Books in Brief

I Was a Savage, by Prince Modupe (Harcourt, $3.95). Written in a highly sophisticated English, spotted with factitious barbarisms (e.g., “my heart would satisfy with much ivory”), this book is presented as the autobiography of the son of a chieftain of the So-So tribe in French West Africa. The atmosphere of this tale of life in the jungle so frequently reminds one of Chateaubriand’s Les Natchez that one may fairly infer a comparable determination to romanticize the primitive. But this does not impair the validity of the author’s demonstration that the forms of Occidental life merely distress and demoralize the members of races to whom the spiritual essence of Occidental culture must forever remain incomprehensible. Anyone interested in the welfare of African and Asiatic natives, therefore, should strive to halt American “aid” to “underdeveloped areas,” and should urge our bureaucrats to find other sinks down which to pour the blood that they drain from the arteries of our economic life. R. P. OLIVER

Mr. Five Per Cent, by Ralph Hewins (Rinehart, $4.00). The Gulbenkian family has furnished Mr. Hewins with enough material to make a fascinating character study of the mysterious “Mr. Five Per Cent,” one of the richest men the world has ever known. Calouste Gulbenkian created the mammoth Iraq Petroleum Company, receiving five per cent of its royalties for life, a net of several millions per week. He grasped the political importance of oil far ahead of his time and played a significant part in seeing to it that Iraq oil was made available to the Allied Powers during the Second World War. “Mr. Five Per Cent” was not ashamed of his wealth. His insistence on privacy was not due to fear of exciting envy or guilt, but rather because the outward trappings of success were not necessary to him. He regarded the creation of wealth in itself as a fulfillment of his purpose in life, a contribution to the progress of mankind—the bigger, the better. This is why he hated waste and extravagance in any form and counted every penny despite his millions a week. It is also why he hated idleness and worked until he was more than eighty-five; why he despised frivolity and why he quarreled ostentatiously with his only son.

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I Was a Savage, by Prince Modupe (Harcourt, $3.95). Written in a highly sophisticated English, spotted with factitious barbarisms (e.g., “my heart would satisfy with much ivory”), this book is presented as the autobiography of the son of a chieftain of the So-So tribe in French West Africa. The atmosphere of this tale of life in the jungle so frequently reminds one of Chateaubriand’s Les Natchez that one may fairly infer a comparable determination to romanticize the primitive. But this does not impair the validity of the author’s demonstration that the forms of Occidental life merely distress and demoralize the members of races to whom the spiritual essence of Occidental culture must forever remain incomprehensible. Anyone interested in the welfare of African and Asiatic natives, therefore, should strive to halt American “aid” to “underdeveloped areas,” and should urge our bureaucrats to find other sinks down which to pour the blood that they drain from the arteries of our economic life. R. P. OLIVER

Mr. Five Per Cent, by Ralph Hewins (Rinehart, $4.00). The Gulbenkian family has furnished Mr. Hewins with enough material to make a fascinating character study of the mysterious “Mr. Five Per Cent,” one of the richest men the world has ever known. Calouste Gulbenkian created the mammoth Iraq Petroleum Company, receiving five per cent of its royalties for life, a net of several millions per week. He grasped the political importance of oil far ahead of his time and played a significant part in seeing to it that Iraq oil was made available to the Allied Powers during the Second World War. “Mr. Five Per Cent” was not ashamed of his wealth. His insistence on privacy was not due to fear of exciting envy or guilt, but rather because the outward trappings of success were not necessary to him. He regarded the creation of wealth in itself as a fulfillment of his purpose in life, a contribution to the progress of mankind—the bigger, the better. This is why he hated waste and extravagance in any form and counted every penny despite his millions a week. It is also why he hated idleness and worked until he was more than eighty-five; why he despised frivolity and why he quarreled ostentatiously with his only son.