Books: Recent & Readable: Feb. 26, 1940

FINLAND — J. Hampden Jackson —Macmillan ($2).

Finland is a close-knit, informative background book on that smooth-run, rather smug nation which, through no fault of its own, history and world sentiment have made into this decade’s Brave-Little-Belgium. Finland, like every other nation, has faults as well as virtues; Mr. Jackson’s book gains usefulness in pointing both out. The much praised, much compromised agrarian reforms were put through to “wean the masses from Communism.” Trade-unions have little strength outside the towns; and Finland’s population is four-fifths rural, works by thousands in out-of-town factories. There is no unemployment insurance. The Finns, like most peasant people, are clergy-ridden: Lutherans have a 98% moral monopoly. On the credit side: No slums (no old towns), a relatively high standard of living, high literacy, fine technical schools, advanced architecture, relative advancement towards economic equality of the sexes, the famous cooperatives (a mixed blessing), world-beating athletes, Sibelius. Pre-Christian Finnish faith — Shamanism — centred in the magic power of words. It persists in the form of extreme literal-mindedness and legal-mindedness, goes far, Author Jackson suggests, to account for Finland’s remarkable political stability. Finnish civilization is described as “capitalism in peasant dress.”

INDIANS OF THE UNITED STATES — Clark Wissler — Doubleday, Doran ($3.75).

Packed into this 319-page volume is the best layman’s history of U. S. Indian tribes — where they came from ; wherein lay their wide tribal differences; who were their heroes and heroines, and why. Curator of Anthropology at Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, Indian Expert Clark Wissler well knows the typical ignorances, confusions and nonsense comprising laymen’s knowledge of neglected Indian history. Tenderfoot readers know, for example, that tobacco was an Indian innovation; but only a few experts know the far more interesting facts of Indian ceremonials and tradition connected with its use. Old stuff likewise is the fact that Indians introduced maize, potatoes, tomatoes; news to many will be the information that they also invented toboggans, snow goggles, hammocks, hollow rubber balls, the enema tube.

THE ART AND LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE — Hazelton Spencer — Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Hazelton Spencer is a scholar who knows how to write human English without being indecently “popular.” His book is a summary and evaluation of the known facts and of the more sound, or persistent, interpretations, on Shakespeare, his life, his medium, his work, what it means — and doesn’t mean — and how it is acted. Where there are no facts he makes no effort to invent any. His own remarks are distinguished by unusual common sense. The common sense changes Hamlet from Weltschmerz in tights to a gallant and proficient Renaissance prince; proclaims that Shylock cannot be whitewashed but is a definitely anti-Semitic creation ; underestimates such dull-acting but extraordinary poems as Troilus and Cressida, Coriolanus; insists the plays should be read aloud, staged with a minimum of scenery and business. There have been more brilliant and more monumental studies of Shakespeare. But for the general reader this is an almost ideally useful, informative companion volume to the plays, and guide to further reading.