EVENTS sharpen one’s appetite for reading. Three years ago the FiveYear Plan threw a scare into us and ereated a demand for books about, the Soviet. Then the Depression hit us and we forgot other peoples economies in thinking — and reading — about our own (Boy, page Mr. John Maynard Keynes). By the autumn I predict that our newspaper columns will have created a brand-new appetite for books about China. The first of such volumes have already reached US, those dealing specifically with the Manchurian tangle. Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict, by Owen Lattimore (Macmillan, $3.00), is an expert’s study, a moderately solid volume with plenty of meat in it for those who want the facts judiciously arranged and without much individual coloring. Manchuria, the Cockpit of Asia, by Colonel P. T. Etherton and H. Hessell Tiltman (Stokes. $3.00), is equally authoritative, and its text and illustrations make it a more picturesque mirror of the recent events. Japan’s case against China a case that needs citing to offset the prejudice that has been played on by our press — has been very lucidly argued by K. K. Kawakami in Japan Speaks (Macmillan, $1.50). To these books the industrious reader will turn for a longer view than the newspapers afford.
By coincidence or design we shall also see something of China in our fiction next autumn. Pearl S. Buck, whose excellent novel, The Good Earth, topped the list last year, will have a sequel, Sons, published by John Day in the early fall. And the Atlantic Monthly Press will have ready by then its prize novel, Peking Picnic, a story of legation life in the ancient capital by Ann Bridge, an Englishwoman. Who knows, we may even have some Chinese biographies, or a reprint of the Li Hung Chang Memoirs, the most famous forgery of this century.
A contributor to the New Yorker has some fun picturing a ‘Bureau for the Prohibition of Biographies,’ Washington, 1940. To it, of course, you apply for permission to write the book you have in mind. The fine for an unauthorized Grant is $.5000, for J. E. B. Stuart $3250, and for Stonewall Jackson $4000. And so on. Publishers, as a matter of fact, would welcome a little such supervision. Not a year goes by without one or more cases of rival houses commissioning identical subjects for biography. This spring, for instance, there are three books about Hitler, and three dignified lives of Julian Huxley. With a clearing house for contracts, we might have had only one of each.
A biography that has no kin, so far as I am aware, is The Mahdi of Allah, by Richard A. Bermann (Macmillan, $2.50). The author is a German who has traveled the Sudan, studied the dervishes, and personally consulted the survivors of those torrid days when the Mahdi and his ‘Blood and Fire’ battalions had enslaved one quarter of Africa and in their holy zeal beheaded General Gordon at Khartum. ‘Never again,’ writes Winston Churchill in his vivid Introduction, ‘will the whole British people be so stricken by the fate of one man.’ The rise of this black Messiah, the power which he exerted over his exotic land, and his inevitable antagonism with the mystic Gordon, these are elements in a drama which happened before my day, but which stirred my imagination almost as if I had been an eyewitness. I have never read a book of far places which gave me a better sense of participation. The illustrations are appropriate and the translation by Robin John could not be more vigorous.
