Speaking of Books A New Literary Department Edited by FRANCES LAMONT ROBBINS What Everybody Is Reading TH HE books in greatest demand are usually those most discussed. The following list is compiled from the lists of the ten best-selling volumes sent us by wire by eight book-shops each week. These particular book-shops were chosen because we think that they reflect the tastes of the more representative readers. These shops are as follows: New York-Brentano's. Boston-Old Corner Book Store. Denver-Kendrick Bellamy Co. Fiction "Jalna," by Mazo de la Roche. Little, Brown & Co. A clannish family in Canada survives the potentially disrupting love affairs of several members. If you like a good story, peopled by startling and brilliant caricatures, you will enjoy it. Reviewed November 2. "Death Comes for the Archbishop," by Willa Cather. A. A. Knopf. This imaginative biography of a French missionary bishop to the Southwest is fine in spiritual concept, rich in beautiful description and moving characterization. Reviewed October 26. "Kitty," by Warwick Deeping. A. A. Knopf. A young wife's struggle against her dominating mother-in-law for the possession of her husband, set in post-war England. You will enjoy it if you like a machine-turned story with humor and wholesome sentiment. Reviewed last week. "Adam and Eve: Though He Knew Better," by John Erskine. The Bobbs-Merrill Company. You will find this an entertaining satirical tale dealing with the first companionate and Reviewed the first Mr. and Mrs. marriages. last week. "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," by Thornton Wilder. Albert and Charles Boni. A study in the operation of fate, whereby widely divergent lives are brought to the same end. This is not merely a clever device for relating fundamentally unrelated stories, as in The Cabala" or in Lubbock's "Roman Pictures." Readers of this startlingly brilliant book will miss its worth if they fail to see the emotional depths which the shimmering surface covers. Reviewed by Mary Shirley, last week. Non-Fiction "Trader Horn," by Alfred Aloysius Horn and Ethelreda Lewis. Simon & Schuster. The romantic story of an ancient adventurer, full of poetry, guileless wisdom, action, information, and color. Reviewed November 16. "Count Luckner, the Sea Devil," by Lowell Thomas. Doubleday, Page & Co. This is the account of Luckner, the daring German seaman, his sailing ship Seeadler, and their exAs thrilling as any ploits in the World War. old tale of privateering days, it brings back the ancient romance of the sea. Reviewed last week. "Napoleon," by Emil Ludwig. Boni & Liveright. You will find this engrossing biography a fine foot-note to the Napoleonic period. Reviewed November 9. "Bismarck," by Emil Ludwig. Little, Brown & Co. This splendid biography by a master craftsman is unhesitatingly recommended_to any one with a taste for solid reading. Reviewed November 9. "Mother India," by Katherine Mayo. Harcourt, Brace & Co. This highly gifted reporter's account of some aspects of Indian society is not calculated to endear us to India, but is providing lively reading to lots of Americans. Reviewed June 22. of them are published, and move Westward, advertised, in the last analysis, by word of mouth. This list, varying as it has only slightly in three months, is interesting to look over. In fiction Willa Cather towers as an artist above the rest. Granted that all novelists write for money or fame or both, she is fundamentally sensible of the impulsion of creative force. "Death Comes for the Archbishop" began to be read on the strength of her other books, but got its own hold quickly. Not all readers are sensitive to its beauties of concept, style, and setting. But the lives that it portrays are lives of sublime and heroic sacrifice. Of all ideas that capture and enthrall the incurable romantic, the idea of selfsacrifice is the most powerful, the most fascinating. "Jalna" is a picture book and a prize book. Its author, indifferent performer, bungling amateur, as she is, still uses her talents with sincere intensity. Set down half her book's sales to the prize, and half to the hot, highspirited pictures. (Advance reply to the accurate, "You're right, there are no illustrations in 'Jalna." ") Deeping writes by clockwork. "Kitty" is liked for the reasons that clockwork is. If oiled and wound, it will run, keep to plan, do what's expected, spring no surprises. It is comfortable and the tick is nice. Erskine shoot back the cuffs, spread out the palms toward the audience. "It is all legerdemain, ladies and gentlemen; keep your eyes on the professor." Erskine's heart is said to be in his music. It is not in his writing. "Adam and Eve" for its popularity leans heavily on "Helen of Troy." The people in the Scientific Facts About Diet CONDENSED book on diet entitled A "Eating for Health and Efficiency." has This book is for those who wish to keep physi- HEALTH EXTENSION BUREAU GOOD HEALTH BLDG. THE OUTLOOK RECOMMENDS TEACHERS' AGENCY next apartment were talking and gig- The Pratt Teachers Agency gling about it last night-"Yeah, it's cute. But it's deep, too, don't forget it; there's real deep stuff in it." In biography Ludwig's name leads all the rest. He is a scholarly worker, a penetrating student of the psychology of genius. If in the process of making his important contributions to the study of history he can capitalize the present passion for biography, so much the better. It is a passion common and strong, because we all like, sitting in the office, fretting over household budgets, correcting examination papers, to be reminded that there are lives less level, men bolder and more magnificent, women more beautiful and less content. Katherine Mayo is an able reporter and propagandist. A quarter of the readers of her book are interested in India. The other three-quarters find "Mother India" pornographic and have been told that they would find it so. And as for "Trader Horn" and Mrs. Lewis, "Count Luckner" and Lowell Thomas, it is so easy to know why these books, the imaginative and understanding interpretations of thrilling tales, are read and read. It is because they meet that insatiable appetite in us which keeps every one hoping until his dying day that somewhere, around some blind corner, adventure is waiting, finger on lips, ready to whisper, "Hist-piruts!" Readers with a more than casual interest in cultural subjects will rarely find a current book at once so provocative in matter and so distinguished in manner as is this collection of essays on literary topics. Too many of our ablest critical writers here- writers whose object is not only the statement of their own opinions, but the stimulation of readers to an evaluation of theirs are cursed with eccentricities and roughness of style. We are the sufferers, those of us who cannot easily give our attention to ideas, however invigorating, which have been forced to flow through a clogged or jerky pen and appear on paper in an alternation of blots and scratches. But Lewisohn's fine prose style will lure the most difficult into his book. Once in, if you are intellectually complacent, prepare for buffetings in the introductory essay, on "Culture and Barbarism." The further essays are frank, vigorous, and exquisitely tempered analyses and appraisals of the qualities of many Englishmen of letters, Frenchmen, Americans, Germans, and Jews. All are sincere and interesting, and most are fresh in view-point. Among the "Cities" group, the one on "Catullus in Verona" is charming. Among the "Men" essays, the reviewer delighted especially in the one on Saintsbury, which pays to that fine, headlong old enthusiast a very moving tribute. About the essay on "Culture and Barbarism" it is possible to quarrel with Lewisohn. If you do, he may set you down at once as a barbarian; and you need not try to silence him with "propagandist." He will not object to that, since he says, "Powerful natures in literature are always propagandists one side." It is doubtful if the limiting clause was needed. Is it only in literature that inadequacy and indifference masquerade as tolerance? Lewisohn's particular propaganda is for the romantic as against the classic, for the subjective as against the objective, for the individualist as against the mass-minded. With much of it, it is easy to agree. But some of it has the look of a house trying to divide against itself. Actually, subjective and objective are interdependent; the individualist becomes imperceptibly the leading unit of the mass; the romantic expresses himself in classic gesture. The subjective Lewisohn gives us a piece of objective critical writing in pure classic mood. In a translation so smooth that it is not recognizable as such, Feuchtwanger's new book has just been published. His "Jew Süss" set a standard of brilliance which might easily not have been maintained. It was written with a smashing power not commonly found in so-called historical novels, and the setting of the gaudy gallantry and flashing cruelty of an eighteenth-century petty Court was one calculated to lend great variety and color to the book. But "The Ugly Duchess" does not disappoint. It is a far more somber story, set in the bleak Tyrol, in the fourteenth century, when the central European mountain country was almost untouched by the glorious, stirring life of France and Italy, and lay in a sort of drab fog of dumbness, superstition, and sodden brutality. The only lights in this heavy cloud were the conflicts of a few able political minds. "The Ugly Duchess" is written, fittingly, in a low key. It is marked by massive and important construction rather than by high color. Mediævalists will enjoy Feuchtwanger's intelligent grasp of the curious mediæval mind. They may have a few quarrels with him, particularly for his omissions in the matter of corroborative detail. But the mediavalist is always wanting to scratch fiction and find history. Most readers have better sense. For them it suffices that "The Ugly Duchess" is a good and brilliantly written story. It concerns Margarete, duchess in her own right of the Tyrol, a woman cursed with hideousness of face and body, gifted with an able, constructive mind. The curse of ugliness is indeed the whole theme of the book-the praise of beauty, perhaps for the Duchess, in her efforts Let us hasten to add that this in- Usually his, or her, distinction is Such people submit the facts in They stand out. They count. A recent survey revealed the fact readers are executives of important These people stand out. They know what it is worth while The inference-the fair inference- Halter Thales Circulation Manager Invigorating, Open-air Recreation in Sunny TUCSON Every outdoor sport. Sunshine every day, Numerous tourist attractions. Famous Come Rock Island or Southern Pacific. TUCSON Sunshine Climate Club ARIZONA 701 Old Pueblo Bldg., Tucson, Arizona Please send me the "SUNSHINE BOOKLET" Get Travelwise DO YOU PLAN AN UNUSUAL TRIP? Maybe it's Honolulu this yearor Japan-perhaps it's the snowcapped Alps-or the lure of South Africa that calls. CaliforniaFlorida-the South of Italy or the French Riviera washed in mellow sunshine. If it's "East of Suez," let us tell you about it. And if it's hunting-fishing or a hotel in our MidSouth, by stream or mountain, ask us for our list. Write for fascinating literature on our own or any country in the world. to sink the humiliated woman in the triumphant ruler, is constantly thwarted by the power of beauty personified in Agnes von Flaven, courtesan and political intriguante, and by the inevitable homage which all mankind pays to that power. The characterizations are solid and truthful. The men-knights, knaves, statesmen are strongly marked and living figures. The descriptive passages are vivid and emotionally sensitive. Feuchtwanger demands the reader's interest for his heroine and holds it centered in her; but he never betrays his theme by allowing her any very firm hold on the reader's sympathies. When her efforts are most royal and her disappointments most poignant, he holds an unexpected mirror up, and the sight of the Maultasch (bag-mouth) in all her physical repulsiveness shocks away all sympathy. The working out of the theme has been somewhat complicated by the further necessity of making the reader accept the beautiful von Flaven as the natural object of universal adoration, without permitting his interest to be warmly engaged by her. In doing this Feuchtwanger has not been entirely successful; but it may be that his intention has been to follow the passive rather than the active way, to serve beauty by abhorring its opposite. And, since he writes of those isolated countries where the coronation of beauty which was the exquisite flowering of the Middle Ages seems to have been warped and twisted into a matter of throwing stones at ugliness, it may be that he has done just what he set out to do. "If I Should Ever Travel" "Pleasant Days in Spain," by Nancy Cox McCormack. J. H. Sears & Co. Unusually promising at a first glance is Mrs. McCormack's attractive volume of Spanish travel and impressions, "Pleasant Days in Spain." The narrative, easy and informal, based upon letters to friends and still retaining the epistolary form, contains much material of interest tossed together in a rather helter-skelter fashion. The letters are gay, vivid, and highly individual, and must have been delightful to those to whom they were originally addressed, but they are not such as to bear without loss the cold ordeal of print. When the writer's personality is familiar, there is so much unwritten that the recipient of a letter can be trusted to supply the interpretative uplift of a self-mocking eyebrow, perhaps; perhaps the softening effect of a remembered smile; or some habitual drollery of manner or inflection to make a bit of queer English or commonplace slang really funny. Lacking such aid, impossible to the ordinary reader, it must be admitted that the careless cock-sure sprightliness of Mrs. McCormack's style is not always happy in effect. This defect in the literary art of the book is emphasized by contrast with the high pictorial quality of its illustrations. Mrs. McCormack, a sculptor whose excellent bust of Primo de Rivera is the subject of one of them, was fortunate enough to obtain from Señor Lopez Mesquita, one of the leading modern Spanish artists, permission to use seven of his pictures not before reproduced. They appear in half-tone, and represent Spanish types ranging from King Alfonso and a famous bullfighter to sad old peasant women and a laughing gypsy, and are of arresting power and distinction. E. P. "In Praise of France," by Stephen Gwynn. Houghton Mifflin Company. Mr. Gwynn's praise mounts to the point of becoming a lyric pæan to the glories which are France. To the maiden voyager the book will suggest an introduction to noble architecture, pleasant countrysides, or vintage wines; to an old lover of France it is full of mellow reminiscences of all three. This is not a guide-book in the ordinary sense, but rather a charming elongated essay-an interpretation of France as informal as the way in which the fisherman's nets are spread and "hung to dry even on the railings about the church," at Marseilles. The author's three great concerns seem to be churches, trout, and wine. With the philosophy of the true fisherman, he says: "Had my luck been better in the two hours I fished, I should know less about Gisors." Superb mediæval cathedrals, chateaus of the French countryside, vintage time in Bordeaux, the pleasures of the table in Brillat-Savarin's country, and the specially trained truffle-hunting pigs of Périgueux are described with the skill of Unquestionably, a literary raconteur. Stephen Gwynn's pen is mightier than the fishing-rod with which he angled his way through France. M. M. T HE editor of this department will be glad to help readers with advice and suggestions in buying current books, whether noticed in these pages or not. If you wish guidance in selecting books for yourself or to give away, we shall do the best we can for you if you will write us, giving some suggestions, preferably with examples, of the taste which is to be satisfied. 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