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THE MIDDLE TWENTIES—John Farrar —Doran ($1.50). Into this slim, trim volume, the editor of The Bookman has packed poems of infinitely varied moods. There are elfinly humorous love lyrics, the brooding sombreness of a group called Portraits, War Women, and even one appalling trifle which concerns itself with a cocktail made by alcoholizing the bodies from Egyptian tombs:
"Plop!—and down you go!
After a cracked-ice shaking,
Into a stiff fat wife
Before a rich fat dinner.
Umm! What a curious flavor!"
THE BLACK HOOD—Thomas Dixon— Appleton ($2.00). Author Dixon blandly and bravely prefaces his story with the suggestion "to the five million members of the new Ku Klux Klan that they read this book." A tale of the original Klan in the days following the Civil War, when it was ordered dissolved, it breathes all the mysterious and sinister significance of the "Invisible Empire," and swirls the reader along with it under its exciting black hoods and white sheets. It stops by the wayside to terrorize one dark-skinned Julius Caesar, self-styled "Apostle ob Sanotification," known to his rivals as "dat slue-footed hypercrite." But most of the time, horses gallop, blood flows, hero rescues, villain pursues, disguises disguise—all in the author's most approved manner and with the technique developed in his Birth of a Nation (cinematized by Griffith) and The Southerner.
John Trotwood Moore
"Jackson Was the Greatest Man America Has Ever Produced"