Reviewed in Brief

A History of Communism in East Asia, by Captain Malcolm Kennedy (Praeger, $8.50). In the Far East and in Southern Asia there has been some resentment everywhere of Occidental “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and even tutelage, for more than a century. Several years before Zinoviev remarked in 1925 that “there is no doubt that the road to World Revolution lies through the East rather than through the West,” Soviet agents were all over Asia feverishly exploiting this sometimes rampant, sometimes sullenly silent hostility to the West. This bulky volume of Captain Kennedy’s (556 pages), tightly packed with facts, deals competently and in as much detail as the average reader will ever want, with Communist policies and operations in every country from India to Japan and from Indonesia to Tannu Tuva. Its greatest value will doubtless be as a reference book, but, far from being dull, it is good reading and easy reading. R. G.

Letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert (Viking, $7.50). No one who knows Joyce’s work, legend, or declared aims, will be surprised at his letters. They are probably the least interesting by a so called “creative writer” ever published. They have no juice, no personality, no openness, no charm, no heat. Much of the time, they might have been written by a travelling salesman whose “line” is minutely carved jade—a man whose private heart, soul, and self-knowing have nothing to do with his work. Joyce had passion in him, as his early writing makes clear; and he had a resourceful, scrupulous gift for language. But after 1915 (roughly), these two elements seem to abhor each other, and go about their, business separately. The passion flourished, as the best of the letters show, in his love for his family, especially his daughter. But the words, thousands and thousands of them, which his “patience, cunning and exile” mitred together, stand terribly alone-—uncommitted, unbegotten-upon, meaning anything, nothing.r.p.

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A History of Communism in East Asia, by Captain Malcolm Kennedy (Praeger, $8.50). In the Far East and in Southern Asia there has been some resentment everywhere of Occidental “colonialism,” “imperialism,” and even tutelage, for more than a century. Several years before Zinoviev remarked in 1925 that “there is no doubt that the road to World Revolution lies through the East rather than through the West,” Soviet agents were all over Asia feverishly exploiting this sometimes rampant, sometimes sullenly silent hostility to the West. This bulky volume of Captain Kennedy’s (556 pages), tightly packed with facts, deals competently and in as much detail as the average reader will ever want, with Communist policies and operations in every country from India to Japan and from Indonesia to Tannu Tuva. Its greatest value will doubtless be as a reference book, but, far from being dull, it is good reading and easy reading. R. G.

Letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert (Viking, $7.50). No one who knows Joyce’s work, legend, or declared aims, will be surprised at his letters. They are probably the least interesting by a so called “creative writer” ever published. They have no juice, no personality, no openness, no charm, no heat. Much of the time, they might have been written by a travelling salesman whose “line” is minutely carved jade—a man whose private heart, soul, and self-knowing have nothing to do with his work. Joyce had passion in him, as his early writing makes clear; and he had a resourceful, scrupulous gift for language. But after 1915 (roughly), these two elements seem to abhor each other, and go about their, business separately. The passion flourished, as the best of the letters show, in his love for his family, especially his daughter. But the words, thousands and thousands of them, which his “patience, cunning and exile” mitred together, stand terribly alone-—uncommitted, unbegotten-upon, meaning anything, nothing.r.p.