WILMETTE LIFE February 14. 1930 II IWNfAIN SQVAR[. · LVANSTON COMMENT on BOOKS. and AUTHORS commonplace style, the understatements, the slightly stilted dialogueall is there save the dry humor whi~h made his "Helen" so notable. · And the effect is, surprisingly, to rob this modern story of almost all interest. No doubt it will be argued that Mr. Erskine rxpects his readers to supply their own irony and their own explanations for the devastation caused in these three lives by Isabel Beauvel's passion for sincerity. The defects of the case as it is presented to us are too apparent, however, to be overlooked, and most people will reply to Mr. Erskine's demand with a shrug of the shoulders. As his heroine put it in her uncommonly dull Atlantic Monthly essay which started all the trouble, the whole thing "suffers from unintended limitations." ---- . . ~.....,r. ..-· Wilmette J700 BOOK SHOP Lincoln Emil Luawig . A full-length life . . . from his obscure beginnings to his tragic end ··· told in Ludwig's characteristically vivid and colorful style. Little, Brown~ Company .. Ss.oo Around a Toadstool Table Rowena Batin Bennett These little poems for children express lovely thoughts in the simplest of words. Thomas S. Rockwell ...... $1.00 By John Erskine. lndianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill company. 1 A part of the excellence of Mr. Erskine's mildly historical narratives of the past few years lay in their almost complete lack of atmosphere or description. While his people were called by great names such as Helen of Troy or Galahad, they spoke and acted and lived very much as everyone fondly believes the average man to talk and act and live nowadays. Mr. Erskine has now chosen to abandon the realms of romance for a new and narrower world~that of the small American city. It is a world not far removed from the rowdier slogan-filled region where the Babbitt of Mr. Sinclair Lewis holds sway, ·for it is bounded on the one hand by the business activities of the husband and on the other by the social and domestic occupations of the wife. But in his somewhat unbelievable new fable of three people who "go sincere," Mr. Erskine has carried over much of the method and manner characteristic of his earlier b?oks. The flat, rather SINCERITY. THE DAY OF THE CATTLEMAN. · By Ernest Staples Osgood. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. 1929. Dr. Staples has given us the first really comprehensive and yet analytical hook on a much-treated field. There are two ~ood historical works on the cowboy, one on the rise of the livestock industry, several on the Texas cattle-drive., one on ranching in the north, and two or three on the Indian wars in the range country. Though in its style this volume smacks here and there of the doc~oral dissertation, and though it does not treat with sufficient detail or color some of the rich human aspects of its subiect, it does not fall far short of the level of a standard treatise. That is, it takes up all the main aspects of the cattle-ranching indusry from 1860 to 1890, delves more deeplv into the evidence than previous students have gone, makes a few discoveries of importance, and welds a great mass of material, old and new. into a well-proportioned and well-documented outline of nearly thre<' hundred pages. . AMERICAN FOLK AND FAIRY TALES. Selected by Rachel Field. Drawings by Margaret Freeman. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. An American folklore is in one sense ~ contradiction in terms, for that type of people who are usually considered most truly American have no folklore of their own at all. The colonists of the pew world simply transplanted an old world cultural tradition. It is only where eddies have been cut off from the main stream and have lapsed into primitiveness that an original folklore has grown up. Such an eddy as the Tennessee mountain CO!}ntry. Another backwater, this time served from a background, is the lumber camp of the Northern woods. But these sources furnish only a few of Miss Field's stories. She has interpreted "American" in a geographical sense to include Indian and negro folklore which make up the bulk of her stories. The Life of The Rise of American Civilization Charle1 A. Beard and Mary R. Beard Tbt Macmillan Company .. $J.oo A reprint of this excellent work. all in one inexpensive volume. JIABY BAKER EDDY Discoverer and Founder o£ Christian Science FOR EMBRYO ENGINEERS Geqrge F. Swain has written "The Young Man and Civil En_ gineering" (M_acmillan); Tohn Hays Hammond, "The Engineer" (Scribner); Robert L. Sackett, "The Engineer and His Work" (Ginn). All three are intended to help boys decide whether engineering is the vocation for them. Col. Starrett's "Skyscrapers and the Men \Vho Build Them" (Scribner) would be likelv to interest this boy as .a g~od picture of one class of engmeenng. By SIBYL WILBUR An Authentic Biography Mrs. Eddy's life is here de· picted with il1uminating clearness. The author, carerully avoiding invention, has presented the facts in a refreshing manner. Miss Wilbur was not a Christian Scientist when she wrote this biography for publication in a magazine of ~eneral circulation. Published by THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE PUBLISHING SOCIETY BosToN, U.S. A. The Embezzlers V alentint KataecJ Lincoln Macvugh ........ S 2. 5o TROUSERS OF TAFFETA. By Margaret Wilson. Harpers. In pleasing .c<;>ntrast to some of the .more unpleasant books about India, is this charming novel of the domestic life of Indian women by a medical missionarv. Moslem women evidently have a happier time than Hindu. as their religion and customs are not so oppre§sive. The joys and s~rrows Q.f harem life are depicted wtth a })UlSter hand and it is fair to take this qS an a~curate sample of the better class homes of Mohammedan northwestern India, though not of th~ Hindu provinces of the center and south. ======== ALL THE BROTHERS WERE VALIANT. By Ben Ames Williams. Dutton. This is a strong tale of high adventure in the days of whaling out of New England. Although short, "All the Brothers Were Valiant" is memorable for its vividness, its striking bareness. Mr. Williams, it will be remembered, tells of the testing of Joel Shore by a mutiny in the far Pacific, and of his cruel conflict with his wild-blooded brother. This story was well worth re- · printing. Not many novels published in 1919 could have stood the test so , successfully. ----------- George Washington The Savior of the States Rupert H ughea William Morrow 8 Company Ss.oo · The Crystal Icicle Katherine Keith Harcourt, Brace 8 Company . $2.50 408 Pages - 18 Illustrations .IIay be ptfrcha8ed at an book8tore8 and lead4no department ·tore· Cloth Edition: $3.00 Monks are Monks A Diagnostic Scherzo George Jtan Nat han Alfred A. Knopf ........ $1.50 The Go-Between T htre~t Benaon Dodd. Mud ~ Company .. $1.00 Fool's Goal B. M. Bown Little, Brown ~ . Six by ~ight $1 o 3 Mezzotints Regular price $20 For February Company .. $1.00 Tbt ·seven Days' Secret J. S. Fletcher Clode .··.···.·.·.·..·. S1.oo TOLOFF'S SPECIAL MINIATURE In gilt frame-hand-painted in oils .................... $)2.50 Tbt Man With the Squeaky Voice R. A. J. Walling Morrow ····.·········. S2.oo Jostph D. Toloff Our Photograph· Liot Forever 518 DAVIS J Ult inlid· th· Wnt D.vil Stmt Door. ST., EVANSTON UNIVERSITY 217 8