ADMIRAL BYRD'S READING

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21404, 21 February 1935, Page 12

ADMIRAL BYRD'S READING

LIBRARY AT ADVANCE * POST A MIXED SELECTION [From Our Own Reporter.] WELLINGTON, February 20. When literary commentators rue short of material they describe a situation in which an imaginary man has to live for an imaginary and unspecified' period on an imaginary dasert island. Then they ask what 10 or 20 books would best entertain the castaway. Rear-Admiral Byrd, who for a whole Antarctic winter was separated from his companions by a far more effective barrier than protects any island, was in rather a worse plight than any castaway of fiction. The only interests he could have were his daily scientific observations made as a matter of routine reading, and listening to music. \' To-day he gave to a reporter of "The Press" a list of some of 10 books that he read while in the advance base. The list follows: "Victory," Joseph Conrad; "To What Green Altars," by W. B. Maxwell; ■ "Eloise and Abelard," by George Moore; "Burning Daylight," by Jack London; "The Law of Lean Land," by Pitt; "The Lost World," by Consjin Doyle; "The Barrier," by Rex Beach; "Early Autumn," by Louis Bronkfield; "The Way of a Lancer," by Richard Bolislanski, in collaboration with Helen Woodward; "Of Human Bondage," by Somerset Maugham; "A Life of Leonardo da Vinci," by a Russian author; "Columbus Came Late," by Mason; "Genghis Khan," by Harold Lamb; "Main Street," Sinclair Lewis; the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini; "Thus Spake Zarathustra," by Nietzsche; "Time, Space, and the Atom," by Richard T. Cox; "Preface to Morals," by Walter Lippman; "Tha Racial History o* Man," by Dixon; "The Story of Philosophy," by Will Durant; "Pitcairn Island," by Hall; "The Mutiny of the Bounty," by Hall. A large proportion of other books on a part of the list that could not be found dealt with philosophy, the study of which interests Admiral Byrd more thap anything else.

His Reference Book Admiral Byrd, he said, also had at the advance base, the latest edition of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica" so that he could attempt to settle the host of questions that spring to the mind of a man shut off from a chance of questioning his fellows. This was perhaps his most used book, for often one article would lead on to another subject, and it to another, with the solitary reader following a sort of paperr chase through the volumes. Particularly was it useful in answerinj the questions wnich his music posed for him, for he had a gramophone and a wide variety of records, preponderately classical. Beethoven and Wagner were perhaps most played, with the waltzes of Johann Strauss for lighter moments. The radio was used only for the practical purpose of communicating with the base, for power had to be husbanded. When Rear-Admiral Byrd can be induced to talk seriously of the, lonely winter, he will not mention the danger to himself, but always returns to philosophy, and its search for answers to ultimate riddles. Celf ! tainly if Little America with .-m, work, its jokes, its laughter, and its quarrels, was an ideal laboratory for the psychologist, the advance Wrtft with the sick man able to talk iby radio with his companions yet as far beyond reach of them as if he bad been in another planet, was the testing ground of the philosopher.,