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New York Tribune: "The story is at once serious and sentimental and is saved only from downright banality and absurdity by its swift, fine, unusual limning of character, its philosophical digressions, and its descriptive certainty and distinction."
The Author. Maxwell Bodenheim was born in Natchez, Miss., in 1892. He has served in the Army, studied law, art His first writing was poetry (Advice, Minna and Myself, Introducing Irony). He has one other novel (Blackguard). He is at present associated with Ben Hecht (Chicago "bad man"—Time, Sept. 3) in editing the Chicago Literary Times.
Good Books
The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:
MAN AND MYSTERY IN ASIA—Ferdinand Ossendowski — Dutton ($3.00). The Polish author-scientist-sportsman who has already interested the American people in his Beasts, Men, and Gods here narrates some of his earlier adventures on the same continent. Employed by the Tsar's government in investigating salt lakes, coal mines, gold deposits, Dr. Ossendowski was obliged to make long trips into the Kalunda and Bateni steppes, into the Altai Mountains, to the convict island of Sakhalin, into the extraordinary Ussurian country where the tropical tiger roams in the same forest as the reindeer and the northern goose and the Indian flamingo rise from the same lake. During these travels he watched the Tatars taming their wild horses, he saw the two eyes of a man-eating tiger peering at him through the jungle grass; an escaped murderer whom he befriended showed him a deadly battle among tarantulas; he visited a camp of Mongol Golds still in the stone age; he became the brother of a Kirghiz rider. A book of adventure for those who are cut off from adventure by the routine of their life. A book of truth for those who 'do not find fiction strange enough.
THE MAN WHO DIED TWICE—Edwin Arlington Robinson—Macmillan ($125). The narrative of Fernando Nash, a musician, is in blank verse. He died in the spirit and, having tasted the uttermost of disillusion and defeat, is 'born again—before he dies in the flesh—to such a vision of glory as "not more than once or twice, and hardly that, in a same century" will be given to another. An average between the best and the worst that Mr. Robinson can do, it is neither masterpiece nor failure. As such, it is filled with cramped or involuted obscurities. But as such it is filled also with the austere gold of his restrained apocalypses, is set down with that eminent aristocracy in the choice of phrases which has carried Robinson to the head of our living poets.
JAMES JOYCE: HIS FIRST FORTY YEARS—Herbert S. Gorman—Huebsch ($2.00). A critique of the "most-talked-about man in modern letters" by an admirer who has abandoned the usual claptrap for eloquent and intelligent exposition. It is lucid and comprehensible. One need not necessarily be won over to Mr. Gorman's enthusiasm for Ulysses in order to pay tribute to the competence of this book.
Honore Willsie
She Edited "The Delineator"