PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21242, 24 January 1931, Page 4

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Whitaker’s Almanack has had various imitators, but none of them has successfully challenged its claim to be regarded as the most reliable of all books of reference concerning the , government, finances, population, commerce, and general statistics of the various nations of the world. The completeness and accuracy of the information that is furnished in it make it indispensable to any reference library. Nor are the compilers of ‘ Whitaker,” as it ia commonly called, content to rest on the laurels they have gained and on the features they have included in the volume in the past. Each successive issue provides additions to the stock of information which is, with painstaking care, compressed within its covers. The issue for 1931 contains many of these additions, which increase the comprehensiveness of the publication and enhance its value, “ Whitaker ” enforces its right to be regarded as the most important useful of the publications of the kind, and, published at 6s net, constitutes astonishing value. There are several articles in the December number of the Round Table that merit close attention. In one entitled “Where is Europe Going?" the argument is employed that Europe is at a parting of the ways, and that there are two conflicting tendencies, one leading back to the old pre-war balance of power, and the other to international co-opera-tion for peace. The slump in the United States and the Imperial Conference each forms the subject of an article, and a fourth, dealing with “ England in the Great Depression,” explains why a decline in prices hits Great Britain worse (than other countries. Articles follow on India, Russian Realities, the Crown and the Dominions, and other subjects. It is an unusually full number.

Prominence is given to Indian affairs, not only in the editorial survey of events, but in special articles in the December issue of the Empire Review. Other articles deal with Northern Rhodesia, constitutional changes in Egypt, fingerprints in Kenya, and the British lead against slavery, and the contributors are persons whose names are generally suggestive of authority. The January number of The Home, “ the Australian journal of quality,” is an admirably artistic issue. The reproduction by it of photographs, all of them well selected, places it on a peculiarly high level. - “ The Samoan Massacre ” is the title of a pamphlet the nature of which is sufficiently indicated by the statement in a foreword that “ the Western Samoa Mandatory Administration, in the early morning of December 28, 1929, without antecedent or occasional provocation, killed 15 (sic) natives and wounded some 50 others by the discharge, from rifles and machine gun, of expanding or dum-dum bullets.” The publication is issued by one C. W. Owen, who, formerly a resident of Auckland, now writes from Hobart. ■ _ , “ The Undoing of Palestine ” is an antiZionist pamphlet, consisting of the reproduction of three articles from the Patriot newspaper, which alleges that successive Governments in Great Britain were stampeded by Jewish influence into measures that ignored alike the claims of the Arab population in Palestine and the promises made to it on three occasions. We are in receipt of the New Zealand Society of Accountants’ Year Book, which, besides containing a full list of public and ’ registered accountants and standard rules for branch societies, supplies a verbatim report of the last annual meeting of the society. • . , , The December issue of the journal or the New Zealand Institute of Architects contains several articles which are more largely of technical than of general mThc Christmas number of the Strand Magazine is particularly interesting. Besides “ Sapper,” P. G. Wodehouse, H. do Vcre Stacpoole, and others who are numbered among the regular contributors to this magazine, and whose stories are always readable, Edgar Wallace supplies one of his crime-mystery tales, there is another posthumous story by Sir A. Conan Doyle, and Mr Winston Churchill writes entertainingly about M. Clemenceau. Ihe Strand contains also its novel features. Our copy is from Gordon and Gotcli. The early December issue of West, which is published in alternate weeks, contains a complete novel by Charles E. Barnes, and stories by G. A. Connor, R. S. Spears, R. M'Donald, A. de H. Smith, S. Omar Barker, and W. A. Sinclair. A Mexican tale by W. C. Tuttle is commenced, and an exciting story by B. Haycox is concluded, in this number. Our copy of West, which makes good railroad reading, comes from Gordon and Gotch. The New Zealand Stock Exchange Gazette, for February, begins an extension of the service rendered by the publication. Besides giving market quotations, with present returns on investments, of active stocks—the list of which is capable of expansion since it might be expected that a Stock Exchange Gazette would furnish the quotations of all listed stocks —it contains analyses of companies’ balance sheets and a page of useful notes on new flotations. The widened range of the publication increases its value to investors. The January issue of the New Zealand Financial Times is a very interesting number. Professor Toeker writes about the International Labour Conference which he attended at Geneva last year as a member of the New Zealand delegation, and “ Scrutator ” contributes a trenchant article with reference to the problem of unemployment which, he maintains, has been wrongly diagnosed in the Dominion and for which a remedy is being applied that is characterised by him as disastrous. The hints to investors generally follow on the line that the courageous investors should he able to double their capital in the rise in the prices for gilt-edged shares bought during the slump. “ Crcesus,” the •writer of the hints, says the best buying should probably be in October of this year, but this advice hardly seems to harmonise with the statement in the Financial Times’s “ message for 1931 ” that “ things will be booming in New Zealand not later than October.”