The Weeping Wood

RUBBER is the hero, the villain, and the common denominator of this novel in fifteen sections, which might easily be mistaken for fifteen entertaining short stories. The tales are about the men who gather rubber and the men who use it; they are set in Africa and Akron, Boston and Brazil; the characters range from an eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary to a chemist working on a synthetic rubber formula. The book has none of the usual defects of novels written to inform. Miss Baum has never forgotten that rubber is only interesting and important through its effect on people. Her book is about people, and the research behind her stories never intrudes on their brisk and easy telling.