INFORMATION, PLEASE

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25833, 18 June 1949, Page 3

INFORMATION, PLEASE

CANADIAN SPY TRIAL Mr John Baker White, the Conservative M.P. for Canterbury, assembles in THE SOVIET SPY SYSTEM (Falcon Press Ltd. 133 pp.) a convenient summary of the Canadian spy trials proceedings of 1946 and some further evidences of the working of the Soviet intelligence system. There are documentary and other illustrations and a map. HEARING AIDS

Lowell Brentano’s WAYS TO BETTER HEARING (Allen and Unwin. 212 pp.) is intended “to provide for the. average man or woman who has sustained a definite loss of hearing the simple and practical facts that will help him to keep this loss from being a burden.” Dr. Arthur Wells, in an introduction, says there is “hardly a statement in the whole book” with which he does not completely agree. • LOCAL ADMINISTRATION

President of the International Union of Local Authorities, 1936-48, Mr G. Montagu Harris has written a wideranging survey of COMPARATIVE LOCAL GOVERNMENT (Hutchinson: University Library. 207 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.). It is practically world-wide in scope and a mine of information valuable to all students of local administration. CANADA Dr. Margaret McWilliams's THIS NEW CANADA (J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd. 328 pp.) is an excellent survey, especially good on the political and administrative side, of the development of modern Canada and of its present situation, social, economic, and legal structure, and problems. The book is admirably organised for reference, as well as continuous reading, and has some good illustrations. NATURAL BACKGROUND

Mr Keith C. McKeown, assistant curator of insects in the Australian Museum, Sydney, has been made aware, by many inquiries from teachers and their pupils and others, of the demand for “a general background to Australian nature study.” This he has attempted to supply in NATURE IN AUSTRALIA (Angus and Robertson. 235 pp.). the scope and design of which may be indicated by reference to chapters on the soil, the earth, the forest, the chain of life, the web of life, the search for food, the hunters, the hunted, and the quest for a mate. The book has little less substantive value in New Zealand than in Australia. It is very well illustrated. MIND OF THE BRUTE

Secretary of the Dutch Society of Sciences and late lecturer in Experimental Zoology in the University of Amsterdam, Dr. J. A. Bierens de Haan has written in ANIMAL PSYCHOLOGY: ITS NATURE AND ITS PROBLEMS (Hutchinson: University Library. 160 pp. Through Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd.) an admirable general introduction to the subject. It has absorbing interest, in particular, because, while man’s evolutionary ascent from “an ancestry mentally akin to animals such as are living now on earth” is generally acknowledged, it is impossible to narrow beyond a certain point the “broad rift between animals and man,” the one living in “the realm of the natural, the perceptual, the concrete only,” the other extending his to “the spiritual, the conceptual, the abstract.” QUININE In THE FEVER BARK TREE (W. H. ‘Allen. 251 pp.) Mrs M. L. DuranReynals presents “the pageant of quinine”—a phrase that will not please everybody; t but the book should thoroughly well satisfy every reader interested in the long and many-sided history of malaria and the discovery of quinine treatment. As she says, the modern discovery of anti-malarial synthetics has by no means made quinine treatment obsolete. This is a fascinating piece _of medical and international history. FARM WORKERS’ UNION

Reg Groves’s SHARPEN THE SICKLE (Porcupine Press. 256 ppJ is the history of the Farm Workers’ Union. But Mr Groves has written it broadly as a piece of social history, keeping his eye constantly on the mass of farm labourers and the conditions in which their efforts to organise and secure themselves were again and again bitterly frustrated. Most readers will be astonished when they, read that the settlement of the Norfolk strike of 1923 sent the men back to 25s a week. BEGINNING TO SAIL

Mr Aubrey de Selincourt, in SAILING: A GUIDE FOR EVERYMAN (John Lehmann. 142 pp.), sets out to explain, “in the briefest possible compass, the basic elements of the art of seamanship: those few things without a knowledge of which no man can take a boat to sea.” And he has tried to “dispel the illusion that in order to sail a man must be rich.” The book is illustrated with diagrams and pictorially by Guy de Selincourt.

After many personal bequests Mr A. E. W. Mason, the novelist and playwright, who died on November 22. left the residue of his estate to Trinity College. Oxford. He left £70.646 gross (£69.387 net), on which duty of £20,899 has been paid.