ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 532, 2 September 1949, Page 14

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

[CEDROME, by Frank Tilsley (Eyre and Spottiswoode, English price, 10/6), is a competent, realistic, tearjerking, commonplace novel about the rivalry of little girls to become dazzling star skaters on London’s indoor ice. Frank Tilsley portrays vulgarity and partakes of it. The book is entertaining so far as it goes, especially if you can bear the glamourising of skating-equivalent for instance (at a slightly lower level),

to the romanticising of the circus in Dame Laura Knight’s pictutes. -D.H. WHY have. Christians hated and persecuted one another? Why do good churchmen, who should be armed in spirit against the ills of the world, become neurotic? What can be done to overcome the fear which often warps the religious mind? Oscar Pfister, a pastor of Zurich, tries to answer these questions in Christianity and Fear (translated by’ W. H. Johnstone; George Allen and Unwin. English price, 30/-). He believes that fear or dread, a pervasive mood in society, is brought about mainly by loss of love. "The deepest essence of human nature,demands love," he writes, "and without it the individual and mankind as a whole lapse into misery, disease, wickedness and cruelty. .. ." The thesis receives support from a historical study of Christianity, and the ideas throughout are based on depth psychology. This book will be challenged by the orthodox, but its scholarship entitles it to respectful attention, HE curious reader may study 18 paintings by Winston Churchill, reproduced in colour, in a slender book published by Odhams Press, London, Painting as a Pastime (through Whitcombe and Tombs, 10/6) takes its title from an introductory essay which has been reprinted. from Mr. Churchill’s Thoughts and Addresses.