Word: priestley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
ENGLISH JOURNEY?J. B. Priestley? Harper ($3). At 40, John Boynton Priestley is one of England's most comfortably successful writers. His huge-selling novel, The Good Companions (1929), made him an overnight reputation on both sides of the Atlantic as a sentimental hearty of the right sort. Thousands of undiscriminating readers have hailed this blunt-minded Yorkshireman as another Dickens. Though Priestley himself is well aware that the resemblance is meagre ("I am not like Dickens at all"), his latest book may well give the myth a wider circulation. Dickens' sideline was social sympathy; Author Priestley's English Journey...
Starting democratically by motor-coach and ending by being driven in his own car, last autumn Author Priestley fetched a wide circuit through industrial England, busily noting what he saw and felt. At Southampton the great liners made him proud but a talk with a steward made him wonder. The Wills Gold Flake (cigaret) factory at Bristol pleased him. But the suburbs of Birmingham he found "beastly," and the benevolent despotism of Cadbury's cocoa factory at Bournville depressed him. Cutting through the Cotswold Hills he came on Chipping Campden, medieval wool trade centre, now a carefully preserved Arcadia...
...tawdry Goose Fair at Nottingham disgusted him. His home town of Bradford, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, he found changed for the worse. At Bradford a reunion of his old battalion made Author Priestley angrily reminiscent of the War. "I have had playmates, I have had companions, but all, all are gone; and they were killed by greed and muddle and monstrous cross-purposes, by old men gobbling and roaring in clubs, by diplomats working underground like monocled moles, by journalists wanting a good story, by hysterical women waving flags, by grumbling debenture-holders, by strong, silent, beribboned asses...
...VENNER CRIME-John Rhode- Dodd, Mead ($2). The insatiably curious Dr. Priestley correlates a "death from natural causes," an "ordinary disappearance" and a bill for electricity into a solution for one of the Yard's unsolved cases...
...Priestley enthusiasts will not find Wonder Hero quite such a good companion as his earlier novels, but if they are real Priestley enthusiasts they will like it. Others may consider that Author Priestley has hit an easy mark and is jumping on a man of straw when he is down. Everybody will recognize Wonder Hero as both an entertaining and a moral tale. Charlie Habble was a perfectly ordinary young Midlander except for two things: he had no girl and he had a job. His job was on the night shift of a chemical plant: he had to keep awake...