Books in Brief

The Good Years., by Walter Lord (Harper, $4.95). Walter Lord is the master of the chronologically irrelevant that has spawned so many books in the last few years and that reached an amusing anticlimax in Corey Ford’s account of a day when nothing happened. I think John Dos Passes, from a higher literary level, may have started it all with his newsreel technique in U.S.A. But in any case the formula is a simple one: copy all the odd details from the newspaper files of the period and rewrite with-a-punch, tape-record about a thousand survivors, cover the ground on foot or at least by car (if possible), and trust to luck that novelties may turn up. Mr. Lord has turned up quite a few things, including the notes left by the dying McKinley’s physician and the caterer’s instructions for Mrs. Astor’s Ball. His Good Years are those from 1900 to the outbreak of World War I. He has chapters on the Boxer rebellion, McKinley’s assassination. Teddy and the big stick, the San Francisco earthquake, Big Bill Haywood’s trial for the dynamite murder of Governor Steunenberg, the 1907 panic, Peary’s dash to the pole, the suffragettes, the rise of Wilson, child labor, and finally the Last Summer. This assiduous compilation is entertaining if not exactly novel. It gives one somewhat the effect of looking through an old picture album, with nostalgia and at times a slight uneasiness at the two-dimensional effect. The facts are all there, however, burnished in modern frames, and one can scarcely quarrel with them.

F. RUSSELL

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The Good Years., by Walter Lord (Harper, $4.95). Walter Lord is the master of the chronologically irrelevant that has spawned so many books in the last few years and that reached an amusing anticlimax in Corey Ford’s account of a day when nothing happened. I think John Dos Passes, from a higher literary level, may have started it all with his newsreel technique in U.S.A. But in any case the formula is a simple one: copy all the odd details from the newspaper files of the period and rewrite with-a-punch, tape-record about a thousand survivors, cover the ground on foot or at least by car (if possible), and trust to luck that novelties may turn up. Mr. Lord has turned up quite a few things, including the notes left by the dying McKinley’s physician and the caterer’s instructions for Mrs. Astor’s Ball. His Good Years are those from 1900 to the outbreak of World War I. He has chapters on the Boxer rebellion, McKinley’s assassination. Teddy and the big stick, the San Francisco earthquake, Big Bill Haywood’s trial for the dynamite murder of Governor Steunenberg, the 1907 panic, Peary’s dash to the pole, the suffragettes, the rise of Wilson, child labor, and finally the Last Summer. This assiduous compilation is entertaining if not exactly novel. It gives one somewhat the effect of looking through an old picture album, with nostalgia and at times a slight uneasiness at the two-dimensional effect. The facts are all there, however, burnished in modern frames, and one can scarcely quarrel with them.

F. RUSSELL