Life, 1925-12-10 · page 23 of 36
Life — December 10, 1925 — page 23: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page from *Life* magazine contains two distinct elements: **Main Text**: A book review column praising novelist Booth Tarkington's work "Women," and discussing Thomas R. Marshall's memoir "A Hoosier Salad." Marshall, former Vice-President, is noted for having made a famous quip about needing "a good five-cent cigar"—which the text humorously notes that women's groups (the "Leagues of Women Voters") wished he'd redirected toward more "respectable" concerns like hair-nets, reflecting 1920s gender politics and social reform movements. **Illustration**: A sentimental Christmas Eve scene showing what appears to be a young child asking a ship's captain to hang a stocking on the smokestack. The image's sentimentality—a child maintaining Christmas traditions at sea—contrasts with the page's sophisticated literary commentary, typical of *Life*'s mix of highbrow and genteel domestic humor.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
F trophies were awarded in literature as they are in golf, tennis and trap- Mr, Booth Tarkington's serv- vuld certainly have a time of it the silver clean. Any number of complimentary. adjectives might be applicd to his work, but if I were lim- ited to one only, I should choose that the merchants of our country ng millions of dollars yearly to in the public's mind to their “satisfactory.” Mr, Tarking- novels satisfy. They are unpre- to substance, they strain after no effects in style, but they are there. “Women” (Doubleday, Page) is the latest addition to the Tarkington col- lection. It deals in the author's char- acteristic manner with various fem- inine types of the same suburban com- I drove to a bookstore h the rain to get it on the day I saw its publication advertised in the papers, and told the neighbors I shouldn't be in that night for bridge, as long as they had four without me. It was well worth both bother and sac- After all, greater praise hath ok reviewer than the admission e paid for her own copy. which are pa munity rifice no b that SoMe :THING else good which has come out of Indiana is “A Hoosier Salad” (Bobbs-Merrill), the recollec- tions of the late Thomas R. Marshall, once Vice-President of these United States, and probably the only man ever elected to that office capable of appre- ciating what the Comic Spirit had done for him in letting him into every ses- sion of the Senate free. Whilst Mr. Marshall was Vice-President, some of his musings would occasionally creep into the papers if they happened to be uttercd in the presence of an intelli- gent reporter, but we by no means got enourh of them, “A Hoosier Salad” does not suffer from the fact that our appetite has been whetted. Starting off with the announcement that “To make 4 perfect salad there should be a spend- thrift for oil, a miser for vinegar, a wise man for salt and a madcap to stir it up,” it presents the reflections of a man who had a good seat at the * LIFE - Life and Letters passing show and a twinkle in his eye When, in the days before bobbing was the fashion, such wide circulation was given to Mr. Marshall's statement, “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar,” how many Leagues of Women Voters longed to wire him to change it to “hair-net”! There is nothing in his book to indicate that such a suggestion wouldn't have pleased him immensely. Not long ago I pointed out lyrically in another part of this magazine that ten thousand times ten thousand saints had thronged the lighted steeps without making much of a dent in his- tory, whereas several have given us delightful and unending food for copy and conversation, Cleo- patra and Helen were cited amongst the samples. It now seems that their (Continued on page 29) famous sinners WD soreens- CHRISTMAS | EVE AT SEA “MR. CAPTAIN, WON'T YOU PLEASE HANG THIS STOCKING ON THE FOR ME TO-NIGHT? comicbooks.com