Tuesday, July 25, 1961 Summer Session Kansan
Page 3
... Books in Review ...
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
CONTEMPORARY AFRICA, CONTINENT IN TRANSITION, by T. Walter Wallbank. Anvil Books, $1.25. THE ERA OF REFORM, by Henry Steele Commager. Anvil Books, $1.25. SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY, 1917-1941, by George F. Kennan. Anvil Books, $1.25.
T. Walker Wallbank places his emphasis upon the English areas When his volume was written Ghana was still the Gold Coast. Nigeria was a few years away from Independence. There was no chance in the world that revolution could come in the Belgian Congo, and the natives of Angola were so subjugated that Portuguese colony also seemed safe for the colonial power occupying it.
Here are three recent volumes in the fine Anvil series, volumes that should provide valuable adjunct reading in many courses. Of the three, the one most wanting is the one that should be best—the volume on contemporary Africa. Its failing is the same failing of John Gunther's "Inside Africa": events in Africa move too rapidly for the author, the reader, the scholar, the statesman to keep up with.
Things change fast. Africa has leaped from the Stone age to the 20th century. Less than 100 years ago Henry M. Stanley was finding Livingstone. Leopold had not yet begun to move in the Congo, nor Rhodes south of there.
Key documents, from the Stanley story to the Portuguese policy of assimilation, are found in this volume, which, despite its already dated touch, is worth owning.
The Kennan volume is clearly dated "1917-1941." This removes the problem of contemporaneity for Kennan, and he is able to proceed with foreign policy developments in the Soviet Union from the time of Lenin to the invasion of Russia by Germany in 1941. Kennan, of course, is the preeminent man to provide this data. He tells the story in a style that leaves something to be desired (especially when one recalls other of his writings). But there is much to be told
Included in the document are speeches by Lenin, notes to major powers, policy statements, the resolution that created the Comintern. Gorky's appeal for famine relief in 1921, Asian policies, statements by Stalin, a Pravda editorial of 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty, and many others.
Commager's volume on the era of reform has the charm of the editor and the charm of the materials. Commager sees the middle years of the 19th century as being years caught up in the individualism of Transcendentalism, when any man could do anything through the precious power of intuition, when all the world needed reforming.
So reform began. Commager begins, as he should, with Emerson, who stimulated so much of this (though he himself frequently scuffed at reformers). "Man the Reformer" is here, and so are Robert Owen's call for a world convention, Greeley's statement from his "Recollections" on reform, and Theodore Parker's history of reform in New England.
The ladies of Seneca Falls once again paraphrase the Declaration of Independence. Wendell Phillips assists them in their plea for suffrage. William Leggett gets fiery-eyed about the rich and poor, as he did in Bryant's Evening Post. Homestead agitators vote themselves a farm, Horace Mann fights for better schools, Thaddeus Stevens pleads for better education, and so does Whitman. Dorothea Dix presents her memorial on the condition of the insane, Garrison and Elihu Burritt plead for peace, and Sumner angers the military in his Fourth of July address. It is quite a panorama of reform that Commager unfolds in this little paperback.
Frances Wright, who stirred up quite a storm herself, writes of reform, and so does the dream-world Alcott and Hawthorne's sister Elizabeth Peabody, who tells of Brook Farm. John Humphrey Noyes tells about the Oneida community and its attitude toward the sacrament of marriage. Bancroft is here, and Jackson on rotation in office, Catherine Beecher on education for women.
*****
HAWTHORNE. by Henry James. Great Seal (Cornell Press). $1.45.
BORNE. by Henry James. Great Seal (Cornell Press), $1.45. This paperback was published several years ago, but because of the continuing interest in both its author and its subject it deserves reexamination "Hawthorne" had peculiar interest when it first appeared, for Henry James was being allowed to honor an American author in an English series, and that was a fabulous honor in the late 19th century.
He was writing of Hawthorne as the first great American writer, and the distinction still stands—Cooper and Irving notwithstanding. Hawthorne's novels and short stories occupy a strange position between romanticism and realism, and they are tinged with a pessimism quite foreign to reform-happy mid-century America.
It was late in life before the great novels of Hawthorne began to appear, and he presented the manuscript of "The Scarlet Letter" to his publisher as fearfully and as tentatively as though he were a schoolboy with a bad piece of poetry. That novel and the other three—"The House of the Seven Gables," "The Blithedale Romance," and "The Marble Faun," which James chooses to call by its European title, "Transformation"—still stand up among our great works of literature.
"The Blithedale Romance" was built on a strange experience, Hawthorne's brief stay at Brook Farm. He went to that gaily optimistic colony—a mixture of Transcendentalism and Fourierism—with some degree of optimism himself, but he never succeeded in uniting in the happy pursuits, if that's what they were, of the people of the farm. One of the Transcendentalists, the cosmos-accepting Margaret Fuller, became his heroine Zenobia.
Hawthorne's life was short, and not particularly happy. He received minor governmental assignments, chiefly because of his faithfulness toward Franklin Pierce, his Bowdoin College friend for whom he wrote a campaign biography in 1852. As an official in the Custom-house at Salem, his home town, he wrote "The Scarlet Letter," and an essay called "The Custom-House" begins that novel.
Fall Fashions to Change; Curves Making Comeback
FARIS — (UPI) — The word out of Paris as the leading fashion houses opened their fall showings was:
Milady, get ready for the shapely look.
After the loose clothes women have worn now for several seasons, more curves are emerging from the haute couture salons.
Skirt hems, slightly dropped, no longer reveal the kneecaps.
Two women designers, Gres and Maggy Rouff, are first to raise their silk curtains on the Paris fashion stage. Next in line was Jean Patou who dresses many smart French society women. His star model, Carole, made a sensation because of her resemblance to America's first lady, Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy.
Pierre Cardin, the most talented young Paris designer in the Avant-
Like hungry guests, a sitting audience looks.—George Farquhar
Fate makes our relatives, choice makes our friends.—Jacques Delille
Garde class, climaxes this first day of the Paris fashion showings.
His models have a new evening hairdead, called "First Lady," created by hairdresser Carita. For this sophisticated new style the hair is brushed flat back over the temples with a tuft of locks on the top of the head to look like a soaring, fountain-like pony-tail falling back on itself.
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