BOOKS FOR BOYS

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21726, 7 March 1936, Page 19

BOOKS FOR BOYS

Epic Tales of Modem* Adventure. By T. C. Bridges and H. Hessell Tiltman. George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 287 pp. (7/6 net.) Great Names In History. By Claud Golding. George G. Harrap and Co. Ltd. 300 pp. (7/6 net.) A Century of Boys', Stories. Edited by Francis Brett Young. Hutchinson and Co. Ltd. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. 1024 PP* (4/6 het.)

All of these books can be read for interest, entertainment, and profit by boys and adults alike. The first gives in amplification ' and' greater detail stories of adventures by land, air and sea, and under the sea which have stirred newspaper readers for a brief day, perhaps, and then been forgotten. Such amazing tales as the rescue, by heroic Russian airmen, of the complement of the ice-breaker Cheluskin from the Arctic ice, when all hope had practically been forgotten, v deserve to live in history as brilliant examples of stark courage and determination. Or one may ascend into the stratosphere with brave add jaunty Professor Piccard and other heroes of enquiring science; dive into the depths of the ocean, half a mile below the surface, with Dr. William Beebe; follow the intrepid C. W. A. Scott and T. CampbellBlack in their hectic sweep across the world to win the Melbourne Centenary air race; hunt and capture alive wild animals with Mr Frank Buck; or undertake the dogged five years’ journey with Andrew Bahr across the Arctic wastes with a herd of reindeer. And there are many more tales equally thrilling and enthralling. Leaving modern adventure, we may care to look back through history and renew acquaintance in a more personal way than at school with great figures. Here are assembled such names as Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, William Wallace, Queen Elizabeth, Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Galileo, Cromwell, Peter the Great, Faraday, Garibaldi, Abraham Lincoln, and a host of others/ Or next we may return to old friends of fiction, R. M. Ballantyne, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Sir Walter Scott, Jack London, G. A, Hentft Captain Marry at, and so on. There we may recapture old enthusiasms and live through fictional adventures just as real and thrilling to us as boys—because they were told by masters of the art—as any factual story of adventure could be.