MISCELLANY

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 27990, 9 June 1956, Page 5

MISCELLANY

The Long Road Home. By Adrian Vincent. Allen and Unwin. 208 PP- ’ . - The author was made a prisoner of war at Calais in l r 4o, and remained in German hands until the liberation five years later. This book is a record of his experiences. It is an unusual story in that there are no heroes: in fact much of what happens reflects to no-one’s credit. It is an account of life in prison camps and on working parties, of bribery and corruption of camp guards, of illicit love affairs and of fantastic subterfuges to get out of camp. The best part of the book is a grim description of a death march, when as the Russians approached, for three months a column of men trudged across Germany and Czechoslovakia, a column continually thinned by frostbite, death by starvation, death at the hands of their captors, and finally, almost within sight of freedom, death from their own planes. The road home was long indeed. The tale is told in the first person with complete candour, and with no attempt to gloss over facts; it is alive with incident and a wry humour

Nationalism, Myth and Reality. By Shafer. Gollancz. 319 pp.

In spite of an apparently formidable panoply of learning, and no less than 70 pages of bibliography and notes, this historical analysis oi nationalism fails to impress. The author is an American historian who ‘‘believes that historical work may be enriched by the findings of other disciplines,” and has therefore summoned psychology, anthropology and biology to his aid. But even all this, combined with the labours of research students and the assistance of a massive reference file in the background whose existence makes itself felt throughout the work, produces little. Mr Shafer has, in the first place, no clear idea of his own attitude to nationalism. And although he attempts to make careful distinctions at the outset between nationalism and patriotism, and nationalism and the consciousness of nationality, he does not always observe his own distinctions. Nor does he oppose the idea of nationalism to the idea of internationalism, except in a somewhat sentimental concluding chapter entitled ‘‘Men are More Alike,” appealing to us all to forget our differences and remember our similarities. On this level, he mayconvert the odd “general reader” from the habit of making loose generalisations about the objectionable habits of foreigners, but he has nothing to offer the serious reader, still less the scholar.

The Television Annual For 1956 (Odhams Press).

Yes—it’s bound to come our way in the end. The economists will groan at the useless cost of it; sociologists will issue grave warnings of, its effect

on our children; the head of the family will grunt and sweat under another time-payment burden. New Zealand will get it: bye and bye. This book will show the curious what they may be in for. The British T.V. stars we see here may come to us, eventually, on film, and we may learn to love them. That the picture the book presents is one of frightening silliness is perhaps beside the point; and a similarly presented picture of Amen can T.V. would be much, much worse If you want to know all about whal the British viewer sees, here it is.