Word: written
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...ETERNAL MOMENT-E.M. Forster -Harcourt Brace ($2.50). Fifteen years ago when these stories were written, television was not an accomplished fact, nor flying taken for granted. Yet "The Machine Stops" (one of the stories) presupposes these for a subterranean segregated existence, predicates a punch of the button for mechanical medical service, punch of another for compound food tablets, another for a lecture, and yet another for a symphony. But gradually the music goes bad, the artificial air fouls, and the great god machine deteriorates quickly to utter non-function, vomiting its inhabitants up dark passages to death from unaccustomed...
Naturally enough, the first half of the book, dealing with the astronomy, geology and biology of the earth's creation, is far more satisfying than the second. The chapters which take the world up to the dawn historic civilization are written convincingly, with graphic power. There is no diminution of strength later, but the mass of fact and conflicting forces which makes up modern history does not lend itself to sketchy treatment. To dismiss the Renaissance and the Reformation in sixty pages is not easy, but with his evolutionary theme supplying the background the author handles the task without smacking...
...between philosophy and religion, one must, however, as Mr. Spaulding points out, take flight from the solid earth, and to pronounce upon the success with which he had done this must be left to the individual reader. Dr. Brown's volume "Beliefs That Matter," is on the other hand written purely from the standpoint of Christian theology. With the subtitle, "A Theology For Laymen," it contains, for example, subchapters on "The Lost Sense of Sin and What to Do About It," and "What the Bible Can Do for Us." In a word it is frankly an interpretation of Christian theology...
Here is a book concerned almost wholly with problems of war which nevertheless makes very absorbing reading for the laymen. Devoting but three well written chapters to the uninteresting youth of Jackson, Mr. Tate almost immediately swings his hero into action--at West Point, in the Mexican War, and finally in the Civil War which was to bring him his great fame and his death from pneumonia shortly after his great flank march at Chancellorsville...
...often that one finds a book written purely and frankly with no ulterior motive but to give pleasure to the reader. It is the fashion with contemporary novelists to try to draw a picture of life as they see it, and for the most part they see it--darkly. For the most part, as a result, while their stories may be interesting for any one of a number of reasons, they are not always pleasant...