THE MICHIGAN DAILY SUJNbAi, MAIWi , 93 IN TH-EE WORLD O F B O O KS H. G. Wells' Scenario Fantasy STERN: Chats And Scintillates In .Her Autobiography Not So Success By KENNETH PARKER Herbert George Wells, prophet of a sort, declared some seven years ago in his book The King Who Was a King that the movies are destined to become our greatest art form and that, as result, we are due to see the development of a new literary medium, the "film treatment," a "literary collateral of the stage or the, novel." Wells is anticipating such a development in giving the reading public another of his modified scenar- ios in Man Who Could Work Miracles, an expansion of the short story of that title. Having learned something of the craft of the script writer while work- ing with Alexander Korda, of Lon- don Film Productions, in the filming of Things To Come, Wells has ap- parently decided to take up in earnest the writing of non-technical sce- narios, intending them for general consumption. The work in hand pre- sages more of its type to come. Man Who Could Work Miracles is a strange offering.', Not only does it involve a peculiar form of presenta- tion but also a fantastic situation, which is not tied up with reality as effectively as it is in the original story. The combined factors serve to defeat the humorous effect intended, although the work is not without its bright moments. George McWhirter Fotheringay,k supposedly an average individual, but judged by American standards, a mental entity even below that level, is given the power to work miracles - even as he is arguing against mira- cles one night in the bar of the Long Dragon Inn in the English country town of Dewhinton. Not, knowing that the power has been given him by the Player, one of three imagined Elemental Powers who are curious to see the outcome of such a gift, Fotheringay attempts to prove to one Toddy Beamish that miracles are impossible by commanding the lamp in the bar to burn "upsy-down" -which it does. After experimenting with this new sful As Original TODAY'S BOOKS MONOGRAM by G. B. Stern. Macmillan,$2.50. Autobiographical reminiscences. TAKE ALL TO NEBRASKA. By Sophus Keith Winter. Macmil- lan $2.50. A novel of farm life. ALUMNUS WRITES NEW BOOK Arthur Pound, well-known writer and graduate of Michigan, is the au- thor of a new book, comprising his recent series of articles in the At- lantic Monthly. The articles, each covering a large American corpora- tion are the result of his thirty MONOGRAM, By G. B. Stern. Macmillan. $2.50. By DOROTHY GIES THERE are all too few books in theI world that one can open to abso- lutely any page, and read backwards or forwards or skipping with equal pleasure. G. B. Stern's pseudo-auto- biography is that kind, and certainly one of the most delicious pot-pourris of reminiscence, comment and phi-' losophy to bubble upon the literary horizon in many years. In these days of the blood-sweat- ing school of prose, when writers even of comic strips have to get horribly! intense about everything, what balm to the cauterized reader is a leisurely personality like Miss Stern's. Spiri- tually kin to the eighteenth century, with its lost art of letter-writing and its easy, rambling conversational es- says, Miss Stern's book likewise is one long series of digressions, so sprightly,' so urbane, so engaging one is com- pletely won by her wanderings. To mention in the next sentence a whiff of Gertrude Stein and a dash of William James seems quite incon- gruous, to be sure, but curiously enough the book suggests both of' these, depending for its construction, or rather its formlessness, on pro- cesses of association, related in many ways to automatic writing. But G. Stern has charm where G. Stein has not. Miss Stern has determined to avoidi the pitfalls of formal biography, "dullness, crowding, bad taste, anec- dotes, a cargo of I's, whimsicality, and over-intimacy." So her method is simply to choose at random three objects in her room - a little blue glass dragon, a bit of the Grand Can- yon, and a picture found in a rubbish heap at a French villa - and with these as stimuli, to follow where her train of thought and memory leads. The net result is the distillation of a vivid and mercurial personality through a kaleidoscope of events. Peter Pannery, vicious obsession of the Englishman, Queen Victoria's fu- neral, cakewalks, torch songs, her great aunt, heroine of The Matriarch novel, the Marx Brothers - all receive brief and scintillating comment. Na- turally the difficulty of so haphazard a method is that half one's reminis- acrag may be irrelevant and uninter- esting to the reader. Miss Stern shows a fastidious taste in selection and is never once guilty of the cap- ital crime of dullness. Particularly intriguing are her paragraphs about the theatre -Noel Coward conceiv- ing Cavalcade, the Christmas panto- mimes of another decade, the first night of Journey's End in Berlin, and her close acquaintance with brilliant actors. When she dissects the Elsie Dinsmore books in the light of Freud and discloses a ghastly Oedipus com- plex in that saintly heroine the result ,is hilarious. Concerning Miss Stern herself, one gets the image of an Ina Clairish lady with a gift for banter, who has seen sunsets on every continent and lived all in all, a life of delightful levity. But the book is not all froth and no beer. There are pages of bril- liant description, of subtle under- standing and mature wisdom. Thus she shrewdly declares of the elder Marx: "Groucho sums up our spe- cial pride in being children of the Twentieth Century; he gives us an effect of swift logic, decisive action, THE LOST GENERATION by Max- years' observation of the evolution of ine Davis. Macmillan. $2.50. American business. A study of youth and the depression. - PLAYS OF CHANGING IRELAND. been sold in this country in the last Edited by Curtis Canfield. Macmil- I forty years. From the same source lan. $3.50. Irish drama of the past comes the information that the sale decade. of Somerset Maugham's Of Human PUBLIC SPEECH by Archibald Mac- Bondage is approaching the 2,000,000 leish. Farrar and Rinehart. $7.50. mar. Poems dor in by the author of Conquista- a signed limited edition. H. G. WELLS power in a harmless sort of way Fotheringay eventually comes to re- alize his potentialities. But being a humble man, he goes to his employer, Mr. Grigsby, to Mr. Bampfylde, the village banker, and to the Reverend Silas Maydig for advice. After being convinced of his power, these gentle- men give him plenty of advice, but of conflicting sorts, so that he finally perceives that he must act according to his own principles. He does, and therein lies the climax of they story. Throughout there is a feeling of conflict between fantasy and reality to a degree which is not present in the original short story, a tale which is delightful because such incidents as the sending of the village police- man to Hades and then to San Fran- cisco are left to the imagination of the reader and not further exploited. On the whole, the touch in the adap- tation is heavy, sometimes degenerat- ing to slapstick; and we must say that the "film treatment" is an art form which has its limitations. Marcel Maurel3 G. B. STERN author of "Monogram", "The Matriarch", etc. (Macmillan) ruthless efficiency, hundred-per-cent organization, and the result non- sense." Possibly that too is the character- istic fault of contemporary literature. At any rate you will find a thor- oughly delightful oasis in MONO- GRAM. BEST SELLERS OF THE WEEK THE LAST PURITAN by George Santayana. Scribner's. $2.75. WHY KEEP THEM ALIVE by Paul de Kruif. Harcourt. $3.00. THE EXILE by Pearl Buck. Reynal (AP) Hitchcock. $2.50. THE HURRICANE by Nordhoff and Hall. Little Brown. $2.50. ALMA MATER by Henry Seidel Canby. Farrar & Rinehart. $2.50. Doubleday Doran report that Rud- yard Kipling left an estate of more than $3,000,000, and that a total of 3,500,000 volumes of his works have I Engraved $ Cards & Plaes. THE ATHENS PRESS Printers City's Lowest Prices on Printing. 308 North Main Street - Dial 2-1013 Former Student's Adventures With Mr. Punch Recommended r I1 TYPEWRITERS A Few Good Used Ones For Sale or For Rent ULRICH'S BOOKSTORE oil By JOSEPH S. MATTES I FORMAN BROWN: Punch's Progress MacMillan: $2. Punch's Progress - from Ann Ar- bor to Hollywood, from Natural Science Auditorium to the screen. Sixteen years ago this Mr. Punch was first created after Forman Brown,' then a student and later an English instructor here, and Harry Burnett, his roommate, saw their first mar- ionette in "Natural Science Audi- torium - as unlikely a theatre as could well have been found." Then and there developed an almost fath- erly love for Mr. Punch, a growing disease, the author calls it, that has always been incurable for him, and probably always will be. There followed for Messrs. Brown and Burnett college summers of tour- ing Michigan in a Ford of ancient vintage, displaying Mr. Punch to Michiganders from Charlevoix to well south of Ann Arbor, from Ann Arbor to Lake Michigan-then, upon grad- uation, New England, where "hick" I I umims ammmmem aI 1 BOOKS OF REFERENCE for all BRANCHES OF ENGINEERING BOUCHARD: SURVEYING ..... . ............. . .............. ...... . $3.75 ALLEN: RAILWAY CURVES AND EARTHWORKS WITH TABLES........ 4.00 MERRIMAN & WIGGINS: AMERICAN CIVIL ENGINEERS' HANDBOOK..... 8.00 KING: HANDBOOK OF HYDRAULICS................................... 4.00 WALKER & CROCKER: PIPING HANDBOOK ............................. 5.00 WEBB: RAILROAD CONSTRUCTION TEXTBOOK WITH TABLES........ 6.00 O'ROURKE: GENERAL ENGINEERING HANDBOOK .................... 4.00 BLANCHARD: AMERICAN HIGHWAY ENGINEERS' HANDBOOK........ 6.00 MACHINERY HANDBOOK .............................................. 6.00 KENT: MECHANICAL ENGINEERS' HANDBOOK... .......................6.00 MARKS: MECHANICAL ENGINEERS' HANDBOOK ...................... 7.00 COLVIN & STANLEY: AMERICAN MACHINISTS' HANDBOOK............ 4.00 SMALLWOOD: MECHANICAL LABORATORY METHODS . . ..............3.50 STANDARD HANDBOOK FOR ELECTRICAL ENGINEERS................. 7.00 WARNER & JOHNSON: AVIATION HANDBOOK .......................... 7.50 COLVIN & COLVIN: AIRCRAFT HANDBOOK. .................. 4.00 HENNEY: RADIO ENGINEERING HANDBOOK ........................... 5.00 HUDSON: THE ENGINEERS' MANUAL ................................... 2.75 HUDSON-LIPKA : MANUAL OF MATHEMATICS........................ 1.50 KIDDER & PARKER: ARCHITECTS' AND BUILDERS' HANDBOOK.......8.00 HOOL & JOHNSON: CONCRETE ENGINEERS' HANDBOOK .............. 6.00 HOOL & JOHNSON: HANDBOOK BUILDING CONSTRUCTION, 2 vols......10.00 HODGMAN: HANDBOOK OF CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS...............3.00 PERRY: CHEMICAL ENGINEERS' HANDBOOK .......................... 6.75 INSKIP: TABLES OF SQUARES AND LOGARITHMS.....................4.50 INSKIP: TABLES OF SQUARES (New Arrangement) .....................5.00 INSKIP: TABLE OF GRADIENTS ........................................ 3.00 town inhabitants and vacationing J millionaires enjoyed Mr. Punch f equally. Then the Yale Puppeteers - they X picked this name up by virtue ofX Harry attending dramatic school at Yale; they should be, I think, the Michigan Puppeteers - started tak- ing Mr.' Punch on extensive tours: through the East, southward, stop- ping here and there, to Florida, the Middle West, and finally to Califor- nia by way of the Southwest. In Hollywood a theatre is acquired; the greats of Hollywood meet Mr. Punch of the wooden head, and give rise to many an amusing tale. But the wanderlust is too strong and so back to New York where an ambition of long standing is satisfied-to estab- lish a permanent marionette theatre in America's largest city.1 After success in New York they va- cationed a while, then were called to Hollywood to help in the production of a picture. I Whether you are interested in pup- peteers or no, whether you have ever seen a marionette or no, you will probably enjoy Punch's Progress to the utmost, because, essentially, it is adventure. Nothing of the me- chanics, history or technique of pup- petry is contained, giving it a lightT ness that is delightful. Brown's ability of expression is not too often equalled. He has a lively vocabulary, words, as Stanley Walk- er's saying goes, that "swim and cut and slap and dance." Whatever he is describing, his lovable puppets, a movie ' actress, a Babbitish junior leaguer, or beautiful scenery, each sentence is compact and clear. Next to his excellent expression, probably what makes the book so in- teresting is his intense love of pup- petry. His enthusiasm for the little wooden men is carried into his trav- els and it is contagious; not that you fall in love with marionettes, but rather you are interested in and ad- mire this man Brown and all his en- thusiasm, his light and adventurous' spirit. Once in his early days of puppeteer- ing, he scribbled a sonnet which translates somewhat his love for pup- pets: I have played God, stood balancing above "the yellow glare of lights and pulled the string "that make alive the tiny wooden things and felt not mercy, kindliness, or love, "but only aching fingers, eyes that strain "to make the puppet pass across the stage "and simulate the human heritage "of pleasure that is masquerading pain. "Some day I shall not make them act like men. "I shall be God indeed, and shall not WAR SURGEON WRITES A hitherto unexploited field of war reminiscence will be covered by Dr. Harvey Cushing's From A Surgeon's Journal: 1915-1918. Depicting faith- ully the experiences of a medical man in the War, the book is to be profusely illustrated with startling photographs. I. LW 1. Something New For The 1936' Junior Girls Play 1 S ; il i I l i i I' l i I I I II III~iIIIIIIIII iI111 1 Illi iI !I fli lii II l i li ll llilllII I illII