MISCELLANY

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25276, 30 August 1947, Page 7

MISCELLANY

JAZZ IS MUSIC Mr Ralph Venables, introducing the “first British edition” of Esquire’s Jazz Book (Peter Davies. 184 pp.),says that in reducing “the almost staggering assemblage of data” in the 1944, 1945, and 1946 American issues to the compass of a single volume he has tried to “retain the factual articles at the expense of those concerned solely with opinion.” This difficulty will not be encountered in future, for the American and British issues are to march like identical twins from year to year. Among the contributors to this telescoped issue are Paul Edward Miller (Hot Jazz, Jazz Greats, An Analysis of the Art of Jazz, Fifty Years of New Orleans Jazz, Thirty Years of Chicago Jazz, Historical Chart of Jazz Influence), Charles Edward Smith (Collecting Hot, Some Like It Hot), E. Simms Campbell (Jam in the Nineties, Blues Are the Negroes’ Lament), and George Hoefer (Collectors: Personalities and Anecdotes). Biographies (more than 30 pages) are compiled by Charles Edward Smithexpert awards, naming the best and second-best All-American jazz bands, 1944-1946, are detailed; there are scores of photographs.

IT DOESN’T PAY Mr John E. Horwell, late Chief Constable, Scotland Yard, accumulated ample evidence, in his 30 years’ service, that crime does not pay. His book, Horwell of the Yard (Andrew Melrose. 176 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.), ranges from murder to forgery, from blackmail to razorslashing, from warehouse breaking to long firm frauds. (And the long. firm fraud experts, of whom the public hears little, are very thoughtful artists indeed.) One of the best stories here is that of the success of Flannel Foot the Phantom Burglar, who for 11 or 12 years, working alone, broke into two, three, four, and even five houses a night, every night • of the week (except Sunday). But even Flannel Foot knew his run \vould come to an end some day and lived, in those years of triumphant crime, “one long purgatory.” When he had served his sentence, he kept his resolve: he never touched crime again. BALANCE

Miss Dallas Keflmare is among those who, whether theologians or philosophers or medical men or psychologists, have begun to believe that the problem of . world order and peace cannot be separated from ,the problems of personality. (“The Kingdom of God is within you.”) Her study of parental and family influences in The Stamp of Nature (Williams and Norgate. 212 pp.) is interesting as a careful pursuit, in the light of Christian teaching, of the essentials of that “happy, properly-adjusted personal life” which is, she says, “the first step to a world at peace.” Teachers and parents, particularly, will read this book with appreciation. THE SEASONS

Some 40 essays, grouped by affinity of theme under the four headings Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer, are collected in The Web of the Year (Hutchinson. 151 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.), by C. M. Mason. He is a pleasant writer, with a good eye for domestic and landscape scene and a relish for the little pleasures that fill an idler’s day and sweeten a toiler’s. DEPARTURE

. Still under the editorship of Reginald Moore, Modern Reading 14 (Phoenix House Ltd. 167 pp.) appears in a new form, durably cased as a book and with three new features: substantial extracts from books on the way to publication, studies of modern authors (Steinbeck and Gustav Fechner, here), and some pages of photographs. As a quarterly 'miscellany of contemporary prose and poetry, English and American, ‘/‘Modern Reading” goes from strength to strength. LAWSON

A collection of his best work. Henry Lawson: 20 Stories and Seven Poems. (Angus and Robertson. 337 pp.) is enriched by studies and recollections reprinted from various sources— Paris, Vienna, and London, as well as Australia. Mr Colin Roderick, the editor, has done a very good thing in this book. There are too many New Zealanders, an<Lprobably Australians too, to whom the one and only Henry is only a name, or not even a name. THEY SERVED TOO A record of the . work of the R.S.P.C.A., 1939-1945. Animals Were There (Hutchinson. 141 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.), by Arthur W. Moss and Elizabeth Kirby, is concerned less with war-time sdr-, vice to animals than with the warservice of the animals—horses, dogs, camels, for fnstance—and often heroically devoted service it was. Illustrated.

REUNITING ISRAEL Dr. Leonhard Ragaz’s Israel, Judaism and Christianity (Gollancz. 70 pp.) is an historically and theologically argued plea for the reuniting of Judaism and Christianity,* “the two trunks in which the tree called Israel is split.” It is as a Christian himself that Dr. Ragaz points to “recovery of faith in God’s Kingdom as a thing both of the past and of the future” as Christianity’s gain from such a “conversion to itself.”