Word: books
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Bible of all astrologers is the French prophet Nostradamus, who died in 1566, leaving behind him a book of cryptic verses supposedly predicting (among other great events) the rise of Oliver Cromwell, the Great Fire of London in 1666, the revolt of Britain's American colonies. Nostradamus wrote: "The Chief of Fossan will have his throat cut. . . ." Said Columnist Walker's Astrologer: "Transpose fossan and you get OSSANF, the initials of Hitler's title, Oberster Sturm-Scharen-Anführer...
Still remembered is Dan Beard's American Boy's Handy Book, Or, What To Do and How To Do It, an exciting manual on kites, knot-tying, boats, trapping, taxidermy, etc., etc. Published in 1882, while Beard was attending Manhattan art school, it made Dan Beard's reputation as a boy's man which even Teddy Roosevelt could not surpass, blazed the way for his Boy Pioneers and Sons of Daniel Boone (forerunners of the Boy Scouts) started as a promotion stunt when he became editor of Recreation...
...Ethel Vance" is a pseudonym for someone whom the publishers say they have good reason not to name. The book might be the product of an impossible collaboration by Kay Boyle, Christopher Isherwood, Dorothy Sayers, Franz Kafka and Alfred Hitchcock. Its atmospheric detail and steadily elaborated suspense are better than most Hitchcock. Book-of-the-Month Clubbers, who get Escape for October, will not willingly lay it down...
...severely blue-penciled certain passages* in Poland: Key to Europe, by the ex-head of the Foreign Policy Association, now Round Table Editor of FORTUNE. Wonder is, however, that so much of the text can still stand. Candid, exhaustive, lucid, this is still by all odds the best available book on Poland, Europe's "Great Unpredictable...
...STALIN-Boris Souvarine-Alliance ($3.75). The ironies of history with which this book deals are even exemplified in its publication. Five years ago, even one year ago, English and U. S. readers would have found it more profitable if less pat. Souvarine's Stalin, published first in French several years ago, the work of a onetime member of the Executive of the Communist International, is practically unique among latter-day Bolshevist or ex-Bolshevist writings in carrying authority for the sane Western mind. With the knowledge of an insider and the detachment of a historian, Souvarine shows how Stalin...