Books Briefly
Books Briefly Witty Bookworm Q'S LEGACY by Helene Hanff Little, Brown. 177 pp. $14.95. Helene Hanff knows how to squeeze an orange dry. In her earlier books, 84, Charing Cross Road, and The...
...A grateful tribute to the scholar who guided her reading...
...Dutton, 170 pp...
...When she was eighteen, reading anything she could find on English literature in the Philadelphia public library, she came across a volume by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch...
...Labor Saga STRIKEMAKERS & STRIKEBREAKERS by Sidney Lens Lodestar/E.P...
...Sidney Lens, The Progressive's Senior Editor, goes a long way toward remedying this oversight in Strikemakers & Strikebreakers, a book intended for teenagers and young adults...
...The struggles of the American labor movement are part of the hidden history that most schools somehow never get around to teaching...
...Young people who haven't made a special effort to acquaint themselves with workers' campaigns for decent wages and working conditions tend to be woefully ignorant of this vital part of their heritage...
...In these pages we meet her English publisher and the publisher of a play based on 84...
...Lens, a veteran union leader, begins his tale with the Federal Society of Journeymen Cordwainers— Philadelphia shoemakers who organized in 1794 and mounted their first strike a couple of years later—and ends it with the copper miners whose two-year-old strike against Phelps-Dodge still continues...
...He guided her taste and selectivity in reading...
...In her earlier books, 84, Charing Cross Road, and The Duchess of Bloomsbury, readers learned of her long love affair with books in general and one London bookstore in particular...
...Q's Legacy is a sequel...
...Her correspondence and telephone calls have continued over the years and on one trip to England she makes a tour of "literary sights" she has been invited to visit...
...It became a bible to her and led to her slow accumulation of five Quiller-Couch books...
...She manages to turn her ordeal with cataracts into wit...
...In between, he captures the high drama of labor's history and explains the forces that propelled workers to band together and, when necessary, resort to the ultimate weapon of withholding their labor...
...This includes a trip to Harrow with a young student and stops at the houses of Jane Austen and George Bernard Shaw and tea at Quiller-Couch's old quarters at Cambridge...
Vol. 49 • November 1985 • No. 11
