Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Saturday 11 August 1945, page 10


Book News

WHILE SOME MELBOURNE

BOOKSHOPS are stocking books from abroad for" the planner of a new life after the war, especially books for the new-chum on the land, American publishers are bringing out a great rush of reorientation books," as they have been called, addressed to the former serviceman or war worker. The enterprising Messrs Simon and Schus-ter have published an omnibus, While You Were Away, which tells what was going on while the serviceman was overseas in American political, economic and social life. (8 and S's book happens to have the same title as The Argus booklet with a similar subject, published for Australian servicemen some months back.) Among American reorientation novels" is Zelda Popkin's The Journey Home, for which the author did her research on a railway day coach, interviewing returned men on the run from Florida to New York. Then Grace Livingston Hill's latest (her 93rd? her 98th?) is called A Girl To Come Home To.

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"Read Arthur Koestler and have a good cry intellectuals have been saying it for some years now. The latest publication by the author of The Yogi and the Commissar is a four-act play, Twilight Bar (no moaning please), of which the theme is that "the earth is the unhappiest of the planets." Koestler wrote the play, he says, "in a period of extreme depression."

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. Richard de Gallienne, a leading English literary figure of the 1890's, has survived the occupation in southern France and is sending the manuscript of a new book to a New York publisher. Le Gallienne, who has relations in Melbourne, is now nearly 80.

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY

PRESS hopes to publish in a few weeks The Renaissance and Other Essays, by Professor R. M. Crawford. Popular in approach, it attempts to remove misconceptions of the meaning of human and of the term Renaissance itself. Jack Cato has just finished the manuscript of his memoirs, cover-ing his experiences as a portraitphotographer among the eminent in London and Melbourne, as a traveller, and as a friend of Melba. . . . Brian Fitzpatrick, author of the two big problems British Imperialism in Australia and of a Short History of the Australian Labour Movement (second edition 1944), is putting the finishing touches to a popular history of Australia.

says I

have received a number of please explains" from readers of my statement, in a review of Grace Moore's You're Only Human Once, that to bring out all that is funny in the following might take several paragraphs: "He came of the genus joker practice calls, which some people can take or leave alone. I'm the last-named variety."

Without taking several paragraphs I would point out: One belongs to, not comes of, a genus; members of the same species, like Miss Moore and her friend, can't be members of different genera; "genus" should be "variety" "some people can take it; or leave it alone means "some people Save the craving well under control,"

p., some like it, some do not"; "last" home the "latter"; "variety" pointspl "genus."

Well, you asked for it. Of course the cream of the whole thing is the sudden occurrence, in a book by a dive of a passage that reads like an up-variously well-written bit of inflated, uneducated pub-talk. <

THIS WEEK a friend asked me if

any books have told of the specifications - hard facts, figures, and plans - whereby ballets have been handed down from generation to generation intact. As might be expected, the inquirer was a lecturer in engineering, but the ballet season may have prompted the same query else-where A work of this class has just arrived, The Ballet Called Giselle, by Cyril W. Beaumont (London: published by the author; Spencer's book-shop with full information on "book," costumes, choreography, production, and evolution over a century.

Three little books, with little-known Sydney imprints, are Leon Batt's Restless Poems, entitled Not For Fools" (Sydney: Pertinent Publishing Co; 5/), an attack on hypocrisy and injustice that will leave every reader feeling more righteous than before; Stephen Kelen's Camp Happy and Other Stories (Sydney: Panda Books), humorous and sentimental tales published in the better-known Sydney weeklies; and Flicks Daze, by Hartney Arthur (Sydney: Mulga Publications; 5/6), with drawings by Cedric Flower, which would show that the films of a generation ago were more inept than those of today.

While the standard of service reading is being stepped up by AES, Sec, a civilian accompaniment of CEMA is the publication in the June number of the Journal of the Clothing Trades Union of a sketch by John Steinbeck, a short story by the Englishman, Eric Knight, and a long review of Alan Marshall's These Are My People.

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Title of the year Lady Loverly's Chatter, a novelette, shortly to be published, by an American author, Marcel

Rodd.