Life — February 15, 1917 — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

272 The Latest Books, ‘OU can spend ten profitable minutes on a train with almost anyone. Ten hours is different. Ten days’ companion- ship aboard ship is an acid test. Ten weeks together in the interior of China 1s equal to a thousand. Short of mar- riage (which is slower and can't be played “ stag") the most drastic trying- out process known to human beings is traveling together—even in book form Travel books are written on litmus pa- per. They infallibly reveal the character of the author's mind. UT a man in an automobile; carry him from New York City to Indiana ; have him sit down and write a five-hun- dred-page book about the trip—can you imagine a more terrific test, quantitative and qualitative, of the man’s personal, intellectual and spiritual content? Of the scope, quality and richness of his reactions, past and present, to the unfold- ing scroll of daily living, to the panorama of contemporary America, to the cternal riddles of the race? Would you care to meet a man (through book) who tri- umphantly stands this test? To travel with him and hob-nob with him on the way? To be made his intimate and to become bis debtor in a hundred ways? Read Theodore Dreiser's “A Hoosier Holiday” (Lane, $3.00). PEAKING of China—Will Levingtoa Comfort's new novel, “The Last Ditch” (Doran, $1.35), is a stirring story of desperate physical endeavor and super-soul strife amid the plottings of the recent republican upheaval in the Celestial Kingdom—the history of a young American's adventurous connec- tion with the revolutionary cause, plus his transcendental bee-flight of mystic mating with a forcordained woman of the Gobi desert. Comfort’s vivid de- scriptive powers, his genre-knack and sense of drama, are here, as in his former novels, joined, without fusing, to his im- tense and almost painfully earnest de- sire to demonstrate the concrete validity of iridescent human illusions. OSE WILDER LANE has done a difficult. thing surpassingly well in putting “Henry Ford's Own Story” (Ellis O. Jones Forest Hills, NY. $1.00) as he has told it to her into im- personal narrative form. The thing is as simple. as swiftly sequent, and withal as as fine fiction. Yet throughout it has ati the lure of literalness and the zest BELGIUM of authentic revealment. It is news cre- atively conveyed. To read it is to find art, like a flivver, carrying curiosity to its desired goal. The book is likely to be a best-seller, and, which is less usual, deserves to be. HERE are two volumes the annual appearance of which is gradually coming to be depended on and watched for by more and more of the busy, but interested, readers of the country, and the value and dependability of which it is a pleasure to bear witness to. One of these is Edward J. O'Brien's “Best Short Stories of the Year.” The other is William Stanley Braithwaite’s “ An- thology of Magazine Verse and Year Book 5 of American Poetry.” Both represent labors of love indefatigably pursued and critical discrimination of a high order. The “Best Stories” of last year 1s on the press, The 1916 “Anthology” (Gomme, $1.50) has just appeared and is commended to all busy seekers for the best work in a scattered but rapidly de- veloping field of contemporary literature. OG lovers who are not antipathetic to sentiment rather trowel-somely laid on will find Esther Birdsall Dar- ling’s story of an Alaskan dog's develop- ment from shabby puppyhood into the supreme cross-country speed champion of the canine Derby of the north— (Continued on page 283) comicbooks.com 7 \