Life — July 27, 1916 — page 17: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Latest Books we books continue to tumble out of the presses on each other's heels, and we continue to make, with regard to them, the same sort of gestures with our minds that we make with our hands in passing through a cloud of gnats. But now and again one of them “gets through.” William J. Robinson's Fourteen Months at the Front” ( Brown, $1.00) is one of these. author is a young American in his carly twenties. He enlisted, in England, on the rebound from a lost job, in Septem- ber, 1914. His familiarity with mo- tor-eycles and automobiles led to his being detailed as a despatch and military chauffeur on various sections of the British front. And he writes of what he saw with exactly the kind of nonchalant nat- uralness that might have kept cager listeners crowded round him in the steamer's smoking room on the way home. rider HE title of Mr. Robinson's book sounds bromidic, but masks an exceptionally living narrative. “ Be- cause IT Am a German” (Dutton, $1.00), by Fernau, is, on the other hand, a title that suggests all sorts of possibilities in the way of getting inside the other fellow's skin and seeing how the world looks from there, but turns out to be the Herman THE SILENT PARTNER label on a bromide bottle. A long time ago (as we now reckon time) an anony- mous German writer published a book in Germany called “J’Accuse.” It“ jac- cused” the German government of being responsible for the war, and was sup- pressed. Mr, Fernau’s book is a discus- sion of the validity of Mr. Jaccuse’s jaccusing as to who threw the brick. = of the things that we notice about the war is that its individual de- velopments are forever “entering upon their second phase.” And the present season shows us that the same thing is “UN FEU D'AMOUR” fiction’s with happening in connection with contemporary lems of sex. and n preoccupation The scientists are the sap- pers ers in movements of this kind, and the abler novelists then follow and “ Thus Wells, Galsworthy, Dreisser, George, O'Sullivan fellows have been busy terms of fiction the new sex-understandings un- covered by scientific and chology. And now, this work being, for the moment, completed, the makers of plot-novels and the romanticists-by-for- mula are beginning to pour the new wine into their old bottles, It is the sec- ond phase. prob- organize the positions. Cannan, and re-stating in their biology psy ARWICK DEEPING'S “Bridge of Desire” (McBride, $1.25) is the old story of the model husband's mad infatuation for an adventures; of his elopement, disillusionment and repentance; and of his return and forgiveness. Its “ newness ” re- sides in the fact that the wife sizes the situation up psycho-biologically and hides the deserter’s defection while waiting to welcome him home. The tale is perfectly and non-erotic, but ridiculously ob- clean-minded sessed by a sort of intellectual sex- consciousness. IMA WOLF'S San Francisco romance, called “ Fulfillment” (Continued on page 167) comicbooks.com