Van Loon's Geography
THE MAN of the MONTH Van Loon’s Geography [Simon and Schuster, $3.75]
ONCE upon a time years ago the eccentric ‘Lord’ Timothy Dexter of Newburyport wrote a book and called it A Pickle for the Knowing Ones; now my friend Van Loon has written a geography which might well bear the subtitle of ’Tabasco for the Ignorant.’ Here indeed we have history, surmise, a lot of good geology, vast reading well boiled down, prejudice (with which we at times agree), (the astronomy of navigation extraordinarily well told, fact, fancy, with a little crass inaccuracy. Then poured over all this extraordinary range of dishes is a piquant sauce—yes, a veritable Jamaican Chipolata. The sauce will, I am sure, make a strong appeal to the palate of the ‘Tired Business Man’; it is for him, I surmise, that this book really was written, and I venture to guess that he will read it in many thousands and to the great good of his soul. Here is a book which can compete with the Follies, beloved of the T. B. M., and, I suspect, win hands down.
On the jacket a good deal is said about the illustrations, and with some of this I cannot agree. Some are extraordinarily vivid and illustrate some statement in the text with almost uncanny skill. Some are bizarre and mean but little, while a few, a very few to be sure, are vastly misleading and inaccurate — see ‘If the British Channel Should Run Dry,’ opposite page 231. This is awful.
Van Loon knows his Europe, and the chapters which deal with Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, France, England, for example, are masterpieces of terse and penetrating analysis of their physiography, history, commerce, and the origin of their populations. Italy is skimped a bit, but we read that she was a traitor to her allies in the Great War and then that ’the main street of Rome looks like a street in Philadelphia,’ which, of course, is inexcusable. More space is devoted to Denmark than to the Three Guianas, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru combined, which seems hardly fair. The author excuses himself, however, on the ground that the importance of a country depends upon its contribution to the sum of human happiness, and we are all again reminded that this is a ‘human’ geography. Just what this means is not quite clear, for a very large part of the book discusses land forms, with relation to population if you will, but land forms are discussed just as they should be in any real geography.
I do not wish to be captious. I have read this work with the greatest enjoyment, but I have had to shiver once or twice at my friend’s zoölogy. ’To-day there remains only one variety of marsupial in America’ — perhaps so, but there are many genera and a host of species. He has also to learn the universal and ironclad rule that in binomial scientific names the first is always capitalized — the second never. Our poor government can be blamed for a lot, but it did not exterminate the buffalo to starve the Indians into submission. The buffalo was killed commercially, if ruthlessly. The Union Pacific Railway brought settlers and they brought agriculture, and buffaloes and agriculture do not mix. But I find myself being just what I promised not to be. Good this book is, but so, too, is it marred by some silly if unimportant blunders. I salute the author for his vast reading, his power to give the result of his industry to his public with a sharp clarity, a shrewd philosophy, and a graceful wit.
THOMAS BARBOUR