PUBLIC LIBRARIES

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 66, 14 September 1940, Page 19

PUBLIC LIBRARIES

BOOKS OF THE WEEK

The City Librarian has chosen "So Perish the Roses," by-Neil Bell, as the book of the- week and has furnished *$£&*«s££ Lamb makes splendid material for the biographical novelist. The legend of Lambs silliness, so oddly at variance with his varied strengths, has made many regard him with tolerance as a somewhat feckless oddity; while acknowledging, sometimes with surprise, his pre-eminence as an essayist. Mr. Bell shows the truth as somewhere between the two views: the oddity as a gem Us. but of the kind which is so closely allied to madness: he shows us Lamb as a man who savoured life so fully that he found himself at a comparatively early age. . ■ Lamb's relations with his sister form a chief theme of the book, and Mary Lamb emerges from these pages perhaps in a juster light, and a more sympathetic one, than from those of other commentaries. The essayist's relations with Emma Isola, his ward, too, are handled with taste and sympathy; for with all the emotion, tragedy, and suffering with which any biographer of Elia has to deal, Mr. Bell avoids the pitfall of sentimentality. This is a book, as the author explains, which he has always wanted to write: and he has given a most convincing picture of latent genius, always acknowledged yet never fulfilled on the grand scale: and containing something almost feminine in its intuitive perceptions. < RECENT LIBRARY ADDITIONS. Other titles selected from recent accession lists are as follows: —General: "It Might Have Been You," by C. Knox; "Journey Into China," by V. O. Cressy-Marcks; "Suez and Panama," by A. Siegfried. Fiction: "Malice in Wonderland," by N. Blake; "The Singing Flame," by J. Armstrong; "But You Are Young." by J. Lawrence.