WAR IN THE DESERT.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 129, 2 June 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

WAR IN THE DESERT.

JEWS IN GERMANY. NOVELS AND SHORT STORIES. In reviewing a recent biography by an American professor, Sir John Squire Complains that he adopts at the start that tiresome modern trick whereby a false notion of breadth and picturesqueness is given by the cataloguing of events which were happening all over the world at the same time as some event with which they have no connection. Sir John, presents a reductio ad absurdum of this practice by imagining a future biography of some poet, born in Rutland; in 1934, which mentions that, at the time of his birth, "the streets of Vienna, dominated by the little figure of Dollfuss, ran red with Socialist blood, while in bleak Manchukuo the spectacled Henry Pu Yi returned to the Dragon throne of his divine ancestors."

"Reading and Discrimination," hy Denys Thompson (Chatto and Windus) is really a book for schools, but, as the publishers say, its wide range of interest, and the importance of the questions it raises, should appeal to the general reader. The first third of the book is a commentary on literature and the reading of literature, and is an admirable example of good writing. The remaining two thirds are made up of a variety of extracts from books" and speeches. Mr. Thompson tells us what his object is in issuing it. It is to help in the training of discrimination in reading, and in maintainng the capacity for reading of those who are interested in literature. It is one of the best publications of the kind we have "read, and not only teachers of English hut a wider public will find it of distinct value. ■,

Protest Is made by Mr. A. G. Street in the "Bookseller" against "a scliool of writers who paint a picture of a beautiful countryside peopled with the most horribel human beings imaginable. . . . To put a decent likeable person into their books seems "to be against their principles." On the other hand, he names "a few books which have painted a picture of England's countryside which I, a countryman, can recognise as being a faithful one. 'Corduroy,' by Adrian Bell; 'The Lonely Plough,' by Constance Holme; 'The Wheelwright's Shop,' by George Sturt; 'The Ploughman's Progress,' and others, by Sheila Kayo Smith; 'Pond's Hall Progress' and others, by T. W. Freeman; and 'Richard Jefferies,' by Reginald Arkoll. All these," says Mr. Street, "will, I think, tell the exile that England's countryside has not altered very much fundamentally."