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JUNGLE JOE—Clarence Hawkes—Lothrop, Lee & Shepard ($1.50). Unfortunate the boy or girl who grows up, or has grown up, without reading about Shovelhorns, the moose monarch; Shaggycoat, the astute beaver; Black Bruin, the genial bear, and a score of other wild personages whose biographies have been set down by the typewriter of painstaking Clarence Hawkes.
Jungle Joe now joins their company, a youthful elephant captured with 55 of his elders and betters in a drive on the Malay Peninsula. He is brought over the oceans to Madison Square Garden; shipped across the continent with a big circus to winter quarters in Hollywood, and then back again to grace the zoo of a small New England city.
Joe's trainer and "brother," a Malay lad named Ali, is with him through thick and thin, from the night the bellowing tuskers mill and trample in their first stockade after crushing the life out of Ali's father. Together the two weather a Pacific typhoon; a plunge from a railroad trestle in their boxcar; a 100-mile race against an Arab horse; a pulling-match with four draft horses; a cinema tiger-hunt that turns serious.
The Author. Born in Goshen, Mass., 46 years ago, Clarence Hawkes lost a leg at the age of nine and, four years later, both eyes. Afield to try a new gun, the boy strayed from his father, stumbled in swampy land, discharged his weapon into his own face and had to struggle two miles to the highway alone.
He spent five years at the Perkins Institute, Boston, where he was Helen Keller's contemporary and friend. Casting about for an occupation, he tried music, piano-tuning, chair-caning, but resolved finally upon lecturing and poetry. Recognition was slow. He once received $1.65 for a talk delivered to 13 people. His poem, "How Massa Linkum Came," later a popular favorite, was refused by 17 editors before the Springfield Republican accepted it.
In 1899 he married Bessie Bell, a Hadley (Mass.) girl, who had illustrated his first book of verse. A volume of stories, Master Frisky, woven about their pet collie, was well received and the blind man began to go back into the bright memories of a boyhood spent in woods and fields for the material of eight books of nature lore. Later he prepared animal stories by collecting and having his wife read him exhaustive data on the country and creature he wanted to write about. He wrote of bison, wolves, wild horses, reindeer, moose, bear, beaver. He laid his scenes in Kentucky, Alaska, France, Baffin Land, Norway, New Brunswick, the Adirondacks, the Rockies, the prairies. His literary activities have been incessant and of great variety. But among two score titles, the best are those on wild life.
His writing reflects the true instinct and feeling of a born naturalist, and he has long been accepted as the peer of men like Ernest Thompson Seton and the late Jack London. Acclaim has come not only from naturalists but— much more important—from hosts of readers who know what's what about storytelling. That celebrated field naturalist, Director William T. Hornaday of the New York Zoological Park, has paid tribute to Mr. Hawkes' "marvelous fidelity" in describing the sunlit world he knew so briefly and in supplementing (as all good nature writing must be supplemented) with lore from trappers, hunters, birdmen, trainers. For imparting personality to his animal characters, he is another Kipling, though without that writer's fanciful propensity for endowing beasts with unscientific abilities.
Like many another seemingly handicapped man, Author Hawkes says: "I don't do anything differently from anyone else." Fishing is his great recreation, and his acute hearing has made him a delighted auditor at football and baseball sidelines. On the occasion of Hadley's 250th anniversary parade, he designed 30 floats, working out color schemes with his wife's aid. A radio enthusiast, he hopes soon to have broadcast to his 100,000 fellow blind people in the U. S., his autobiography, Hitting the Dark Trail.
It may be true that Author Hawkes does as others do, but not all do as he does. Not all have overcome a like amount of difficulty. Not all have a quiet country house easily distinguishable to its many visitors by flocks of wild birds that refuse to leave the vicinity, blow, hail and snow as it may Not all, living in a dark world the size of a haycock, have led thousand into the wide light world of all-outdoors.
Burnt Husband
AFTER NOON—Susan Ertz—Appleton ($2). A burnt husband shuns the altar. Charles Lester, left with vivid twin daughters by a flighty runaway wife, guards his British independence, his tolerance and intelligence from further exposure. But an American widow's frank piquancy is too much for him. He marries her, and when she really learns that clinging-vine love is not for folk walking erect in the afternoon of life, they enter upon a happy ever-after. It is a cool, delightful study in mature emotions from the poised pen of the author of Nina and Madame Claire.
ALERT READERS
—are not permitting the
season to slip by without having read, or planned to read, books designated by the best current criticism as:
Rich Writing
Spanish Bayonet—Stephen Vincent Benet ($2). Romance and deviltry on an indigo plantation in 18th Century Florida.
Black Harvest—Ida A.R. Wylie ($2). A powerful grotesque in the occupied Rhineland.
It's Not Done—William C. Bullitt ($2). Reviewed in this issue.
Afternoon—Susan Ertz ($2). Reviewed in this issue.
Lolly Willowes—Sylvia Townsend Warner ($2). A decayed gentlewoman's discovery of Satan.
Light and Pleasant
The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-65 (Edited by Alexander Blacker Kerr)— Cleone Knox ($2.50). A mettlesome Irish nymph's intimacies.
All the Sad Young Men—F. Scott Fitzgerald ($2). Stories of resignation on this side of paradise.
The High Adventure—Jeffery Farnol ($2). The modern Dumas-Dickens at his buoyant best.
The facilities of TIME'S book department are at its readers' disposal. To order the above, or any other books, inclose a check or cash with a note to the Book Editor making plain to whom you wish your purchases sent.
*IT'S NOT DONE—William C. Bullitt—Harcourt Bract ($2).