GLIMPSES OF THE GREAT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 175, 26 July 1930, Page 2 (Supplement)

GLIMPSES OF THE GREAT.

' A year or two "lion-hunting" in Europe was responsible for the latest volume by ; George S. Viereck, former friend of the Kaiser, American pro-German during the 1 war, poet, novelist with a sex obsession, and author of that weird hotch-potch of history and personality, "The First Two Thousand. Years of the Wandering Jew." In-"Glimpses of the Great" (Duckworth) he proves himself a good reporter with an eye for the dramatic. He set out, according to his own story, to give an abstract and brief chronicler of his time, for, in Wilde's phrase, do not interest him "unless they stand in symbolic relation to their age." That implies a. good deal more than the achievement, for such a presentation should be as much for the future as for the present. But, while "Glimpses of the Great" is excellent journalism, it is not the stuff of which classics are made. It is arresting and provocative; however, and it throws a clear white light on many of the greatest personalities of the day. They are all people who mean something—Foch, Marx, Clemenceau, Shaw, Zangwill, Steinach, Voronoff, Mussolini, Freud, Ramsay Mac Donald, Henry Ford—they march forward, each intent on his purpose in life, each applying his own solutions to its problems. To that extent the book is, as its author claims, a mirror of the tiine, and he is surely warmly to be commended upon the assiduity of his hunt for big game.- The results reveal the writer's own pre-occu-pations—the war, world politics, philosophy, literature, and sex; he writes of the great as ho see§ them, not .always with admiration fox; their methods, but always with a sympathetic understanding of their own point of view. Thus, though in his army of .thirty each marches; under a different banner, they are all interesting, and if each, lias his own panacea for all the ills of humankind, all tare limned as earnest, strenuous men, missionaries with gospels of their own making, but none the less sincerely feeling the urge and the lift, of liuinanitarianisrm. Viereck is especially in unison, witli liis subject.- when dealin or with such men as /Freud, the. Columbus of the subconscious,-Steinach and Voronoff;. Hirschfleld,. Moll, ■ the Sherlock golrnes of ghostland, and;. SchrenckNotzing, the scientist of spooks. An entertaining book,-with many fascinatingchapters.