By Calder M. Pickett Associate Professor of Journalism
THE RAINBOW AND THE ROSE, by Nevil Shute. Signet, 50 cents.
Now no one in the English department or anywhere else needs to tell me that Nevil Shute is not a great writer. You don't have to read his polished, glittering sentences three times to get the true meaning, to extract the last gram of symbolism. No key prepared by Edmund Wilson must be kept beside your desk to uncover the meaning of some word never found in Webster. A knowledge of Freud is unnecessary—if there is sexual symbolism in Shute's books I've never spotted it, and some graduate training in literature, believe you me, made me look for it, for awhile there, in some mighty strange places.
Nor is Shute the greatest of social commentators. Oh well, there's "On the Beach," but the little reviews will soon write this one off as so much claptrap. Few are the messages in Nevil Shute.
But he does tell a good story—the idealist in "Round the Bend" who started a kind of Social Gospel in the Persian Gulf; the little aircraft designer who wrecks a dangerous plane in "No Highway"; the Englishman who brings kids back from wartorn Europe in "Pied Piper." "The Rainbow and the Rose" is not one of his best books, but it tells a good story.
Briefly it is this: A flier in Australia, who has long idolized a pioneer pilot, learns that his friend has been severely injured in a crash landing, and he determines to go to the man's rescue. In flashbacks he recalls the pilot's careers, and his love affairs.
England and Australia, as usual, provide the setting for Shute. It is all very crisp and matter-of-fact.
\* \* \*
By Diane Sedgwick
Page 3
WAKE ME WHEN IT'S OVER, by Howard Singer. G. P. Putnam's
Sons. $3.95.
Howard Singer's story of a shnook would be great material for a movie if the censors didn't make a short of it.
According to Howard Singer a shnook is, "an innocent bystander who always gets hurt . . . a businessman who buys a rubber plantation the day before some genius invents the perfect synthetic."
This book is about an all-around shnook who, by filing for G.I. life insurance, gets sent to Shima, an island halfway between Korea and Japan, as a radar operator.
Mr. Singer has written humor that produces chuckles, then snickers, then giggles, then guffaws, and between times smiles.
He has an excellent talent for presenting a delicate subject bluntly, making it hilarious, and still having the course of action seem logical. For example, how many authors could tell of a man being courtmartialed for promoting an island by subtly stating, "Come to Shima. It rejuvenates your sexual vigor," and make the story believable.
A high point of his writing is the introduction of a new character. He applies his spicy style to a description such as, "...he was one of those guys who looks like he can order his hair to stay down, and they do, every single one, without vaseline, water, or tonic, just by sheer force of personality."
The fresh style and humor of Singer makes "Wake Me When it's Over," utterly enjoyable reading for shnooks and non-shnooks alike.
From the News-stand
Publish or Perish
“In the preface of her latest book, 'Mountain Glory and Mountain Gloom,' Professor Marjorie Nicolson tells us that its preparation took twenty years. She explains in detail how the idea of the work arose in the course of her teaching, and she relates the vicissitudes of its execution. If this is the way of achievement, as the history of thought confirms, then the academic imperative of ‘Produce’ is plainly ridiculous. And by the same token, so is the requirement that the doctoral dissertation shall be a piece of scholarship. . .”
"Clearly, if the scholar's wordly prospects are made to depend exclusively on getting frequently into print, what follows is what one finds—an abundance of trivialities designed chiefly for committees on promotion...
"In literary studies, particularly, the modern mode is to count images or themes, detect far-fetched parallels and generally worry a poem or a novel until Raggedy Ann is nothing more than a heap of sawdust. And each grain, though without value in the marketplace for ideas, is scholar's gold.
"This resignation to pointlessness is especially conspicuous in the scholarship of art and literature, these subjects being the very antithesis of futility and incoherence. But the willingness to ignore intellectual import also governs much of the work done in American history, economics and sociology...
"But the bulk of the scholarship done upon American historical sources lacks both ideas and scale. Obscure state politicians of eighty years ago are treated to painstaking biographies. The history of banks and timber merchants is retold with a minute fidelity worthy of the greatest revolutions of States. In economics, as everyone knows, description and synthesis are in disfavour, having given place to the construction of mathematical 'models' which are supposed to symbolize the exact relations of certain elements abstracted from our bread-and-butter life. Similarly in sociology, the study of types and professions yields a tonnage of books and graphs unencumbered by philosophic thought and comprehensive views." (Excerpted from "Publish or Perish," The Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 6, 1959.)
William H. Shannon, professor of business and a former member of the School of Business faculty for 16 years, died recently at Fennville, Mich.
Wednesday, Jan. 13, 1960 University Daily Kansan
Ex-KU Accounting Professor Dies
Since 1946 Prof. Shannon had been a professor in the School of Business and School of Law at Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. He earned a law degree from K.U. in 1938.
Frank T. Stockton, emeritus dean of the KU School of Business, describes Prof. Shannon as "one of the truly distinguished teachers of accounting theory."
Prof, Shannon taught at KU from 1930 to 1946 except for wartime leave. He also served one year as golf coach.
He is the author of Principles of Accounting, which was adopted as the official text for beginning accounting at KU in 1936. His latest book is Legal Accounting.
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