Books
Lapp, John A. & Ross, J. Elliot & Morton, David & Mitchell, Broadus & Chase, Mary Ellen & Thompson, Charles Willis
BOOKS Discovering Wilson George Harvey, by Willis Fletcher Johnson. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. $5.00. IT DOES not take all of Mr. Johnson's 436 pages to convince the reader that he...
...and Practical Social Science...
...It unfolded before the mind of the latter-day Irishman as a new thing, and thrillingly his own...
...The inflammatory torch, of course, was the old literature, now rediscovered and presented by O'Grady to English-speaking Ireland in translations and adaptations which preserved much of the spirit of the old stories and poems, and revealed their genius as one akin to that felt by the modern Irishman as the spirit stirring within himself...
...IT IS not easy to write a convincing study of childhood, either in narrative or in essay form...
...There was need of a book which should gather the fruits of such special scholarship as has been done and present a connected story of Gaelic literature in the light of the most recent researches...
...The volume is enriched by eight full-page cuts...
...He is perhaps too thoughtful at times, too slow with his story, too reluctant to move on...
...His book is truly a saga, because it is entirely a record of heroics...
...AFTER a short introduction justifying the need of Biblical criticism, the writer gives what he considers to be the earliest form of this poetic work...
...He is appalled at the thought that social progress, or social change I should prefer to call it, is blind...
...He is inclined to explain too much, to lose our sympathy by exhausting our patience...
...He fails to reckon that idealism need not be born in anguish, but may spring from plenty, and be the more buoyant and effective for the sufficiency that lies everywhere about it...
...New York: The John Day Company...
...and Frederick Law Olmstead, a Critic of the Old South...
...Johnson's fellow-citizens that Colonel Harvey was not a great man, and that much less than 436 pages would contain all that anybody needs to know about him...
...If it is less detailed and less spirited than Dr...
...The book reviews the history of Catholic charities from the middle-ages to the present in chapters on The Christian Doctrine of Charity, Catholic Charities before the Reformation, Catholic Charities and the Catholic Revival, Charity and Social Justice, The Laity and Catholic Charities, Modern Social Work Problems and Technique, and Catholic Charities in Practice...
...For many of us, it is still a puzzling matter how this new literature came into being...
...Writers of Gaelic Gaelic Literature Surveyed, by Aodh de Blacam...
...Carol Ryrie Brink is a Minnesota poet and short-story writer...
...In the social realm it is someone like Christ, or Luther, or Lincoln, who can think ahead of his age...
...Rev...
...To some persons, it is true, Father Husslein's device of writing in the present tense when describing Saint Peter's Mass will be a little too imaginative...
...de Blacam has given a picture of the times, and a chronicling of historical events in the midst of which the literature was growing...
...What followed is literary history too recent to require a retelling here...
...Marie de L. Welch is one of the editors of the San Francisco Review...
...Williamson is known to most readers as a naturalist, and as an essayist whose sketches have of late years appeared in our best magazines...
...HOPPER tells the stories of twelve men who received the Congressional Medal of Honor for services during the great war...
...Mary Ellen Chase...
...And the vicissitudes of the country during the transition from the age of national integrity to the period of a conquered land and a decaying polity are shown in their marked effect on the national soul as revealed in its literary output...
...This need is exactly and richly supplied by Mr...
...It is equally difficult to recall that fifty years ago there was nothing deserving the name of a body of Anglo-Irish literature, whereas today there is a corpus of large proportions and of a distinctive and undeniable genius...
...James M. Gillis, C.S.P., is editor of the Catholic World...
...Briefer Mention Long Ago Told: Legends of the Papago Indians, by Harold Bell Wright...
...The book is one of four which together make a work called The Flax of Dream and which present childhood, boyhood, youth and early manhood...
...No one is better fitted to discuss the relationship of the Catholic Church to the whole problem, for it has been a study of the author for years to determine in practice how the Catholic programs and works of social amelioration fit into the general plans of the community under American conditions...
...The treatment in each chapter is broad...
...If you take him on the second tack of defining the workings of social progress, he is likewise deficient...
...And yet in reading these careful pages, one has a comfortable, secure sense of good craftsmanship, of unstinted, unhurried work...
...Nashville, Tennessee: The Cokesbury Press...
...Grenville Vernon is the author of The Image is the Path...
...2.50...
...John A. Lapp is the dean of the School of Social Service of Mar-quette University, and the author of Our America...
...Charles Willis Thompson is a veteran political correspondent for New York journals...
...Economics...
...The American Citizen...
...John Gilland Brunini is a member of The Commonweal staff...
...Donald Joseph in October's Child is better at narrative than is Mr...
...Children of Importance The Beautiful Years by Henry Williamson...
...Other conjectures may be equally plausible...
...The trouble with Johnson is that he goes further and tries to make Harvey an all-around king-maker...
...The Book of Job, Its Substance and Spirit, by W. G. Jordan...
...Here is a complete survey of the literature of two thousand years, set before the reader in a manner which will give him some conception of the pageantry and proportions of Gaelic writings...
...Beoadus Mitchell, associate professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of William Gregg, Factory Master of the Old South...
...J. Elliot Ross...
...For those of us on this side, a movement so momentous and so sudden begged for an explanation...
...How "Big Brother"-no aborigines had a nobler conception of the Great Spirit than the Papagos-created man after the subsiding of the waters, how fire was brought from the sun, why we have four seasons, and the other legends are things which "must not be told in the summer-time when the snakes are out...
...Diana Sumner and F. S. Jesson are new contributors to The Commonweal...
...Each contribution to this inexhaustible subject treats the matter in a somewhat different way, and reaches a somewhat different audience...
...Hopper should try to get at the rest of the Medal of Honor men who are still living...
...Objective forces that press upon mankind are not in his picture...
...Medals of Honor, by James Hopper...
...If you take him from the first angle, he begs the question by defining Christianity as something indistinguishable from a decent impulse toward one's fellows...
...2.00...
...But to others it will paint vivid and unforgettable pictures...
...David Morton...
...J. Elliot Ross is the Catholic member of the faculty of the School of Religion, Iowa University...
...Rev...
...New York: E. P. Dutton and Company...
...Sociology and Religion Man's Social Destiny in the Light of Science, by Charles A. Ellwood...
...Father Husslein's book will make an admirable present, and is especially appropriate for religious, seminarians and priests...
...He expects the reader to believe that such men as Penrose (the real ruler of that convention, though he did his ruling over the telephone) Lodge, Brandegee, Smoot and the rest of the old grey woves of the Senate did not know what to do about that nomination and came humbly to Harvey at the Hotel Blackstone for instructions...
...He deplores prosperity...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...O'Grady has reduced this possibility to the minimum, though the book must not be taken as light reading because it is brief...
...It was Harvey who conceived, in 1906, the extraordinary idea that he could take one college president out of a swarm of them and turn him into a President of the United States, and who worked in solitude so indefatigably and so artfully that by 1910 he was on the high road to success...
...This was Harvey's one great achievement, and the incredible skill with which he performed the seemingly impossible stunt deserves everything here said about it...
...Such books will be badly wanted some day...
...Wilson rewarded Smith by turning on him as governor and driving him out of politics, as later, when he had come to rely on Colonel House for the nomination, he turned on Harvey and told him he wanted no more of his support...
...Johnson's 436 pages to convince the reader that he thinks Colonel Harvey a great man, nor that he would be greatly surprised if he were informed that there are those who differ with that view...
...2.00...
...What Is Social Charity...
...de Blacam's book...
...A very proper emphasis is put on the need for justice in the social order, while full admission is made of the urgency of effective means of relief...
...One fears, indeed, for these overly serious boys, so weighted down with unalleviated impressions...
...Early Christian Worship The Mass of the Apostles, by Joseph Husslein, S.J...
...In telling the story Johnson reveals a great deal of unwritten history, and what he tells seems undeniably true...
...New York: D. Appleton and Company...
...The author enjoys distinction as a student of society, being professor of sociology in the University of Missouri...
...THESE lectures were delivered in connection with the School of Religion of Vanderbilt University, at Nashville, Tennessee, on a foundation which committed the lecturer to "a defense and advocacy of the Christian religion...
...His latest book is Presidents I've Known and Two Near Presidents...
...It was a past marvelously rich in history and legend, haunted by the shapes of great heroes and made gracious by the presence of beautiful and sorrowful queens...
...Broadus Mitchell...
...David Mokton is associate professor of English in Amherst College, and the author of Ships in Harbor, and other books...
...It is a sorry story, altogether, but Johnson has the facts and they are inescapable...
...Catholic books and articles on social work are frequently given to lamentations for the fall of the social institutions of the middle-ages under which justice and charity had reached in some section of Europe, a high development...
...THE Papago Indians have never had a written language, but their story-tellers have preserved from generation to generation a wealth of folk-lore of which, Mr...
...One will not soon forget the southern winds and rains, the old sycamores and the dazzling brilliance of a cardinal against the newly fallen snow...
...A conference of senators held in Harvey's hotel room in Chicago decided that Harding should be nominated in 1920, and Johnson writes the story as if Harvey had been the ruler of the conference, with the senators eating out of his hand and obeying the crack of his whip...
...He has prepared a book for the general reader which can be read in a brief time, and thus has helped to remove one of the excuses for not being informed on a subject which should be the concern of everyone...
...2.75...
...But "In winter when Tahs-the sun-walks far from the earth and the ground is cold and hard...
...He considers the book post-exilic, and refuses to believe that it was ever considered a drama...
...No one is better equipped to treat the subject of social work than Dr...
...Here, indeed, were the gods that he ignorantly worshiped, declared unto him...
...O'Grady gives a good account, briefly, of the contributions of the Church to social justice in the days before the Reformation, but he draws the reader back and holds him to the present-day problems which are not the inheritance of the Reformation but the result of the industrial revolution, the mechanization of industry and the doctrine of laissez faire...
...Bernard J. Rothwell is one of the officers of the Calvert Club...
...Here is the story of Ireland's literature from those early anonymous writings prior to and during the Norse invasions, down to the work of living authors writing in Gaelic in Ireland today...
...If he had addressed himself to a defense of social work, liberal-mindedness and human neighborliness, he would not have been original, but he would have avoided the indirectnesses and sophisms which envelop his argument...
...Of course in all this much is left to conjecture, as in the attempt to estimate just what the Apostles carried over from the synagogue service and associated with the Eucharistic "breaking of bread...
...Sentimentality, didacticism, diffuseness are pitfalls too seldom avoided...
...In dealing with the literature of each period, Mr...
...when the beans and wheat and pumpkins have been harvested and fields are bare, and the cold winds blow-then in their winter villages the Indians say to one of the old people who know the legends: 'Tell us the huh-kew ah-kah-the things which were long ago told.'" It is a fascinating volume...
...Father Husslein confines himself to reconstructing the Mass as it was probably said by the Apostles, with very little reference to later developments...
...The style is easy, flowing, and (in a good sense) popular...
...3.00...
...Now it is a well-settled conviction with many of Mr...
...Nevertheless, the book contains much information of value...
...It is, therefore, a pleasure to commend the work of Henry Williamson in The Beautiful Years, and of Donald Joseph in October's Child, as thoughtful and careful presentations, the one of an English boy up to nine years of age, the other of a southern child, Lucius Deering, from his sixth year to his first year at college...
...In the telling Wilson's figure shrinks rather pitiably, but the facts are there...
...It does not attempt to describe life in the trenches or behind the lines, but is simply a recounting of valiant deeds...
...Finally, the child himself and even his sometimes incredible passion for nature do not linger in the mind as do the minute observations of the English countryside-of mowing, of the migrations of swallows, of the habits of the various owls...
...Undoubtedly, the general effect of Father Husslein's treatment is to make the devotional life of those far-off days much more real to us, and consequently to deepen our own devotion to the Eucharist...
...Moreover, the disturbing knowledge of predecessors difficult to emulate stands irrevocably in the way-Kenneth Grahame's The Golden Age, W. H. Hudson's Far Away and Long Ago, Juliet Soskice's Chapters from Childhood, Percy Lubbock's Earlham...
...CONTRIBUTORS Carlton J. H. Hayes is professor of history at Columbia University and the author of British Social Politics...
...Hyde's Literary History, it is also a more orderly presentation and has the advantage of more recent researches...
...The Catholic Church and the Destitute, by John O'Grady...
...One must think, indeed, at least to judge from the book in question, that he writes exposition and description far better than narrative...
...The tenseness of his major situation-a father at a loss to understand his motherless son-never for a moment holds the appeal of his descriptive passages, nor does the idyllic love of Jim and Dolly, a woodsman and a servant-girl...
...Johnson's own conviction to the contrary is so deep-seated that he reveals the unimportant about Harvey in the same tone and to the same length as he gives to the revelation of the important, sure that anything he tells about the great man is of value to posterity...
...His people have more life and reality, although it must be said that humor is sadly lacking in both books...
...de Blacam's comes on the eve of the semi-centennial of that movement...
...Wilson appears as hesitating, dubious, easily scared, ready to turn his hand to anything if he can only win the prize, but always needing the stronger hand of Harvey to push him on...
...It is a fortunate coincidence that this book of Mr...
...New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company...
...and that when the great man told them to nominate Harding they all leaped up and barked joyfully and unanimously...
...Dublin: The Talbot Press...
...He leaves out the speeches of Elihu and the stories of the Behemoth and of the Leviathan, which he places in an appendix...
...Assistance at Mass will be transformed...
...Nevertheless, it is well to emphasize the logical development of the Church from Judaism, and to show the connection between present-day forms and the synagogue...
...John A. Lapp...
...It does settle forever, one is bound to believe, the question of who fished Woodrow Wilson out of obscurity and made him a presidential possibility...
...It seems nearly incredible that less than fifty years ago the ears of the world had not heard the names of Yeats and Lady Gregory, of James Stephens and Padraic Colum, of J. M. Synge and A. E.-names so well known today that we forget how recently they were silence...
...Nor is Mr...
...It was in 1880 that Standish O'Grady's bardic History of Ireland was published-a book of such fiery and contagious enthusiasm that it turned the eyes of a whole people to backward gazing and dreaming over a long-obscured past...
...A free use of the metrical translation by Professor Tayler Lewis is adopted...
...Nonsense, Mr...
...It becomes painfully evident that his conversion from conservatism to liberalism was calculated, that even the date of it was calculated, for the effect it would have in getting the nomination...
...Joseph himself either miserly or incapable in the use of descriptive detail...
...Johnson mercilessly puts it beyond a doubt that it was ex-Senator James Smith, the boss of the New Jersey machine, to whom Wilson was beholden for the governorship of New Jersey...
...He writes, for instance, many delightful pages about the fact that Harvey was a friend of Mark Twain's, with reprints of highly unimportant letters which only make one wonder how Mark Twain could have written such trash...
...The volume may be regarded either as a defense of the Christian religion or as an exposition of the working of social forces...
...WITH the turn of the year, Ireland will come upon the fiftieth anniversary of the Celtic renaissance...
...Bardic institutions and productions are discussed in a manner that will prove of special interest to those who think of ancient Ireland as a tameless and untutored region...
...New York: P. J. Kenedy and Sons...
...First in relation to the others, it is obviously the last to make its appearance...
...Modern History...
...and Recent Political Theory...
...Williamson...
...The letters Johnson prints show that Wilson was ashamed of himself for this and tried vainly to square himself with Harvey by paltering with the truth, and that Harvey was big enough not to take advantage of Wilson's floundering attempts at double play...
...Harvey induced Smith to put Wilson over, and Smith had to work like a demon to do it...
...He saw himself, for the first time, as the inheritor of a great tradition, existing in separation and integrity for more than two thousand years, and prolific of a whole literature of story and history and poem...
...The story of the past fifty years in Ireland is one of almost unprecedented wealth of literary output...
...October's Child, by Donald Joseph...
...William C. Murphy, jr., is with the Washington Bureau of the New York World...
...for those who are unacquainted with the simple principles of the subject, it may perhaps not be found elementary enough...
...The jacket shows that several important people have praised the book- S. Parkes Cadman, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Francis J. Mc-Connell, Dean Robbins, Mary Wooley and others...
...2.50...
...WE CANNOT have too many good books on the Mass, and Father Husslein's book is good...
...He writes confidently, as one who is unfolding the inner side of greatness to a thirsty public, sure of returns in the way of gratitude and awe...
...This part of the book is an important, if disagreeable, contribution to history...
...O'Grady has foreshortened the treatment of a great problem into a brief review of salient facts...
...The Calvert Series, edited by Hilaire Belloc...
...Essays on Nationalism...
...In this country, at all events, his novels are less familiar...
...Charles Willis Thompson...
...1.00...
...O'Grady, whose services as secretary of the National Conference of Catholic Charities and as professor of sociology at the Catholic University have enabled him to range over the whole field of charities and at the same time to investigate intensively...
...2.50...
...Johnson, nonsense...
...New aspirants must hold their pens with some misgivings from the very start...
...Wright tells us, the tales in this book are but a representative fragment...
...New York: The Macmillan Company...
...The book is attractive and readable, and those who may not agree with advanced critical theories can enjoy the poetic beauty that is abstracted from the original...
...The author of a brief treatise always runs the risk of using expressions which are full of meaning to the informed but blank or perhaps misleading to the uninitiated...
...About half of it could very well have been left out, but the other half is worth having...
...IN THIS book Dr...
...In the face of a world remade by science and material advance, he clings to the great man theory-"It is the exceptional individuals who generally change the direction of a culture...
...Mary Ellen Chase is professor of English literature at Smith College, and the author of The Golden Asse and Other Essays...
...His story, though delicately and poetically handled, is best in those passages given over to portrayals of the seasons, of the times of day as they are borne in upon the imagination of a sensitive child, of bird and animal life, always in his hands so rich in accurate detail...
Vol. 11 • December 1929 • No. 7
