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MICROBE HUNTERS—Paul de Kruif—Harcourt, Brace ($3.50). Dr. Kruif takes a dozen bacteriologists and from a thorough knowledge of their contributions (and with perhaps as thorough knowledge of the buying public) creates of all scientists a composite dervish, solitary, crotchety, whirling now at this experiment, now at that test tube, at this insect, at that spectator.
Skillful journalese hooks headlines to the following researchers, popularizes them: Antony Leeuwenhoek, "First of the Microbe Hunters"; Lazzaro Spallanzani," "Microbes Must Have Parents"; Louis Pasteur, "Microbes Are a Menace!"; Robert Koch, "The Death Fighter"; Louis Pasteur, "And the Mad Dog"; Emile Roux and Emil August Behring "Massacre the Guinea Pigs"; Elie Metchnikoff, "The Nice Phagocytes"; Theobald Smith, "Ticks and Texas Fever"; David Bruce, "Trail of the Tsetse"; Ronald Ross and Battista Grassi, "Malaria"; Walter Reed, "In the Interest of Science—and for Humanity!"; and Paul Ehrlich, "The Magic Bullet."
There is clear-headed continuity in the ordering of the book, and also a flippant, strained use of fuzzy words. The historian sees his people motivated by eccentric ideas and insanity. The devil, by the vulgate wording, had much to do with their successes—"hellish and dastardly tests," "devilish ingenuity," "his familiar demon." "For progress, God must send us a few more infernal marvelous searchers of the kind of Robert Koch." He sees them all of a pattern and is frank: "But the stumbling strides of the microbe hunters are not made by a perfect logic, and that is the reason that I might write a grotesque, but not perfect story of their deeds."
FICTION
Snob**
The Story. Down on the lobe of the great elephant's ear that is Africa lives Mary Adams Glenn, in a farmhouse on the lonely veld below blue mountains. The farm belongs to Brand van Aardt, the slow, dependable lover of her girlhood. She lives there virtually on his charity with the amiable mediocrity whom she married instead of Brand. They have a ten-year-old boy, Jackie, and she is soon to bear again.
On the first day of this book she sends her Kaffir runner with an imperative note to fetch Brand. He takes his wife, and on the longmotor drive out from Lebanon village there is time to recall years that have passed, to puzzle over Mary's trouble, whatever it is.