NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19144, 29 October 1927, Page 13

NEW BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS.

TALK AND TALKERS. Conv«raatloo. Bj Olive Hesaltlne. | The difference Detween this and other books of the kind —they are unfortunately rather numerous—is that the author has really compiled a coherent as well as agreeable volume. Her object has been to show not only how the great talkers talked, but what they talked about, and on what level they discussed it. Many of the great talkers of literature and history were merely professional pedants who split straws or hairs iu their scholastic vanity and called it all polite conversation. There were even books produced —it is interesting to see something like them appearing again to-day —in which the proper subjects were discussed in the proper way and puns and word-chopping supplied the place of wit. But, of course, the men who traded in that kind of stuff—the women had not yet appeared—are remembered to-d:iy only as horrible examples. Sir Thomas More, Addison, Dr. Johnson, Horace Walpole, and in a totally different style, Lamb. Ttuskin, Carlyle, Oscar Wilde, were genuine talkers, all of thorn with real tilings to say, and a capacity rising sometimes to real genius in saying it. Miss Hescltino quotes widolv, and generously, and well, and achieves also the much more difficult feat of weaving her quotations into her fabric so that they seem a part of it. It is to be emphasised also that she begins at the beginning, which is with Chaucer, and passes accurately llirough all the great literary periods to the present one, which is also a period though we don't always realise it.

LINDBERGH'S STORY. We. By Charles A. Ltndborgh. Cornstalk Publishing Co., Sydney. Those who comvinco themselves in advance that this book is a ''have'' will get just as big a surprise- as those who expect it to take them hour by hour, and minute by minute, across the Atlantic. The crossing of the Atlantic is an incident in the book, as it was in the author's life, and is compressedLindbergh himself would probably say expanded—into a dozen yages. Nor is any of it new. Out Lindbergh's full life story is new, his early flights and disappointments, his hopes, . ambitions, and twenty-five years of preparation. Long before the day and night arrived that made him famous he had had other adventures, some of them requiring quite as much nerve, and at least two of them bringing far more actual danger a?i<3 excitement than the smooth, lucky, but of course immensely daring and skilful flight from New York to Paris. This is the story of al! those adventures as well as of the adventure that took him to Paris, Mr Myron T. Herrick rather preposterously says in his introduction, "at the moment which seemed exactly pre-ordain-ed." But then Americans, especially American Ambassadors in Paris, must be allowed to get off a littlo nonsense. Lindbergh himself emerges from the narrative as a thoroughly manly and modest hero without any special intellectual equipment, or any pretensions to it, and it is not his fault if- he is introduced to us in sentences like this: "I feel with every fibre of my being that Lindbergh's landing marks one of the supreme moments in the history of America and France, and the faith we have in the deciding power of spiritual things is strengthened by every circumstance of his journey, by all his acts after landing, and by the electrical thrill which ran like some religious emotion through a whole vast population." ADAM LINDSAY GORDON. Sporting Verse. By Adam Lindsay Gordon. Illustrated in colour by Lionel Edwardß. Constable and Co. There is nothing that can or requires to be said about this volume except that it is a most handsome gift edition of an author who will be read as long as men keep racehorses. It is, of course, a question of taste whether it is an advantage to have illustrations in colour to "How We Beat the Favourite," or, say, "The Sick Stockrider"—for the selections chosen are not all from the racing track—but those who do like visual images in such a case will like these, and be proud to have so elaborate an edition of poems they have perhaps never before thought of treating so seriously. A BISHOP ON TOUR. Some World Problems. By the Bishop of London. Longman. People who go on world tours seldom spend long enough in a country to see its economic position in its true perspective. For instance, in the section on New Zealand, to which one naturally turns in this book, the Bishop says that our three vices are ''National Selfishness, National Softness, and National Gambling." In support of the third charge he quotes a remark of a New Zealand mother to her daughter, "You know .1 can't afford to get you any new clothes; if you want any you must go to the races." From this he concludes that young New Zealandcrs are "systematically taught to spend their hard-earned wages on betting in the hope of getting new clothes instead of saving them for the purpose." It is difficult also not to suspect that if this is how New Zealand fares, which we know, the other places presented may seem as strange to natives. And yet in other respects the book is a concise account both of the impressions the Bishop gathered on his travels, and the special problems he noticed in each country. He stresses the need for emigrants who are not frightened of pioneer work and appeals to his own countrymen to help in this direction. The book is purposely short and cheap in order to achieve a wide sale anione the young English people he most wishes to reach. VICTORIAN. Fa 63 On. By Florence Lawford. Werner Laurie. The title of this book is taken from a quaint epitaph in a Sussex churchyard on the tombstone of an old couple who traced their ancestors back to Norman times. A young girl descendant of theirs makes the two words her watchword, and as she has a stronglydeveloped sense of heredity, and has led a sheltered lif'\ she grows into a proper prig. In the end she falls in love with and marries a young clergyman as idealistic as herself. Perhaps the fact that the action takes place in the late Victorian period accounts for the artificiality and sentimentality. CATS TO PIGS. Men are Pigs. By Buono Mesquita. Cornstalk Publishing Company. This is intended to be a counterblast to a book in which women are cats. It is eighty-two pages long, and consists entirely of aphorisms, anecdotes, epigrams, and puns. A few of them are smart, some are banal, and some decidedly risque; but not many are original. The ''pigs" who read will probably survive. (Through Angus and Roberteooj