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The Significance, People upon whom Barry Benefield laid strong hold last autumn with his little-heralded* novel, The Chicken-Wagon Family, will be glad for the introduction to this volume, written by that primate of short-story critics, Mr. Edward J. O'Brien. It is like hearing that your favorite choir soloist has been engaged by the Metropolitan Opera. Says Mr. O'Brien, who reads bales of fiction per annum in professional detachment: "I suppose that those who are dumb have never had their feelings and experience interpreted so clearly before as ... by Barry Benefield." He gives thanks that these "short turns" have been brought together out of various magazines, for he ranks them, with the work of Sherwood Anderson, Manuel Komroff and Ernest Hemingway, as "the most distinguished" of the past decade in U.S. tale-spinning.
Family Biology
CONSERVATION OF THE FAMILY— Paul Popenoe—Williams & Wilkins ($3). How widespread and militant are the "enemies" of the family is conjectural. And how effectively their convictions (or lack of them) might be refuted by a treatise soundly but exclusively sociobiological, is also a question. Nevertheless, Biologist Popenoe's sound book, the first in its field, is far more than an academic disputation. It is advanced with the prime intention of promoting study of the family, per se, through the biologist's lens. Consequently it is packed with orderly, unsensational, valuable facts—the cell- scientist's facts on human polygamy, premarital incontinence, celibacy, size of family, optimum ages of motherhood, abortion, divorce, cousins marrying, etc., etc. There is strong meat in it for thoughtful persons, but it is recommended only to readers capable of supplying their own aesthetic and philosophical salt and pepper. Biologists are Communists. They work with the species, disregard the sport. Their imperative is the stuff that embryos, not dreams, are made of. For "individuality" they are content with the potential differentiations of the chromosomes. Such biologist talk as the following will strike home its full weight only upon the percipient mind: "The ability to form the deepest and finest bond with one of the opposite sex is a highly specialized and delicate ability."
*Modest Barry Benefield, author, was then his publisher's publicity-man.