THE BOOKSHELF.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 117, 20 May 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE BOOKSHELF.

NEWS AND REVIEWS.

ADVERTISING AUSTRALIA. SUPPRESSING THE MAFIA. It is much more difficult to be a wise mother-ia-law than to be a good wife.— Dr. E. H. Geffen.

Bolshevism is much less ill-bred than gate-crashing; and it is nobler to follow a mob in wrath than to run round with "a crowd" which paints the town a nonpolitical red.—Mr. G. K. Chesterton.

Most of us find the economic problem a kind of maze. Whichever path of inquiry we take it leads us into all the rest; and none seems. to bring us to the centre or the exit. —Sir Arthur Salter.

Mr. Hector Bolitlio's authorised "Life" of Lord Melchett, better known as Sir Alfred Mond, has been published. "The times" Literary Supplement gives the book a review more than a column long, and praises the way in which Mr. Bo.itho tells the story of this great industrialist's career. Several other reviewers are equally laudatory.

ROUND AUSTRALIA.

A BRIGHT TRAVEL BOOK. "Butterflies six and eight inches from tip to tip of wings, in red and blues and greens, the colours blending ill bewildering fashion. Loaf butterflies, brown and black, and beautiful, which, when they settle and fold their wings, resemble a leaf, being so shaped and veined. For every variety of butterfly Nature supplies twenty varieties of moths, which rival the butterflies in exotic beauty. 'Great Hercules' is nearly a foot across. There are moths with wings of old English lace, mother-o'-pearl moths, brown moths, daubed with blue and green. A grasshopper as large as a banana, and as fat. Beetles and spiders that give you a shiver down the spine, beetles that look like crayfish, and beetles that look like nothing on earth. One insect, a black evil-look-ing fellow, some - four inches long, had 'feelers' streaking out at right angles to his head, no less than eighteen inches across, and jaws that could nip your finger to the bone. There are sixteen thousand varieties of beetles already discovered in Australia." What a country for the naturalist! Mr. C. H. Holmes has made a four month'? journey, by train, aeroplane, boat, car and on. foot, around the whole of the Australian coast (and one trip into "Centralia" as far as Alice Springs), and taken 500 photographs, in order to prove to the world (including Australians themselves) the beauties, strangeness, productivity and varieties of climate, of the country he loves. Ho has, in "We Find Australia" (Hutchinson), written with a boy-like simplicity and freshness of language, of the different tribes of

natives, settlers, fishermen, ilora, fauna, geology, mining and scenery, on all four coasts, including that most wonderful of wonders, "The Great Barrier," the coral reef 900 miles long, on the East Coast. There are pauses in the story when the author carries the reader back to tho early days, and touches upon tho history of settlement, the introduction of cattle and sheep, the finding of gold, of pearls, of silver lead, and the growth of Australia's enormous exports resulting from small beginnings. The whole story is addressed more particularly to sportsmen, tourists and natural ■ ists, and no better advertisement of the country could be written. In hospitality Mr. Holmes gives the most praise to West Australia, and the outback people, probably because in the east there is more reason for selfishness, reserve and suspicion. Away from any one of the four or five large towns there must be no expectation of luxury, and discomfort may be accepted as part of the fun, but apart from the wet season there is no danger to health, and the sights, sounds and sports are an ample reward to anyone prepared to "travel light" and let. each day be met as an adventure. Townsville and district, and thence down to Brisbane, promise the most attractive scenery, with side trips to the seashore and inland to the bush, not forgetting Heron Island and the Great Barrier, and perhaps, Whitsunday Islands. As a conclusion Mr. Holmes waves a hand to Tasmania, and blows a kiss of praise. The photographs arc of unusual excellence.

ADMIRING THE MINIATURE

More words of wisdom, expressed with characteristic frankness, from Mr. St. John Ervine:-—

The short play and the short story are hard to write, but so are the long play and the long story. The question of which is the harder cannot be settled, for it is mixed up with the nature of the person who proposes to do the writing. Periodically, someone revives tlio ancient lie that a poem in two lines is more marvellous than one in a thousand lines; and some very odd persons go about asserting that the little poems written by Chinese or Japanese poets are superb merely because they are little,' that Milton ought to hide his diminished head because he tilled pages and pageswith " Paradise Lost/ 5 whei*eas an Oriental poet can say "everything" in a couplet. I spent an embarrassed evening in the company of a person who bored me by declaiming such poems as this: —

The almond blossom in the spring! Oh! Ah! . . . The whole soul of the East, I was informed, lay in such lines as tho6e. I ruined my reputation as a person of taste by saying that the whole soul of the East must be remarkably minute if it can go into so tiny a space and occupy so small a thought. Indeed, 1 | went on to say, thinking that I might as well be hanged for a i-heep as a lamb, there did not appear to me to bo any thought at all in lines of that sort. If anyone supposes that The daughter of Fu-Chow has little feet. How delicate are tlio little feet of FuChow's daughter! is infinitely superior to Shelley's " Ode to a Skylark," he is at liberty to go on thinking it, but I ain also at liberty to think that he is talking nonseusei These peoplo who take tape measures to works of art and are certain that brevity, I rnei ;ly because it is brevity, is better tiiuu lengthy gle demented. J

A TRENCH VILLAIN.

CHANGE IN SPY STORIES. There is a significant difference between Francis Beeding's latest story and the spy stories written some years ago, a significance of international importance. In the spy tale of the war and the years after it the villain was a German and the English hero worked against him. In "The Two Undertakers" (Hodder and S tough ton) our good friend Colonel Granby, of the British Secret Service (having recovered from his honeymoon adventures in "Taking It Crooked"), works to save Germany from ruin at the hands of an international gang headed by an eminent Frenchman, whose patriotism has become an insane desire to destroy the hereditary enemy of his country. The teller of tiie story, a young Englshman under Granby, is in love with a beautiful German aristocrat, and her father is depicted as a typo of a chivalrous nobleman. All the reader's sympathies are enlisted on behalf of Germany. It is a wild, impossible tale, but Mr. Beeding is always interesting; his action moves quickly, he writes brightly, and his love interest is all that a publisher should wish for.

WILFRED EWART.

Wilfred Ewart, the author of "Way of Revelation," died in 1922. His first and only novel had a considerable success, although it was published several years before the "war-hook" boom, in which several books less sane and balanced gained fa mo or notoriety. Now a series of Fwart's essays has been published for the first time under the title of "When Armageddon Came" (Rich and Cowan). A few contain memories of days before 1914, some recall outstanding impressions of his own war experiences, and others are the fruit of post-war observations and thought. There is a peculiarly satisfying quality in Ewart's writing. In describing war episodes he conveys the truth without resorting to a cataloguing of horrors, or to irony over-done, or to a railing invective. His deep iovo of beauty, particularly natural beauty, seems to have fortified him in all the desperate situations which every soldier knew. Unlike so many of the later war-book writers, ho was. never the plaything of a senseless fate. These essays show that Ewart was not the least of the young English writers who died in the decade following the outbreak of war.

THE MAFIA.

So many highly-coloured stories have been written about the Mafia that the truth, as told in "The Last Struggle With the Mafia" (Putnam) is something of an anti-climax. Not that the seriousness of the Mafia's challenge to law and order was exaggerated, .but its leaders were considerably less picturesque, and its methods less thrilling than the average magazine writer has had us believe. Prefect Mori, who writes with authority, for it was he who planned and led the final campaign in Sicily, saw the problem of the Mafia as One criminal in part only. It was also a problem in sociology. Tho criminal acts of the Mafia were not more important than the attitude of the people who were the Mafia's victims. If, so lie argued, he could shatter the people's fatalistic belief in the power of the Mafia a considerable part of his work would be done. And he did shatter it. Ilis method was to allay the suspicions of the particular Mafia band he was hunting, until ho was ready to pounce. When he pounced he made no mistake. And soon ho proved, and the people saw, that the leaders of the Mafia gangs wore not the terrible fellows they liad gloried in seeming. One major pang he trapped so completely in their hidingplace that they immediately became the laughing-stock of the very people who had feared them most. And when they became the object of ridicule their influence was gone. The evil was not to be stamped out in a day, but once "the fear in men's minds" was removed tho rest was only a matter of time. Even so, it is clear that Prefect Mori was not gentle in his methods, and of course ho had no fear that Mussolini would censure him for excess of zeal. The Mafia, he makes clear, was not a vast secret society. It was rather "a system of local oligarchies closely interwoven, but each autonomous in its own district." This book, which is illustrated, is a valuable account of audacious, intelligent police work, interesting alike to sociologists and those who merely love the thrill of a chase.

Cinemas and tinned food shops are all very well, but they are not things on which nations are founded.—Major Walter Elliot, M.P.

It is a terrible reproach to our system of education that it is unable to turn out people with any natural good taste at all.—Sir John Stirling-Maxwell.

In early eighteen hundred when America, fighting the Indians, was aleo fighting England, and both sides had

Indian friends and enemies, and Spain assisted tiio Indians with arms and ammunition, there was a period so full of dangerous adventure, strange commerce, and tragedy, that it has not been fully exploited by novelists. Hugh Pendexter, in " The Border Breed" (Collins and Son), lias written one of the best and most exciting stories of this time which anyone could imagine. As a story for boys —of all ages—it is an incentive to courage, based although it is upon the old Hebrew law of "an eye for an eye." In the absence of law, police, means of communication, and transport, except of the most primitive kind, existence depended upon force of arms, cunning, and physical strength. The young trapper and free lanco soldier of the story, in danger, privation, and seeming helpless situations, fought liis way to happiness by entire disregard of death and the conquest of personal fear, assisted by the constant stimulus of tho half-humorous challenges of a trapper's daughter. Pendexter has penned no better romance.

BOOKS RECEIVED

I Warmed Both Hands, by Frank Dllnnt; The Stolen Bride, by Marjorle Ho wen; The Marriage of Ebba Garland, by Dagmar Edquist (Lovat Dickson). That Summer, by Priscllla Johnston (Duckworth). Pull Devil, Pull Baker, by Stella Renson and Count de Toulouse. Lautrec de Savlne, ex-Czar of Bulgaria (Marmillan). The Tinder Box of Asia, by George E. Sokolsky (Allen and Unwin). The Tall House Mystery, by A. Fielding; Rescuing Anne, by Dorothy Lambert; The Fate of»Jane McKenzie, by Nancy Rarr Mnvtty: Man From the Bad Lands, by George W. Ogden (Colling-Haif-Caste, by F. K. Baume "(Macquarlci msA), I