ow F wEEK
BOOK OF THE WEEK
Handled With Care .. .
Glass. By Howard Stephenson.
Claude Kendall. $2.50.
The author has selected a frag-
ment from the history of the be-
ginnings of America and has made
of it a ground upon which he cre-
ates an edifice compounded of the
sufferings, victories and defeats
of those early pioneers in the first
days of industrialism in our coun-
try. This novel is the richly
human story of a lone giant of the
earth,+George Rood, who wages a
single-handed fight against a glass
manufacturing enterprise w h i c h
springs up across the toad from
his farm upon the discovery of
natural gas in the vicinity.
George Rood loses his wife in
childbirth at the time of an explo-
sion caused by the tapping of a
gas well almost at his front gate.
Embittered by this sad experience
and alien to the despoiling meth-
ods of the new enterprise, he
raises his son as a true child of
the soil, mothered only by Mamie,
a young servant girl, and Aunt
Fanny, a woman already well on
in years. "The man and this
habetic image of himself walked
the straight ways" refusing to be-
come wealthy by selling the farm
as the Karchers had done, in cause
of the industrial venture. Early
in the book we have a premoni-
tion that little Georgie will fol-
low, tragically, in his father's
footsteps when we read Aunt
Fanny's words, "He's jest the spit
of you, George. He's jest like
you was starting all over to be my
little one". And George Rood re-
peated "Jest like me starting over
again".
His sudden love for Mamie, by
whom he has another son, but
whom he loses to the dissolute
Jake Karcher, and the mocking
success of the hated "hell-hole",
incites him to a deeper love for
farm and Georgie. There is a
pathetic truthfulness in the fath-
er's struggle and efforts to keep
his son's attitude like his own
when he early realizes that the lit-
tle fellow is not entirely out of
sympathy with the glass industry.
He tries to pass this off and the
simple defense mechanism in his
words "You and me is farmers,
nothing else" is strikingly touch-
ing. The now grown son, like
father, ironically enough, loses the
woman he loves to his half
brother, and the elder Rood who
pays doubly for his sin when
Georgie becomes a prominent en-
gineer in a glass works in another
city, spends the sunset of his life
with Mamie, after Jake Karcher
meets his death at the hands of
his wife's son.
Howard Stephenson calls upon
his vast knowledge of provincial
country folk and factory workers,
gathered while living in small
towns in Ohio and Indiana where
he became acquainted with glass-
blowers and learned of the gaudy
boom days in that region, days
which belonged to the generation
just previous. His particular qual-
ity is an ability to secure and hold
a dramatic movement through the
medium of his delightfully infor-
mal style and this together with
the fineness of the use of dialogue,
makes of hisa characters living
people. He extracts the essen-
tials of episodes and scenes, and
delicacy, charm, brutality and
courseness come alike in the pic-
tures written out by the aut-hor.
This is one of the finest novels of
the new year. It expresses, like
none other, the loamy, heartfelt,
antagonism of those simple people
who believed the new industrial
era was an infringement upon
their honest lives and labors.
- X
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Other -
"THANKS FOR THE BLOW"-and we're also doing a little
tooting for the annual production of the Notre Dame Linnets
Club. It lampooned campus customs and personages.
WORLD'S RECORD HOLDER Johnny
Morris, Southwestern Louisiana Institute,
who does the 110 meter high hurdles in 14.3
seconds.
I expect to trave
L railroad
L plane
(NA
MILITARY ROYALTY-Alyce Connoly, Vin-
cient J. Buck, Cecil Olson, and Hartley C. Eck-
strom last week led the Military Ball at North
Dakota State College.
WHEN IT COMES TO HOCKEY-These co-eds at the Washington State Normal at Ellensburg are the
champion sportswomen of the northern institution.
ORATORY AND TRACK are the
specialties of Larry Magee of Ari-
zona State Teachers College at
Tempe.
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