A FEW MORE BOOKS

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25377, 27 December 1947, Page 5

A FEW MORE BOOKS

FOR CHILDREN Having arrived by an Australian mail too late to be included in the preChristmas reviews of books for children, the three books noted briefly below may now be commended to benefactors who are still unpunctually if not unseasonably searching their minds and the market, to those long-sighted ones who will not think it absurd to begin laying by already for next Christmas, and to those who are now entering the year’s birthdays in their new pocket-diaries. These books are good ones. RAILWAYS

J. H. and W. D. Martin, in The Australian Book of Trains (Angus and Robertson. 248 pp.), have embodied the results of three years’ research among the railway systems of Australia. It is a treasury of information, comprehensive, detailed, accurate and up-to-date (so much may be confidently assumed), presented with admirable care to be clear, very readable, though the authors have had far too much sense to chatter or to gush, and superbly well illustrated. (Some fullpage plates are in colour; some photographs were specially taken at night to fulfil their illustrative purpose.) The treatment is not merely descriptive but historical, being designed to show how railway development followed and prompted the progress of settlement and industrialisation and how the technical problems of railway engineering were defined and solved in different parts of the island-continent and at different times. Readers of all ages are served in this book; but for'boys, particularly, who between the ages of 12 and 18 disclose a strong bent towards railway engineering, it is a perfect book of its kind. NATURE

Written and illustrated (with scores of excellent photographs) by Ronald K. Monro, Australian Nature Stories (Robertson and Mullens. 115 pp.) exhibits the naturalist’s skill in observing and interpreting wild life far more than the story-teller’s. Fancy is employed so far as to give creatures names like Betty or Billy, to endow them dramatically with the powers of speech, and to characterise them, sometimes, with emotions and motives peruPA a llttle nearer to the rational childs psychology than to their own instinctual one. But what is fanciful is not overdone; and the virtue of the observed fact, biologically accounted for, is never compromised. Mr P Crosbie Morrison, editor of “Wild Id fe ’’ contributes a jacket-account of me author, whose early death prevented his developing the rare combination of talents and skills represented in this book. Young children will look at the pictures, which often tell so vivid a story alone; as they grow older ♦ e X. turn more and more eagerly to the descriptive narratives. FANTASY

Michael Noonan’s The Golden Forest (Angus and Robertson. 186 pp.) pursues the adventures of Oonah the Platypus and his friend Wellington Wallaby—handsomely pictured on the frontispiece by Douglas Albion—in the magical country of the title. Their battle with Opal Tim and his desperate band for the security of this delectable region provides much of the excitement and the comedy of a tale which, read aloud, will hold children up to eight or nine, and with which older ones, up to 12 or 13, will be happy by themselves.