Reviewed in Brief

Throughout July and early August of 1910 the number of fires ravaging the national forest reserves in Montana and Idaho began to get out of hand. Then, on August 20, a hurricane appeared, and three thousand fires were suddenly united in a three-million-acre fury. “Crown fires,” from one to ten miles wide, raced through treetops 150 feet above the ground at seventy miles an hour. Five hundred miles away, the sun was completely obscured by smoke palls. Entire towns were destroyed, and 85 men died one of the most terrifying deaths nature can inflict. Mrs. Spencer’s documentary of this 48-hour horror would make almost unbearable reading if she did not write so feelingly of the color, tang, texture and miracle of living timber as she does of its destruction on a monstrous scale.

This is a very intelligent account by a Swiss journalist of a leisurely prowl through Latin America, from Mexico to the Argentine. Unlike, say, John Gunther, Mr. Schmidt does not swoop down from omniscient altitudes; he just drifts, wherever his curiousity inclines, and his observations are always intimate and fresh. About North American relations with this awakening continent, he is very frank and very right; “if the United States are prepared to let Latin America slip out of their hands, there are others who are only too ready to pick her up.” Otherwise, he finds South America an uncreated place. Materially, this land is the richest on the globe; but the people are unborn. What Mr. Schmidt misses is the homogeneity that a European takes for granted (“any taxi driver in Paris has more color, more personality, than a minister or a professor here”), but which it takes more than a few centuries to mature. Like good wine, a good culture takes time, and equally important, no outside air. Latin America is still too exposed to Europe to develop a closed, saturating identity of its own.

RB

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Roger Becket

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Throughout July and early August of 1910 the number of fires ravaging the national forest reserves in Montana and Idaho began to get out of hand. Then, on August 20, a hurricane appeared, and three thousand fires were suddenly united in a three-million-acre fury. “Crown fires,” from one to ten miles wide, raced through treetops 150 feet above the ground at seventy miles an hour. Five hundred miles away, the sun was completely obscured by smoke palls. Entire towns were destroyed, and 85 men died one of the most terrifying deaths nature can inflict. Mrs. Spencer’s documentary of this 48-hour horror would make almost unbearable reading if she did not write so feelingly of the color, tang, texture and miracle of living timber as she does of its destruction on a monstrous scale.

This is a very intelligent account by a Swiss journalist of a leisurely prowl through Latin America, from Mexico to the Argentine. Unlike, say, John Gunther, Mr. Schmidt does not swoop down from omniscient altitudes; he just drifts, wherever his curiousity inclines, and his observations are always intimate and fresh. About North American relations with this awakening continent, he is very frank and very right; “if the United States are prepared to let Latin America slip out of their hands, there are others who are only too ready to pick her up.” Otherwise, he finds South America an uncreated place. Materially, this land is the richest on the globe; but the people are unborn. What Mr. Schmidt misses is the homogeneity that a European takes for granted (“any taxi driver in Paris has more color, more personality, than a minister or a professor here”), but which it takes more than a few centuries to mature. Like good wine, a good culture takes time, and equally important, no outside air. Latin America is still too exposed to Europe to develop a closed, saturating identity of its own.