PAPERBACKS

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32322, 13 June 1970, Page 4

PAPERBACKS

Family Album. By Antonia Ridge. Faber., 254 pp.

Faber have brought out Antonia Ridge’s quiet novel about the middleaged schoolteacher, Miss Dorothy Durand, in a new, paperback, edition. The story of Dorothy’s very ordinary and unexceptional early life and career which is transformed when she visits Provence in search of her French relatives will please many new readers. The French people in the novel are ordinary small-town citizens, shop keepers, small hotel proprietors, football players, ribbon-makers, cures and among them, Dorothy finds the source of a new and revitalised life.

Thinking With Concepts. By John Wilson. C.U.P. 171 pp. Cambridge University Press has reprinted Mr Wilson’s very useful book in paperback. “Thinking With Concepts” was conceived as a text-book for use by British sixth-formers preparing for the General Paper for University Entrance, but it can be read with profit by a much wider audience than this; it is as valuable for any discipline as it is for the student of philosophy. Mr Wilson, who is the director of the Farmington Trust Research Unit at Oxford, sorts questions of a conceptual nature from those of fact and value, and offers valuable help in the analysis of arguments met with every day. The techniques of analysis which he succinctly describes have a wide application in argument.

Kings of Infinite Space. By Nigel Balchin. Pan Books. 224 pp.

Mr Balchin is always a competent craftsman who does thorough research into his subject. In this book (first published in 1967) Mr Balchin portrays vividly the human element involved in the men and women in the moon and other exploration projects. Unfortunately, however, the story does not go far enough. The main character, a physiologist, is investigating the effects of accumulated fatigue in the inhabitants of a space craft and continually hints at important findings which are never specified. The astronaut does not finally get off the ground and similarly the book remains on the launching pad with the full account yet to be written by an author who will explore the awe of man’s greatest challenge, for which the machines are carefully tooled but minds have developed to a more difficult level to analyse,