Fiction: Recent Books: Apr. 13, 1936

SOUTH RIDING—Winifred Holtby—Macmillan ($2.50). Framework of this comprehensive chronicle of a modern Yorkshire town is the decisions of a county council on education, highways & bridges, public health etc. The story follows these administrative acts out into the lives of the local citizens. A workmanlike book, the posthumous novel of an author who died last September.

Non-Fiction

ORDEAL BY HUNGER — George R. Stewart Jr.—Holt ($2.75). The grisly true story of the Donner Party, who went overland to California in 1846, took an unfortunate “short-cut,” were trapped by winter in the Sierras. Some of them kept going by turning cannibal. Forty-six of the 87 got through alive. With illustrations and maps.

WAKE UP AND LIVE !—Dorothea Brande —Simon & Schuster ($1.75). How the author transformed herself in two years from a hack into a bestseller, with the twelve rules that guided her and can help YOU to do likewise. Not as bad as it sounds.

THE RAPE OF AFRICA—Lamar Middleton—Smith & Haas ($3). Brief, graphic study in the European realpolitik (“60 years of duplicity and chicanery”) that has partitioned Africa among six land-greedy nations; with the suggestion that the crisis over Ethiopia is only a beginning.

Verse

MODERN AMERICAN POETRY; MODERN BRITISH POETRY — Louis Untermeyer — Harcourt, Brace ($3.50 each). Revised editions of two popular anthologies by a literary middleman who is still doing business at the old stand.

PUBLIC SPEECH—Archibald MacLeish —Farrar &Rinehart ($1). Eleven new poems by a Pulitzer-Prize poet (1932).

A TIME TO DANCE—C. Day Lewis— Random House ($1.75). A stout attempt to explain that the new poetry movement in England is not Communistic but individualistically Socialist, with some poems by Author Day Lewis as examples.