MISCELLANY

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27094, 18 July 1953, Page 3

MISCELLANY

Karen. The Story of a Family. By Marie Killilea. The World’s Work. 254 pp.

A best-seller in America, this is a mother’s story of her family—and, in particular, of her daughter, Karen, who weighed under two pounds at birth and. when she was a year old, was diagnosed as a hopeless case of cerebral palsy. Mrs Killilea has written her book partly as an encouragement to other parents of spastic children. She describes the home-life of the family with Karen in their midst, how it affected the other children, how gradual and heart-warming success met their efforts to help the child, and how patience, tact, and a long course of educational therapy finally achieved sensational results. A spirit of cheerfulness and indomitable courage in the family, who were Catholics and greatly sustained by their faith, helped them over innumerable difficulties. Mrs Killilea tells the story with simplicity and charm and her book is a pleasure to read.

The Sudden View. A Mexican Journey. By Sybille Bedford. Gollancz. 288 pp.

Bored and irritated with America—irirtated even with air-conditioning, the American climate and American hospitality—Sybille Bedford (an Englishwoman) decided to take a holiday in Latin America. Peru had always had a romantic appeal for her, but travel to Mexico proving easier and a book on Mexico in the 1830’s procured from the Public Library proving irresistible, she decided on Mexico. She is a lively and witty writer, far from the conventional tourist, who extracts for her readers every ounce of entertainment that was to be had from the adventures and misadventures of her journey. She is as capable of providing analytic comments on Mexican history, the nonexistence of a Mexican middle-class, or the situation of the Indians or the peasantry in Mexico as she is of filling in the characteristic small details of Mexican life. Mexican food, Mexican hotels, a delightful Mexican “hacienda” —these things are vividly and humorously described. Mrs Bedford has a sharp eye and an enviable gift for reproducing conversation, and many odd and amusing characters come to life in her hands. She has civilised tastes and the satirist’s outlook on life; and this last is perhaps what gives her book of Mexican travel impressions a zest that is missing from many less personal and prejudiced but duller travel books.

The Cardboard Giants. By Paul Hackett. Gollancz. 309 pp.

Of the many books which have recently appeared by people who have had “inside” experience of mental institutions, this is one of the most moving and well-written. Paul Racket (the author’s real name) is an American, married with three young children, who spent a year in an asylum for soldiers who had served in the recent war. His descriptions of the ups-and-downs of his malady and the progress of his cure, the accounts of doctors, fellow-patients, nurses and orderlies are very vivid, the faithfulness and loyalty of his wife extremely touching. Mr Hackett has the ability to remember and reproduce conversations and suggest atmosphere, and the courage to write honestly. Most important of all, he is without bitterness.

The Glasgow Story. By Colin Brogan. Pictorial Aids by Keir. Frederick Muller. 223 pp.

Here is a lively and informative •book about Glasgow by one of its most talented sons. Colm Brogan meets head-on all the usual objections made to Glasgow—that it is “dirty, violent, alcoholic. Bolshie, dull, dreary, wet and windy,” and not worth seeing even during a change of trains. With a detachment admirable in the circumstances he defends Glasgow against her calumniators. His book is a model of its kind. A far cry from the guidebook or the official panegyric, it nevertheless covers every aspect of the place, the people, its culture, its politics, its architecture, its work, recreations and general character. He makes criticisms where these are just, but the whole effect of his witty and affectionate picture of Glasgow is to make the reader understand why “I Belong to Glasgow” is always sung with such spirit, even by people who have never been there.

In Spite of Blasphemy. By Michael Mourre. John Lehmann. 224 pp.

The confusions, the spiritual torments of a young Frenchman—even now only in his early twenties—are the background of this moving story. It is a biographical account of a young French intellectual, who, before he came of age, had seen the inside of a prison, had frequented existentialist cafes, written for political newspapers in France’s fermenting politics—and tried to become a novice in the monastic Order of St. Dominic. The story is by no means anti-religious, or even anti-Catholic, and it is strangely moving as a self-analysis of a gifted young man caught up in the stream of events in post-war life. Mr Mourre writes with intense feeling and yet the utmost lucidity, the English version being a tribute 10 his translator, A. W. Fielding. In Spite of Blasphemy is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea. but it is a powerful and attractive autobiography by a young man, who obviously has a gift for self-expression —even if he once gave it vent by entering the pulpit of Notre Dame during High Mass and shouting “God is Dead.”

THE EXPECTANT MOTHER (Whitcombe and Tombs, 122 pp.) is a practical handbook of advice to the expectant mother and the newly married written by a group of doctors and published under the auspices of the New Zealand Obstetrical and Gynaecological Society, with a foreword by Sir J. Bernard Dawson, K.B.E. It is particularly useful since it is throughout related to actual conditions and practice in New Zealand hospitals. Comprehensive, frank, and admirably informative, it treats the reader as if she is an intelligent person and answers all the most vital questions, large and small, that can occur to her about pregnancy, sex. contraception, labour and childbirth. Final chapters deal with the post-natal period, the feeding of the infant and preventive inoculations.