Get Thee Behead Me

HARTZELL SPENCE, late of the lKited Press, now a captain in the United States Army and an editor of Yank, has provided in this volume an uncommonly entertaining version of the book that every articulate American not an orphan has in him in one shape or another; to wit, Life with Father. Throughout an engagingly resourceful, indeed brilliant. Middle Western career as schoolboy, newsboy, adolescent businessman and reporter, collegian at the University of Iowa, bandsman, and journalist, Mr. Spence appears to have felt a kind of wry, slightly self-pitying wistfulness about the barrier interposed between himself and his associates by the fact that he was the piously reared son of a Methodist minister. This was his mood at twenty-four, when his family chronicle ends; it seems still to be his mood at thirty-four, when he publishes it. The posture is one that reasonably detached readers will find it difficult to share, though few can fail to comprehend it. The ordinary sympathetic bystander will say, on the strength of the facts and of the outcome, that the three children of the Reverend Will Spence were exceptionally fortunate in their family relationships, that the manner of their bringing-up was a consistent incentive to make the most and the best of themselves, and that what they construed as a set of chronic inhibitions was actually the best of guarantees against their frittering themselves away in the futilities of the average young— in short, that they were given, by both heredity and early environment, an enviable head start in the cardinal matter of character. W. F.