AMONG THE BOOKS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 13435, 13 March 1907, Page 9

AMONG THE BOOKS.

About the end of this month Messrs. Chatto will publish "The Curse of the Romanoffs," a " study of the reigns of the Tsars, Paul I. and Alexander I. of Russia, 1796-1825." The author is Professor Rappoport, who brings to his subject the authority of a trained student and the facilities which an imperfect knowledge of the Russian tongue has denied to many of his predecessors. Moreover, he is able to set out, for the first time, many hitherto unknown records gathered from the stores of the Bibliotheque Nationale, in Paris, and other sources.

Major-General Baden-Powell's " Sketches in Mafeking and East Africa" will be issued this month by Messrs. Smith, Elder. It is an informal record, profusely illustrated from a fertile sketch hook of the general's recent journey to South and Central Africa with the Duke of Connaught. Not only shall we see in its pages Mafeking as it was and as it is, but more remote places, such as Cecil Rhodes' grave, the Falls of the Zambesi, and the banks of the Victoria Nyanza.

If those books of Mr. Kipling, Mr. March Phillips, Mr. Upton Sinclair, Mr. G. F. R. Henderson, Professor Alfred Russel Wallace, and Mr. Wells can be said to be any way "not very up to date," it is only by comparison: we live at such a rate and bolt our literature in such a hurry that most of last season's books are already as finished with and forgotten as are last season's dinners. The half-dozen books that Sir A. Conan Doyle mentions are at least too recent and too outstanding for it to be necessary to add any explanatory footnotes to his recommendation of them. * It is pretty safe to say, by the way, that none who read Mr. Sinclair's first volume. "The Journal of Arthur Stirling, can have foreseen that the author of that sickly, sentimental, and weakly egotistical production had it in him to write so virile and wholly masculine a novel as "The Jungle." "I believe." she pursued, with polemic finality, "that from the very beginning of Creation, all the unrealisable ideas of a world occupied in getting on with its legitimate business have been shot into Ireland. . . . The Irish have always liberally entertained strangers, and they enjoy finding out all they can about them." She sighed, and reverted to her theme: " Thussitting down in rags before the unrealisable property flung into the vacant spaces of their minds, and suggesting beliefs to themselves, and making illuminating remarks upon their false premises, using up, in short, all their nervous energy in dressing up shadows, would appeal to them. So the material, prosaic, world goes on," she sadly declaimed, " and Ireland still squats and dreams in the valley of dead gods. Man was made for progress, Mr. Todd, and the man who dreams backward, as all the Irish do, is a dead weight upon the universe."—" Smoke in the Flame," by - lota."