18 WILMETTE. LIFE May 31, 1929 Comment on Current Books . By Arthur Wilford Nagler. New York The Abingdon Press. Dr. Nagler is Professor of Church HistQry m Garrett Biblical Institute, Evanston, Ill., which leads us to expect a high standard of work. His history is a student's handbook rather than a scholar's thesaurus, and has the qualities of terse and lucid statement which should characterize such a work. Perhaps its best claim to originality lies in its division of the subject into two parts: (l) an outline of the story from the beginnings of Christianity down to the present day; (2) a series of studies of different aspects cf Christianity as seen in its historical development. The institutions of the Church of today receive thus an interpretation such as only their historical ~ev~lopment can convey. -- _j . 1 ·___B_y_Es_th_e,..r_G_ou_Id_ _ _, BOOKS AND TRAVEL TravelCorner j THE CHURCH IN HISTORY. Teltpbont for Your Boob Wilmette J700 No Love David Garnett Alfred A. Knopf .......· $2.50 A Wild Bird A Story of India, by Maud Diver Houghton, Mifftin ~ Co... $1.50 THE BOYS' LIFE OF JOHN BURROUGHS. By Dallas Lore Sharp. Century. This is a really excellent biographical sketch of one of the great figures in our American relationship with the woods, the bir~s. and nature generally. Burroughs has often been sentimentaiized, but here he emerges as a kindly, very human figure, full of quirks and indecisions, but driving nevertheless always toward his goal of a better adjustment between man and his natural eitvironment. He had a great capacity for friendship and this enriches his biography also, for Whitman, of whom he was one of the earliest ~nd staunchest admirers comes in, and Roosevelt, and many more. It is a book strongly. to be recommended to YO!!ng people who love the woods, and can profit by a sense of the tradition of love and enjoyment and better knowledge which men like Audubon and Thoreau and Burroughs have carried on. -INDIAN HEROES. ·By}. Walker MeSpadden. Crowell. This is the sort of book which each young generation demands be rewritten for it in the light of the time in which it appears. All the stories have been told many times, with no other excuse than that they are worth tetling. If Mr. McSpadden brings no new light of history to bear upon +he incidents he does bring, perhaps, a more human feeling toward the heroes of his selection. The selections are excellent and inelude among the well known names of Pocahantas, King Philip, and Tecumseh, others less familiar, Squanto the friend of the Pilgrims, and Tammany the friend of \Villiam Penn with whom. was made the treaty "never sworn to and never broken." In old accounts of the chief of the Lenapes, he is sometimes referred to as St. Tammany or Taman~nd, the "Well-thoughtof," who came as near to canonization as any Indian who ever lived, so far as veneration can do that for ~ny man. The various lives of heroes are selected to give wide geographical reference and historical sequence from the arrival of the white men at the · 1 d f M h h f ts an o an attan to t e capture o Geronimo, the last of the warlike Apaches. The book is competently '11 t t d d h ld 1 1 us rae an ou I d. prove .t. t s th l'b a · wef come a dd1 ton o e n tan 1 rary o · h'ld A every mencan c_ 1_ . That Capri Air Edwin Cerio Harper ~ Brothers ....... $3.5~ Duskin Grace Livingaton Hill Lippincott ....·........ $1.00 The Graphic Bible from Gtntsis to Rtvtbtions in animated maps and cbans. · Lewi1 Browne Macmillan ............. $1.50 According to the Cardinal The Rollicking Chronicles of Toucbard-Lafosst. Tranal4ted by G. S. Taylor Macru-Smitb ....·.·.·.· s3 . 50 Mr. Billingham, the Marquis and Madelon E. Phillip· Oppenheim Little, Brown ~ Co ..··..· $1.00 Arturo Toscanini Tobia Nicotra Alfred A. Knopf ··.·.·.· $3.50 also, he . frequently rememb~rs that he is writing for youth- at times he is even convinced that his readers are aged eight or ten and talks to them in that friendly, elderly way we have with other peoples' children. The e.xigencies of his subject, however, dtscourage continuous converse with the eager eyes of childhood. When he becomes involved in the discussion of oil pressure, draught, cylindrical wick, or continuous current he undoubtedly sees before him the high school boy in his first term of physics, just as Christri1as is about to bring him the Popular Science Monthly. But Dr. Hough's vacillati<?n matters not at all; rather it extends the range of his readers. As a perefctly grown up child, I read the little book twice, not for the sake of telling "The Chitdren's Bookshop" about it, but for interest in the storv it develops: How fire came to us-Lights in the nightThe coming of cattle and the candleLamps that light history - Electricjty gives us tight-Savage cooks-The kettie boils and the fire goes out-Onward to matches-Clay hardens in th~ fire-Fire grasps ir01i - The age of steel. -Richard Halliburton · has completed his spring lecture tour and is now hard at work on his new book, "New Worlds to Conquer," material for ~hich he secured last year on hi South American jaunt. The book wilt probably be published in December. -THEY WERE . SO YOUNG. By . Achmed Abdullah. Payson & Clarke. · Here is a jolly good romance-the expression is used advisedly, for "They Were So Young" has just the sort of mce young British hero that mspires such expressions, and it is besides jolly as well as good. We are asked to believe that m Central Asia, in a region where, if . you are interested en9ugh to follow up the geographical indications on the map, you will find that there is actually a desert, lies to-day a kingdom ruled pver, !ike Sarawak, by a British royal house. The young white sultana at her accession finds her throne in danger, and of course, finds friends to help her. Then come intrigues, "underground railroads" through India, a war of cavalry charges instead of trench fighting, all the incident and color that any reader could want. -Select Documents froh1 Queen Anne's Reign. Down to the Union with ScotlaPd, 1702-7. Selected and Edited by G. M. Trevelyan. The Gardener's Colour Book M ra. Franca King and John Fothergill Alfred A. Knopf .·. ·..... $).oo Myths After Lincoln Lloyd Lewu Harcourt. Bract ~ Co..... $3.50 Wolf Solent Simon ~ John PoWyl Schuster, 2 vols.·· Ss.oo THE STORY OF FIRE. By \Vatter LORD'S-BOOKS Jut ln.ult th. W11t Davil Stred Door Hough. New York: Doubleday, Doran. "The · Story of Fire" by Walter Hough, the ·head of the Department of Anthropology of our Smithsonian Institution, is a direct-to-the-girl-andboy book. Dr. Hough is an authority and writes as such. Quite p1easantl.v, . 1'here is surely no better way to prepare one's self for visiting a foreign city than to read about it. People by reading, alone, have become mor~ familiar with the twists and turns, the historic ston~~ and great buildings of London than those who live there habitually. Yet the best thing to read · is not the usual travel or guide book. These, except for a few of the rarest, are to me exquisitely depressing. They give the husk without the kernel. They tell you where you are supposed to be thrilled withcat being able to give more than the merest hint of why you should be thrilled. Among the slightly better than the usual run of these, is Sisle'y Huddleston's "Paris Salons, Cafes and Studios." It is a rather rambling structure, but it contains names, anecdotes, the chitchat which is passed on now and then from the inner to the outer circle. It is impregnated, however, by that sigh, "There were giants in those days," which is inevitable in this kind of book, since by the time these intangible connection~ or 2roups have become self-conscious enough to be written about they are gone. It is only in the last stages that such things are recognizable. The artistic groups of today will be written about with a sigh tomorrow. But a book which cries out to be read before going to Florence or Italy., anywhere, for ·that matter, is Rachel Annand , Taylor's briUiant, explosive work, "Leonardq the Florentine." Convinced as she was that Leonardo was closely connected with and deeply influenced 'by his time, Mrs. Taylor has taken passionate care in building up a picture of that time. She has built a picture such as has never been done before, for color, for the extravagance which was the very keynote of that incomparable Renaissance .period. Speaking of the Florentines, she says, "Those insatiate eyes had an organic craving for elaborate shifting patterns of sight and soundJ and the sumptuous solidities of pomp in the sun and air, like the physical craving for food and love. Those Greecedrunken minds at any moment threw mythic apolog~es, :rose and white friezes, against the purple evening ... They desired the masquerades because they were solutions of colour, music, sweet lighted faces, rainbow wings and gilt armour, sweet fading words." Lo.ng study and real scholarship .as well a~ artistry have gone to the wnting of this beautiful book on one of the most baffling minds and most intriguing ages of all time. TRAVELS IN FRANCE DURING For London, so different from FlorTHE YEARS 1781, 1788, and 1789. ence and Italy, one of the best recent Edited by Constantia Maxwell. By books, it seems to me, is Lytton Arthur Young. Strachey's "Elizabeth and Essex." Here DEEP SEA BUBBLES. By Henry once again, Strachey has proved that H. Bootes. D. Appleton and Com- he, too, can reconstruct an age and a pany. character. He has made Elizabeth and THE KINGDOM OF LU. By Maurice Essex and the court pass before ~s ':s Magre. Cosmopolitan. in a magic mirror, the mirror wh1ch ts PAGAN INTERVAL. By Frances h'15 Winwar. The Bobbs Merrill Comsty1e. It is not the cold, prim Elizabeth, T~~YPOWER THAT WINS. By which Mr. ' Strachey gives us, but the full-blooded queen who swore, who Ralph Waldo Trine. The Bobbs Merrill Company. spat, who laughed tremendously w~en she was amused. It is also the Ehza-beth who spoke fluent Latin, who read Publication of Henry Jus tin Smith's and Lloyd Lewis's book," Chicago·, The Greek, who danced superb.ly,, who wrote exqut.st'te prose. And 1t 1s the History of Its Reputation" has been vJ'rgin of fifty-three who fell in love withheld until next September. lt was f stated in a recent issue that the title of with the charming adorable Essex o the book is "Chicago; Its Amazing twenty, and whose long intrigue with HistQry." Word was received from Mr him , turned at last into the strange Smith correcting this statement. ·. baftting struggle, jnextricably and d.i~astrou_sly mixed with politics and rothtary history, until it ended upon !he Mr. and Mrs. Herbert ]. McDivitt, block. A London seen after readmg 619 Seventh .s!reet, have as their this book of Mr. Strachey's is one enguests over this week-end, Mr. and riched by a whole chapter of vivid Mrs. Russell Chapman of Toledo, Oh' · 10. h' ts t ory. ...