on a furskin economy...

...Hardy has striven to practise it with restraint and dignity...

...New York: Brewer and Warren...

...They are interesting chiefly for their implied comment on Dostoievsky as a father and a husband, both of which offices he held with affectionate distinction...

...6.00...

...Hardy's own feelings is none the less interesting, in spite of its evident bias...

...Paul Crowley...

...As Pound observes, "there are decent as well as indecent ways of compassing the inevitable...

...It will be interesting to await her second book...

...How ironical...

...2.50...

...Furthermore, the existence of the familiar law of diminishing returns is forgotten...

...First, "our great father Sir William Johnson" was a personality of some color for those times, as one may judge upon hearing that he did not scruple to procure Indian "wives" as mistresses of his estate...

...When treated by one with a native gift for story-telling, a flair for fine description, a nose keen to scent the pithy word or phrase, an aversion to the studied or laborious, then a story of men battling against death must take high rank in a literature...

...And lastly, the volume possesses the happiest of modern styles—enough imagination and "perhapses" to make even commonplace details absorbing, yet withal the rare historian's virtue of following the truth...

...4.25...

...If we remember that Johnson's benevolent but almost feudal influence over tribes of Indians as far west as Detroit was his real contribution to the making of America, the actual events in which he participated are seen as only brief visible signs of his vast power...

...He looked beneath their minor faults . . . into their major virtues, courage and fidelity...

...THE writing of a textbook for history students is perhaps the hardest task that a historian may undertake, especially when it concerns European history...

...The most terrifying ordeal through which they lived occurred on a winter journey—the "worst journey" of the title—a hunt for Emperor penguin eggs undertaken purely in the interest of science by Garrard and two companions, Dr...

...This is visible more in the omissions than in the stated facts...

...The second volume of her biography touches upon so many controversial matters, however, that the admirable tone of its predecessor is somewhat impaired...

...The story of the polar journey is well known...

...This fallacy has brought many realtors' subdivision companies into the bankruptcy court in all parts of the country...

...The notes by the original Russian editors are retained in the present English edition, and there is a fine introduction by Prince Mirsky...

...Friend of Socrates Xenophon, Soldier of Fortune, by Leo V. Jacks...

...In 1754 he was a delegate to the Albany Congress...

...Hardy thought of himself as being primarily a poet, and was keenly disappointed with dissenting critics...

...In the end he attempts a critical analysis of the tragedy, an impersonal criticism especially valuable because it was written by one close to the disaster, not hastily, but after the mature deliberation of more than ten years...

...Then too, a history textbook writer undertakes a much greater responsibility by the mere fact that his production will not be limited to history scholars, but to young men and women whose minds will be formed by such presentation of history as is given them...

...They reached the rookery, seventy miles distant, after three weeks of constant toil and continual danger, they got the eggs, three of them, and then when ready to turn back, they lost their tent...

...Following Montcalm's swift victory on Lake George next year, Johnson was a tower of strength in keeping the Indians from going over to the French en masse...

...Winds of Gobi, by Robert Hyde...

...Jacks explains, an exceedingly strenuous occupation, since the sport was conducted on foot, and the animals sought for were usually either very swift, as deer, or savage, as boars...

...In 1759 he was in command when Niagara fell before British guns...