Word: compendium
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...their mothers and, sometimes, their fathers. But for seven years such typical, normal baby actions have seemed to a kindly and learned man in New Haven to be of supreme importance to Science. Fruit of that belief appeared last week in the form of a monumental, 15½-lb. compendium in two volumes, illustrated with 3,200 action photographs: An Atlas of Infant Behavior,* by Arnold Lucius Gesell, M. D., Ph.D., Sc.D., director of Yale University's Clinic of Child Development...
...never chooses a monosyllable when a polysyllable will do. To him lobbyists are "obscene harpies." Fellow-Senators settle back for a quarter-hour's solid amusement when he strikes such a forensic vein as inspired his essay on the Democratic Donkey: "He is a braying compendium of stately dignity, stanch endurance, fortitude and patience. ... In our quadrennial Presidential campaigns there is more music in his raucous hee-haw than in the midnight minstrelsy of a nightingale. The donkey is a serio-comic philosopher, whose stamina and stoicism conquered the wilderness . . . a sure-footed creature of epicurean taste and gargantuan appetite...
Moulin Rouge (20th Century) is a sketchy compendium of familiar musicom edy patterns. Like Dancing Lady it is a backstage romance. Its show-within-a-show suggests Forty-Second Street. For plot, Moulin Rouge performs the remarkable feat of superimposing two of the dustiest of formulas. Constance Bennett, as a singer who gets a chance to star, surprises one & all by being good. Likewise she completely deceives everyone by assuming the flimsiest sort of disguise. She wishes to impress her songwriting husband (Franchot Tone) and a producer (Tullio Carminati) but does not succeed until she changes places with a Parisian...
...wardrooms of His Majesty's ships last week after the barges brought out the Christmas mail was a heavy oblong new book for officers to look at-the 1933 edition of Jane's Fighting Ships. This compendium of the world's war boats is as useful in the Royal Navy as Who's Who is in a newspaper office. Not for many a year has any Jane edited Jane's. Since 1918 the man who has compiled photographs, diagrams, measurements of all the world's battleships has been Dr. Oscar Parkes, a London physician...
Obviously this sort of compendium is unsatisfactory from the reviewer's point of view, since it yields up no ponderous cosmology, no bone of contention with which he may take issue. Accepted for what it is, however, the book makes excellent fire-side reading. Most of the narratives are well chosen, and in many cases they have the ring of truth. In selecting them, Yeats-Brown has wisely avoided the glossy newness of the recent past, and, by temperate use of the editorial pencil, has preserved that quaintness of style which lends glamour to the adventurers of another...