Search

The article focuses on the book "The Middle of the Journey," by Lionel Trilling. the book presents information about the political commitment of intellectuals. The chief protagonist, John Laskell, the liberal, crossing the perilous Dantean decade in which risks, doubts and challenges of a man's life declare themselves and his personality first begins to contract into limitations and decisions to which it is fated. He is a fortunate young man of the middle class who has disciplined his privileges by an earnest if skeptical liberal faith. He has become, after earlier creative leanings, an authority on housing, so justifying in his own mind the social bearings of his political sympathies.

In the article, the author focuses on the cost and standard of living, and plight of the poor in the U.S. All the wonderful things they see or of which they hear are apparently not for them. They have no material, constructive sense. They are not quick at figures, nor are they clever with their hands. They can only think and write, in a way. They see the vast institutions, filled to overflowing, apparently, with the financially interested and capable, but they have not the least idea how to do likewise. They have never earned more than thirty-five dollars a week.

The article focuses on two books: "Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad" and "The Crazy Fool," by Donald Ogden Stewart. There are men sufficiently acute to recognize the aesthetic principles, which demand that people should laugh at Stewart's latest ventures in humor because "the Haddocks' souls are filled with the tag-ends of modern life and stuffed with the mythology of the daily papers," or even because "Stewart's story is really an excursion into the subconscious of the average 'solid citizen' and his wife." Neither of the books contain the heady stuff of Stewart's earlier books. But at least "The Crazy Fool" is impressionism sufficiently modified to be recognizable both in its achievement and its intent.

The article presents information on a series of articles on various people's and their perspective of the world. The author does not long for a perfect world. It sounds flat. The author remembers reading, some years ago, "Men Like Gods," by K. G. Wells. In that Welisian Utopia everybody was beautiful, polite and shiny. Nature glittered. The roads were, the author believes, made of platinum, or some such high-priced stuff and there was no traffic problem. No corner cop fixed one with a baleful eye as he shamed one before the crowd.

The article focuses on the book "Pictures in Prose," by Aubyn Trevor-Battye. In this volume, which deals with "nature, wild sport, and humble life." Battye has collected some papers which have appeared in "Longman's Magazine" and the "Saturday Review." His title is to some extent misleading, for he is easily moved to verse, and not a few of his pictures are presented in metrical form. The first, and perhaps the best, of his pictures shows the busy life of a trapper and lumberman in a Scandinavian forest, and tells with much pathos how a favorite daughter lost her way and was found by her frantic father killed by one of his own dead-fall traps. Then the scene shifts to England, to the strange little island of Canvey, little known to Londonors.

The article presents information on the book "In Search of a Way of Life," by Edgar E. Singer. Naturalism as a philosophic outlook is repeatedly dismissed, with varying degrees of vehemence and condescension, as insensitive to genuine spiritual values and to the grandeurs and tragedies of human existence. And it is almost fashionable in some quarters to blame nearly all the current ills of on the habit of thought which takes its standards of evidence and truth from modern science. An adequate scheme of life, according to Singer, is a dedicated life, one which involves the subordination of human desires to a supreme objective that is valid for all men at all times.

Presents the poem "Laboratory Still Life," by Mark Van Doren.

The article presents information about Bao Dai, a semi-autonomous member of the French Union. Bao Dai was born in 1916 as prince Vinh Thuy, the first son of Khai Dinh, Emperor of Annam. The court of Annam had been implicated in the unsuccessful uprising of 1916, and Albert Sarraut, France's High Commissioner in Indo-China, thought that a pro-French emperor could be molded by having Thuy educated in France. During the most formative years of his life, from the age of six to sixteen, the young prince received the education of a purely decorative French aristocrat.

The article reports on socio-political developments around the world. The honor which has fallen upon the name of scholar of Peru, Antonio Raimondi, exalting him as much as he has distinguished the country in whose service the labors of his life were given, is an example of the just reward of self-sacrificing devotion to a high ideal, notable because the merits of his services were recognized before their fruit had fully matured in the sight of the world and because he had done his work with heroic courage in the face of innumerable difficulties and perils, with no prospect of fortune and uncertain of success and fame. The second volume of Barras's Memoirs is full of details respecting what may be called the domestic life of- the government of the Directory, its gossip makes one think at times of the conversations and stories of the servants in some great house. The police of the Directory were as active in Italy as in France.

The article focuses on results of a study, which was published under the title "The College Influence on Student Character," in March 1959 by the American Council of Education. At the end of the survey the author found students to be a "paradox in parenthesis." The author used the word "parenthesis" because, over and over again college students told the research team that, in their opinion, the content and form of higher education are not sufficiently related to the rest of life, nor is education genuinely relevant to their concerns. Because of this, students tend to regard the four years of college as a parenthesis setting off a time in which they can perhaps enjoy themselves for the last time before "real maturation" sets in.

The article presents information on the long life of the present generation. A doctor in Sweden recently stated that the life expectancy of that country's citizens might be one hundred years by the end of the century. The average age in United States today is seventy years. There are 15,000,000 men and women over sixty-five in the United States today, as compared with 3,000,000 in 1900 and the rate is now increasing at an estimated half million a year which means that approximately 2OO0 people a day are joining the ranks of Americans over sixty-five.

The article presents information on various developments related to various issues. The comparative accord with which the Security Council has accepted the U.S. resolution on Greece is more than welcome, though there should be no pretense that the terms of reference are broad enough to enable the United Nations to reach a solution of the real problem of Greece. Accepting the situation in that country as it is now, without reference to original responsibilities, it is certain that the present government is unrepresentative, tyrannical, and incompetent to lead Greece toward a prosperous and democratic way of life.

If Enrico Caruso were alive today he would be seventy-two years old. He died in 1921, at the age of forty-eight, the greatest singer of his own and perhaps of all time. To the people who were fortunate enough to hear him from the stage, he remains, after all these years, a unique recollection; but even for those who know his voice only from recording, it is still a present wonder. In Caruso's case there was, first, the anguish simply of being a singer-of having as one's instrument one's own body, so that added to the not uncommon anxieties for the flesh, there was the uncommon invitation to identify flesh and art.

This article presents information about socio-political developments around the world as of August 26, 1909. The most recent advices from Stockholm indicate pretty plainly the failure and impending collapse of the Swedish strike. Saint Nicholas for September 1909 prints a number of brief essays by boys and girls, written in a prize competition, upon the theme "My Favorite Season--and Why." Their excellence consists in their spontaneity and in their natural, unsophisticated analysis of their delight in the out-of-doors life. The present races of golfers are among the most equable-tempered and well poised of mortals.

The life of a college professor, once regarded as one of serenity and security, is anything but that nowadays. He is assailed by preachers and patriots until his only safety lies in not having any opinions and in confining his teaching to the multiplication-table. During the last few years there have been at least three lines of attack upon the independence and self-respect of teachers both in colleges and in the public schools. During and just after participation in the World War there was a surveillance of teachers with a view to driving out those of pro-German, pacifist, or radical sympathies.

This article presents a discussion on life. Initially, one must differentiate must be made between life in the sense of not being physically dead, and life in the sense of awareness and vitality. Obviously, everybody who is not dead is alive. And all experience of alive people is a part of life in its broadest interpretation. But there seems to be an ascending scale of values in life, and somewhere in this scale there is a line below which one more or less exists, and above which one more or less lives. Secondly, one must examine the distinction that is drawn between physical and mental living.

Presents several letters to the editor. Discussion on bicycle in the service of scouting; Comments on human beings and philosophical aspect of life; Discussion on the word "respectable."

The article presents information on two books on W.B.Yeats. The books are "W.B. Yeats: 1865-1939," by Joseph Hone. "The Poetry of W. B. Yeats." by Louis MacNeice. The felicity of the life of a genius can never be recognized until the event of his achievement. His work alone justifies his acts. It is the book of Yeats's life rather than its image that Mr. Hone has set himself to write, as it was the symbolic image, in its fullest derivation and reference, that concerned Mr. MacNeice in his recent study of the poetry.

The article comments on the American reaction to the Palestine remarks made by the British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin at Bournemouth, England. Bevin would have ventured it if he were not casting about for an alibi to cover his own failure to meet the issue. Also when he says that if one has to raise the Arabs' life to the standard of the Jews, one cannot do it if one take away their land. Bevin has demanded to the Jews and Arabs to lay down their arms. Reading this, one realizes how little Bevin has learned from the inquiry, indeed from the long record of British colonial policy, he still believes that order is a prerequisite to policy, an idea easily converted into the theory that order is a substitute for policy.

The article presents information on the author's experience of meeting William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury. Temple's death, the author feels, has robbed Great Britain not only of its ablest and most courageous churchman but of one of the most brilliant of its statesmen. Though the perfection of his gifts was unique, their essential quality was so typically British that an appreciation of the man and his work gives an American the possibility of seeing some important qualities of British life in vivid and personal terms.

The article discusses the book "What Is Living and What Is Dead of the Philosophy of Hegel," by Benedetto Croce. Among the results of the war is the remarkable extent to which certain philosophical theories, simplified by rumor and reduced almost to the dimensions of a formula, have been indicted as ultimately responsible for all that has happened. This is no doubt in some measure due to a wholesome sense of the power of thought in history—in part it is an expression of the intelligible but entirely erroneous instinct to seek definite and easily distinguishable causes for overwhelming issues.

The article focuses on personal life of Samuel F.B. Morse when he conceived the idea of the electric telegraph. Then in 1832 Morse's life renounced a distinguished past. He was forty-one years old, a successful portrait painter, founder and president of the National Academy of Design. His life had been a broken one. In those days, a portrait painter was perforce an itinerant. He had not been able to live for any long time at home, and after nine short years of married happiness his young wife had been torn from him by sudden death, and their three children had gone to relatives.

The article presents the eleventh of a series of anonymous articles giving the personal backgrounds of a group of distinguished women with a modern point of view. The author's home had in it absolutely no verbotens and our family grammar contained no imperative. The five boisterous children absorbed the spirit of mutual consideration without injunctions or commands. Educational opportunities in the back-water communities where they were obliged to live were so slim that their parents were deeply absorbed in the problem of their education. It was the most logical thing in the world that she should join in the militant suffrage activity at Washington, do her time in jail and win her badge of honor.

The article informs about the life of coal miners. The mine office is a square frame house, three rooms and a front porch, with a broad view of the mountains from three sides; in front are the tipple, the cars being loaded with coal, the shops, the men about their work. One might see Jim Pasko out there, a huge man, walking with a certain jerkiness toward the shaft to be let down into the pit to work. Mike Monarch, one of Jim's buddies, came into the office this morning and borrowed ten dollars from the Super. Mike is a stout Bulgarian who has worked here off and on for a decade.

This article focuses on the people who are blessed with good humor. There are people in the United States who have the enviable privilege of being continuously entertained. They are always sure of at least one thrill or laugh every day the Lord sends. At least thirty times a month they find opportunities for laughter or experience that skipping-a- beat of the heart, the chilly spasm, the catch at the throat, the loss of speech that accompany the honest-to-goodness thrill. They are used to it now. They couldn't escape it and slip into the bored existence of their fellow-citizens even if they wished to. There are those in this group, of course, who have tired of this life of excitement and fun.

The article presents information on the book "The Amenities of Home." A book in the main so sound in theory and always so admirable in intention as "The Amenities of Home," must do good, even though sometimes smart rather than clever. Perhaps this is to suggest a limitation rather than a fault in the book. Whatever may have been the author's own experience, she has chosen to describe the life of the easy-going newly rich, and a very unpleasant picture it is. Doubtless the parvenus to whom the book seems addressed are beneath it, and it is easy to fall into sentimental views on the subject.

The article presents information about the book "More Changes, More Chances," by Henry W. Nevinson. "The glory called life" and "the still, sad music of humanity" in these clashing phrases, taken from the closing paragraphs of book, one has the authentic interpretation of the man called Nevinson and of all his works. "In spite of all that man has done to strip the earth of her wild beauty," life is still to him "the vision splendid." His hope that he may live to write of the last twelve years of war and reconstruction will be passionately echoed by all who have the good fortune to follow changes and chances that he has so enchantingly related.

The article presents information on a tax-reduction plan that was advertised in the newspapers. Correspondence was invited. The appeal caught the eye of William J. Halperin of Mount Vernon, New York, who had been exercising his ingenuity trying to attain the good life on a salary of $45 per week. It filled him with hope and cheer, but being a young man with an unfortunate thirst for knowledge he wanted to find out what made the wheels go round and through what specific channels would these rewards and fairies come.

The American delegates to the Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work went to Stockholm in August 1925. The feeling of lack of unity was partly due to the dissent of the German delegation. It was a delegation and not merely a group of delegates as the Americans were, for example. The Germans soon let it be known that they did not share the hope that had presumably brought all people to Stockholm, the hope of a better world here and now. They were as other-worldly as American fundamentalists, and they clung to this pessimistic attitude with a stubbornness that was now only wistful and now almost bitter.

The article presents information on the book "Woodrow Wilson: The Man, His Times, and His Task," by William Allen White. White has been so prominent in the American Progressive movement that high expectations are aroused when he writes the life of one who, was the foremost national leader of his time. Unfortunately, serious obstacles have prevented him from answering two of the most important questions which the reader asks about Wilson. White's own political experience might have enabled him to picture the growth of Wilson's political views, but he fails to do so.

The article focuses on the author's defense of cowardice. In my life of nearly twoscore years I have been afraid of every mishap that can overtake a man in earth, air and water. I have been afraid of swimming, afraid of riding, afraid of shooting, afraid of fighting. I have been afraid of being bitten and afraid of being scratched, afraid of being butted and afraid of being pecked. This being as it is I find that my sympathies incline toward creatures of my own kidney. I like to witness little scenes of cowardice. I like to see people betray the amiability of their natures and their love of life by climbing trees, hesitating behind doors or in any other way hurrying to cover from jolls and jars of the world.

The article focuses on two books — "Old Indian Trails," by Walter McClintock and "The Red Man in the United States," by G.E.E. Lindquist. With scrub growth the Indian historian of the twentieth century has largely to deal, and "The Red Man in the United States" may inaugurate an era in which the present hybrid social and economic life of wards will receive more attention than their legendary past. This survey is not a work of science. If New York were enveloped and destroyed by an alien army, many individual New Yorkers would survive and recreate a new personal life.

The article discusses various books. As a man is wise his thoughts turn to the future. The child, the savage, the wastrel live for the moment. The most original part of Austin Freeman's book "Social Decay and Regeneration," is the endeavor to prove that societies, like germs, have a life cycle. "The Trend of the Race," is filled with figures and tables, one is inclined to paraphrase a popular epigram and to say that there are romances, great romances and statistics. The thesis of "The Control of Life," is that science is for life; that is, it is like the kingdom of heaven, to be sought first and foremost for its own sake, though to him who seeks all other good things shall be added.

This article focuses on two books, "The Challenge to Sirius," by Sheila Kaye-Smith and "The Great Hunger," by Johan Bojer. The theme of "The Challenge to Sirius," is that every human life a challenge. "The Challenge to Sirius," is a life story. It escorts a human being not quite from the cradle to the grave, but from a dreaming childhood to that hour when, past his middle years, the man finds himself. The motive of "The Great Hunger," is not dissimilar to that of "The Challenge to Sirius," but the atmosphere of the book is that of the clear, in contrast with the misty, scented, sluggish airs of Kaye-Smith's work. In the boy Peer, illegitimate son of a good-natured town gentleman and a light woman, is mysteriously born the hunger for some ultimate good which shall justify his existence.

The article presents information on the book "Pells the Conqueror Daybreak," by Martin Andersen Nexo. The fourth and last volume of "Pelle" is before him, the English reader may well feel moved to reread the earlier volumes, which have appeared at considerable intervals, in order to test or to refresh his impression of the work as a whole. The very fact that each of these volumes taken by itself showed uncommon stability and definition-was, in a sense, a "complete story" may have tended to obscure its place in the tetralogy. "Jean-Christophe," with which "Pelle" challenges comparison in several respects, is only intelligible in the light of its conclusion; its division into parts, whether the ten parts of the original or the four parts of the English version, is arbitrary.

The article focuses on the book "Robert Fulton, Engineer and Artist: His Life and Works," by H.W. Dickinson. The biography has been written to do justice to a famous inventor, who has, perhaps, been overestimated by American biographers and has not received proper credit from English writers. When it is recalled that Fulton spent some of the most important years of his life in England, it is not so surprising that one should be indebted at last to an English writer for an impartial survey of his life.

The article discusses the book "Life of St. Francis of Assisi," by Cuthbert Dunne. According to the article the mystic of all ages has held that life itself cannot be adequately measured by the mere logical faculty of the mind, but only by the intuition of the whole personality when attuned to the truth by moral as well as mental discipline. This book is the first scholarly English biography of St. Francis. The article points out that the book moves surely and rightly, but not without a certain sharpness of change from scene to scene.

The first two of writer Brian Moore's four novels The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and The Feast of Lupercal could have been called Belfasters. Moore's earliest fiction is born out of the second world of Dublmers, that of the objectivity unworthy. In Moore's work awareness is paralysis. To discover oneself is to make visible the invisible shackle, which was always there. The one thing impossible to contemplate is change. Every recognition, every epiphanic moment is confirmation of life's hopelessness.

In the course of his long wanderings the Drifter not unnaturally ran across Thomas A. Edison on more than one occasion. The last time he called upon him he found him so deaf that communication had to he by means of a pad and pencil, but the kindliness of the man was in evidence then as always. Down to his last day there was something childlike and charming about him. He had too, the inventor's belief in the complete success of each and every invention. Several stories of Edison's earlier life have stuck in the Drifter's memory. He remembers how Edison proposed to his first wife. He had been courting her in the parlor of a mid-Victorian boarding-house and there seemed to be no other place where they could meet. Again and again Edison came only to find the parlor full of the other boarders.

The article presents information on the book "The Immortal Ninon," by Cecil Austin. The story is like this, shortly before he died the father Henride Enclos left his twenty two-year-old daughter a small dowry to live on and a neatly compact philosophy to live by. "You probably have many years to live," he said. "Make full use of them. Have no scruples as to the number of your pleasures but be fastidious in your choice." And, as became a dutiful child, Ninon faithfully executed her dying father's injunction for more than sixty years.

The article focuses on the book "The Allinghams," by May Sinclair. May Sinclair's predilection for taking her characters from the cradle to maturity, if not the grave and her fondness for watching them approach the bright edge of madness alike find scope in this new novel. There were six Allingham children, born with beauty and brains in a home of comfort and loving tyranny. Sinclair sketches them with a few revealing strokes, as they sat about the tea-table with Father and Mother and Aunt, one bright afternoon of the midsummer holidays of 1893. Then in the brief lucid chapters which follow she flashes the picture as each child in turn begins to try his wings to escape the nest and embark on a life of his own.

The article discusses the book "The Case of Mr. Crump," by Ludwig Lewisohn. Lewisohn's hideously powerful novel is a story of the unequal conflict between a creative artist and the vulgar entanglements of his disordered life. Herbert Crump, a promising young composer, comes from his quiet home in a little Southern city to the sordid loneliness of a New York boarding house and there, in the bleakness of his spirits and without realizing the extent to which he is committing himself, drifts into an alliance with a vulgar woman standing upon the brink of middle age.

Presents the poem "Death As Basilisk," by Ben Belitt.

Presents the poem "Prelude," by Conrad Aiken.

People could be annoyed by the U.S. inventor Cyrus McCormick suddenly leaving the room, as if they were not there, without farewell; and in the midst of their annoyance they could love him. The corresponding political truth about him is that while he liked and loved people, his personal feelings about them had no influence upon his politics or policies. He had lived in his boyhood much abroad. He had gone to school abroad. He had been given the sort of upbringing, which changes many Americans into hybrid Europeans. He remained always irreconcilably an American.

The article focuses on the book "Collected Poems," by Edwin Arlington Robinson. This single solid volume holds without crowding all but a few lines of the verse into which one of the acutest of Americans has distilled his observations and judgments during thirty studious, pondering, devoted, elevated years. According to the author, never once does Robinson show any signs of having withdrawn his attention from the life passing immediately under his eyes; but he has no more frittered away his powers in a trivial contemporaneousness than he has buried them under a recluse abstention from actualities: he has, rather, with his gaze always upon the facts before him, habitually seen through and behind them to the truths which give them significance and coherence.

Presents the poem "At a Country Hotel," by Howard Nemerov.