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Friday, April 17, 1959 University Daily Kansan
By Stanley Solomon
Page 3
THE MOST OF S. J. PERELMAN, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1958, 650 pages. Price $5.95.
This book is a large collection of representative articles by S. J. Perelman. It will probably appeal to a wide variety of readers, especially college students who find little satisfaction in campus humor magazines.
The 96 articles, mainly taken from the New Yorker magazine, cover a span of thirty years' writing. Perelman is more hilarious (and often sillier) in his earlier writings than in his later ones; on the other hand, he has become more subtle and more tasteful in recent years.
Perelman is very good in his special field, which is lively—though light—satire of superficial patterns of conformity, or rather, uniformity: of movie plots, of advertisements, of books, of magazines, of numerous commonplace phenomena of American society.
If you are looking for profound social criticism, you will have to read Shaw or Swift, for Perelman's comments are aimed more at noncontroversial foibles than at serious failings. He picks some pretty safe subjects to satirize, such as Louella Parsons, Rudolph Valentino, "Harper's Bazaar," Schraffts and his wife.
Here, in a 300-page book, are short stories by the masters of Russian literature—a collection published in hardback two decades ago by the Modern Library.
Nevertheless, Perelman is no mere dart-thrower at American culture. Urbane and sophisticated, his style elevates his articles to a literary plane of their own. His cynicism never succumbs to morbidity, and this is rather refreshing in a time of "beat" cynics.
This book will probably be of considerable value to the student under pressure of exam and term papers. It will also serve as a welcome change from "heavy" reading. I mean, after all, one doesn't always feel like reading Conrad...
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Several new paper backs should prove of interest to University students. They include a non-fictional bit of Americana, a volume on historical philosophy, an anthology of short stories, four pioneering plays, and a celebrated novel:
Fifteen stories are represented, by 10 writers, including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov, and Turgenev. Some of these are standards: Pushkin's tale of gambling, "The Queen of Spades," Gogol's "The Cloak." Trends from romanticism to psychological realism are here for the enthusiast of short stories.
GREAT RUSSIAN STORIES. Modern Library, $1.25.
BUFFALO BILL AND THE WILD WEST, by Henry Blackman Sell and Victor Weybright. New American Library, 50 cents.
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Here with dozens of sketches and photographs incorporated into the text, is a loving treatment of the great Buffalo Bill, who went from his Kansas home to become frontier scout and pony express rider, a buffalo hunter and finally showman, whose Wild West show was celebrated on two continents.
Though the writers appear to scorn the mythology of the Old West, their book is full of it. as it should be, for Buffalo Bill belongs to legend as much as to reality. It is a reprint that should be valued in these days when the lore of plains and mountains attracts so many Americans.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY IN OUR TIME, selected and edited by Hans Meyerhoff. Anchor Books, $1.25.
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History to Henry Ford was "bunk." To some it is subjective enough to be classed as a social science. To others it is one of the humanities. In this volume are writings that review the many debates surrounding history.
Among the historians and philosophers represented are R. G. Collingwood, to whom the concept of the imagination in historical writing is so important; Croce, who believed that every history is contemporary history; Toynbee, proponent of a "universal history"; Beard and Becker, who believed that no history could be completely objective, and Sir Isaiah Berlin, who contends that moral evaluations cannot be excluded from history.
FOUR GREAT PLAYS, by Henrik Ibsen. Bantam, 50 cents.
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John Gassner provides for this collection, an anthology that sets Ibsen in his historical context and demonstrates the significance of the great Norwegian in both realistic and symbolic writing.
The plays are those usually recognized as Ibsen's most significant (with the possible exception of "Hedda Gabler"): "A Doll's House," "Ghosts," "An Enemy of the People," and "The Wild Duck." Though the causes for which Ibsen fought—woman's rights, an enlightened public, an awareness of venereal disease and heredity—seem old-fashioned today, they were shocking in the 1880s. And the electricity of his drama is as evident on the printed page as it must have been to those startled Victorians of the late 19th century.
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THE MOON AND SIXPENCE, by W. Somerset Maugham. Bantam, 35 cents.
There has been little decline in the popularity of Maugham novels, and this famous book, which first was published 40 years ago, remains one of the most popular.
It is the story of "Charles Strickland," who forsook polite society and conventionality to become a great, though not entirely appreciated, painter, and ended his days on an inle in the Pacific. Gauguin provided the inspiration for Maugham, as is well known. It is difficult to escape the fact that publication of the paperback reprint coincides with an already widely heralded television version of the novel, to star Laurence Olivier this fall.—C.M.P.