Appreciating the national popularity of reading clubs and circulating libraries, the Editor of the Bookshelf has compiled a list of the most prominent books, fiction and non-fiction, that have appeared in the last twelvemonth. This list has been selected from the suggestions of the nine librarian advisers of the Atlantic; it will be sent with our compliments to committees and members of reading clubs and other interested persons. Requests should be addressed to the Editor of the Bookshelf, Atlantic Monthly, 8 Arlington Street, Boston (17), Mass.

Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie, by O. E. Rölvaag. Translated from the Norwegian. New York: Harper & Bros. 1927. 12mo. xxii+465 pp. $2.50.

Giants in the Earth is a moving narrative of pioneer hardship and heroism, told with such obvious veracity that it makes almost all other tales of the Western frontier seem cheap. At times, as in the description of the storm of locusts, of the blizzard, of the coming to the little settlement of a lone pioneer whose wife has gone mad with grief, it rises to great power. And the background of the boundless Dakota prairie, with its mysterious distances and its capacity for evil, is painted with alternating beauty and grimness.

The novel has such real values that to call it a 'magnificent and powerful epic,' as the publishers do, or a 'sustained and powerful tragedy,' as Mr. Lincoln Colcord does in his interesting Introduction, seems a little strained and even a little unfair. It has pathos a plenty, much humor of a homely sort, a group of appealing characters, and, in the story of Per Hansa and his wife, Beret, a narrative that one follows with sympathy and absorption. But the strongest qualities of the novel are neither tragic nor epic. The tragedy of man's struggle with nature and the epic march of frontier conquest are always in the background, but Per Hansa, the hero, never rises to tragic proportions and his wife is merely pathetic.

Of course, allowance must be made for the fact that the novel is a translation. Its author is a professor in an American college, but he composed Giants in the Earth in Norwegian and it was first published in Norway. There is no indication in the style of this edition that it is a translation, for it reads idiomatically enough, and yet one feels that it somehow falls below the conception and the subject matter. It is hard to

tell just what a fine novel loses in translation, but it certainly loses something; and it is possible that the effect of this one is in English very different from its effect in Norwegian. In English its effect is one of ingenuous charm with occasional chapters of great power.

To the thoughtful reader part of the fascination of the book lies in the sturdy simplicity of the characters - brave fisher-folk transplanted from the rugged mountains and wild fjords of Norway to a flat country of immeasurable distances. For them the prairie beyond the horizon is full of an implacable capacity for evil. The trolls live there, and a sensitive, imaginative woman like Beret dwells in perpetual fear of their malignancy. She at last finds comfort in the traditional religion of her folk, but her newly awakened faith drives her husband out on an errand of mercy that takes him straight to his death. The suggestion is that a true pioneer cannot afford to swerve from a straightforward combat with nature, in which his wits and muscles are immediately engaged and intellectual and mystical refinements only hamper his fighting powers. The study of Per and Beret, in Book Two, is interesting and at times subtle, but the stirring narrative of the 'land-taking,' in Book One, is likely to live longer in the mind.

The novel is an impressive and valuable account of one of the great movements in American life, and, although the characters are all immigrants, it is American to the core. These people in their simple and matter-of-fact way are unconsciously laying foundations that have proved lasting. Their moral courage is perhaps the best inheritance that we have received. Other races have contributed their share to it, too, of course, but none with more undeviating heroism or quiet devotion.

R. M. GAY

From Bismarck to the World War: A History of German Foreign Policy, 1870-1914, by Erich Brandenburg. Translated by Annie Elizabeth Adams. New York: Oxford University Press. 1927. 8vo. xiii+542 pp. $7.00.

ALL histories dealing with the period here described naturally focus on an ethical issue - responsibility for the World War. Since the facts of the period, seen in this relation, are still highly controversial, and many of them remain inferential pending the publication of complete and unsophisticated diplomatic records, the temper in which they are approached is even more important, if possible, than it ordinarily is in historical writing. At least it is the first thing we

want to know in addressing ourselves to a book like the present one. Bearing in mind that when it was written Germany and Russia (through the joyful labors of scandal-scenting Soviet rummagers in Tsarist archives) were the only countries involved in the war that had given the public anything like a full and candid documentary account of the information relating to its antecedents and origin in the possession of their foreign offices, the sentences from the preface that follow help us to a first impression of the author's mind: 'It is the historian's duty in a case where official materials on the one side are meagre, not to attribute a motive unless he can supply an actual proof of it. . . . It is as incumbent on us as on our enemies to avoid prejudices formed under the obsession of war. . . . This book has been written, often in anguish of heart, in the belief that it is necessary. The readers I desire, be they in Germany or elsewhere, are those who seek earnestly to see things as they really were.'

The professor of modern history at Leipzig University who wrote these words has no known antecedents or earlier professional commitments that would give his work what would have been called a few years ago a Treitschke bias. Neither is he, on the other hand, an emotional cosmopolitan. His reputation as an historian and the present book bespeak a well-balanced, painstaking, objective-minded scholar. Naturally he arranges his data in a Berlincentric pattern, for he is describing the foreign policy of his own country primarily for German readers, but his work is by no means conventional Kriegsschuldfrage literature.

It is impossible to deal critically in the compass of an ordinary review with the author's evidence and conclusions. That would necessitate going behind his documentation, which is ample though not burdensome. He does not challenge dissent from the ordinary reader, although he may irritate uncured war neurasthenics and he conceives some phases of his subject differently from other historians both in his country and elsewhere. He would be classed at home as of the Bismarck school. That is, he sees in the Old Chancellor's diplomacy a sincere effort, though exerted in rather devious and complicated ways, to preserve the peace of Europe. He is not an admirer of William II, whose impulsiveness and instability prevented Germany's pursuing a consistent foreign policy and helped to drive Russia into the arms of France. During the quarter of a century while the war was incubating, Anglo-German cleavage, beginning with Britain's jealousy of Berlin's new colonial ambitions, aggravated by her fear of Germany's commercial expansion, and widened to the danger point by naval competition, is represented as the most decisive of many powerful forces moulding the contours of the international landscape.

Professor Brandenburg evidently considers the Kaiser and his entourage largely responsible for the failure to find a solution for the naval issue.

Indeed the alienation of England was the cardinal blunder of Germany's post-Bismarckian diplomats. Nevertheless, 'so far as we can learn from the sources at present available,' he writes, 'no one in England really wanted war. The view so widely held in Germany that Britain engineered the war in order to destroy our economic competition . . has little justification.' Furthermore, 'there is no indication that the Entente was originally intended as an instrument of war.' On the other hand, while Germany's foreign policy 'can justly be accused of short-sightedness, lack of method, want of forethought and of understanding the psychology of other peoples,' and ‘we can blame Germany's vacillation and her sudden recklessness, as in the Morocco question... no one can maintain with any show of reason that at any given time she either wished for war or strove to bring it about.' In France and Russia likewise the great body of the people . . . was desirous of peace,' but each country had a war party in its ruling circles, the Petersburg PanSlavists and the Paris revanchists. Isvolski, embittered by his personal reverse in the Bosnian crisis, actively promoted Pan-Slav projects at the French capital, with the friendly aid of Poincaré. 'So far as guilt can be brought home to individual personalities in the World War, these two men stand convicted.' Of course the Tsarist archives, whose secret documents have been published from the housetops, supply the evidence cited to support this charge. If the Bolsheviki were given equally free run of the other foreign offices of Europe, we might enlarge the circle of criminals. But the author does not simplify the genesis of the war as much as this brief quotation suggests. Although the clever and unscrupulous tunneling operations' of comparatively small groups prepared the way for that disaster, it was in its larger perspectives the result of new political and economic tensions caused by the race to grab the earth's undeveloped territories, the fierce fight of rapidly expanding industries for markets, and the growth of national sentiment among the peoples of Europe, which made them rebel against the old and ethnically irrational frontiers that kept kinsmen apart and yoked together discordant

races.

VICTOR S. CLARK

Uplands, by Mary Ellen Chase. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 1927. 12mo. vi+192 pp. $2.00. (An Atlantic Monthly Press Publication.)

THIS book, if the reviewer mistakes not, springs from the author's affection for beautiful words, for sentences turned with a rhythmic fineness in which each syllable is a conscious and intended element. It is a work of beauty, or it is nothing, and it is beauty of expression which seems to have been foremost in the author's mind as she wrote.

But style must have its appropriate material,

and Miss Chase's material is peculiarly inseparable from her stylistic predilection. One suspects that she would be somewhat at a loss to exercise her faculty for beautiful language if she had not nature to describe, that at times her characters are chiefly valuable to her as excuses to record the blossoming of the wild plum or the heat of the August suns on the berry bushes of the Maine hills. The majority of the English poets are perhaps not far removed from her in this respect; and if prepossession with nature is a less popular characteristic of novels at the present time, many readers will still welcome a volume in which this imperishable source of pleasure is freely and beautifully exploited. And as always when the beauty of nature is genuinely rendered, a quality of the ideal and the poignant pervades Miss Chase's book, pervades its expression, its story, and is enhanced by its humor.

Miss Chase's story is of the simplest, its elements familiar and universal-first love; the earth, in its duality as the type of fullness, of life immeasurable and rich, and as the actual land, crushing the farmer beneath a weight of poverty, repression, and toil; the search for escape from a narrow and parching environment; birth and death. Of such material Miss Chase has constructed her tale. The fullness and the abundance of life, the days of a spring and a summer peculiarly flawless and symbolic of the transient and unearthly happiness of Martha and Jarvis, Miss Chase gives us to feel in overflowing measure. The bitterness of the farmer's lot we rather acknowledge as a proposition to which assent is necessary than feel in its original force. The external beauty of the Maine landscape to her own eye is much more Miss Chase's concern than the actuality of the farmer's hardship to his. The book is open, indeed, to the complaint that its pretended setting of Maine is scarcely distinguishable from the land of faëry, into which the impressionable young Colin, whose susceptibility to both love and the charms of the priesthood is so rudely distracting, introduces the wondering Martha. In the same way the rusticity of Miss Chase's characters is considerably softened. Touched by her willing and tolerant humor, it never obtrudes its cruder phases. It again is present rather as a proposition agreed to than as an immediate datum felt and seen in its native substance.

Yet Miss Chase's insight into the bitter emotional repression which settles over thwarted and isolated lives is preserved in pages of great skill. And sometimes, also, at her most ideal Miss Chase is most actual. Moments are preserved in her words which could only have been produced by an unusual skill both in beauty of style and in the reality alike of their external detail and the emotional perception with which it is united. Such a moment is that which finds Jarvis bending over Martha in the berry patch in the first days of their enchantment. 'Her pink dress, which was at last succumbing to

wear and sun, was torn at the neck, and as she leaned forward showed the white soft skin below the tan of her throat and chest. He saw the fine down upon it, its rise and fall with her breathing, the tiny drops that clung to it. He saw, too, the eager, fearless poise of her head, the hair in curling wisps about her face, the light in her dark eyes that seemed to see something close to him.' Is it not precisely at instants as unconscious, as unprotected as this that the premonitions of fatality and change which are aroused in Jarvis do occur?

THEODORE MORRISON

Trader Horn: Being the Life and Works of Alfred Aloysius Horn, edited by Ethelreda Lewis. New York: Simon & Schuster. 1927. 8vo. x+302 pp. $4.00.

IN a cheap boarding house in Johannesburg lived an old man of over seventy, known as Zambesi Jack, who made his living by twisting copper wire into gridirons and forks and peddling them from house to house. He was writing his memories, memories of a trader in the French Congo in the 70's, twenty years after Du Chaillu and twenty years before Mary Kingsley. In them, to use his own words, 'Romance ran amuck.' He remembers how he shipped to President Grant in a puncheon of spirits, instead of the gorilla he expected, the body of a trader who wanted to be buried at home; how much he admired Livingston's wife (without forgetting Livingston's second and black wife); how Cecil Rhodes got drunk on some of his prickly-pear brandy and almost got eaten by a crocodile while he was sleeping it off; how he picked up in a native village the music box which Du Chaillu had left there half a generation before; how the natives pushed their grandmothers into the river and called them modest if they drowned face down. But chiefly he remembers how he and a schoolmate helped the daughter of a British peer to escape from the throne of a goddess in a native witch house, and how they tossed a gold piece for her hand. (I levelled off the sand. . . . Your shout, I cried. . . .')

One Tuesday morning he sold a gridiron to Mrs. Lewis- and started to talk to her. She gave him pencil and paper and this is his book, just as he wrote it in his boarding house. As he got on with it, he would talk over each chapter with her, and in the book she adds his spoken to his written word. Just as pen and ink choked Dr. Johnson with Latinity, so his pad and pencil almost strangles Horn with his 'literary proce dure' (as he calls it), a style which dates from his early Victorian schooling. However, his tongue gives us such things as "The rich are happy when there are no mosquitoes. For the poor there are greater mercies,' and his opinion of prayer. "This constant nudging of the Almighty is a mistake. John Galsworthy, in the preface he wrote for this volume, quotes a dishful of hors d'oeuvres for a jaded public. Readers of the