It is good news that The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara, by Rosita Forbes, is to be published in a new edition. This Englishwoman, with no assistance but that of native guides, penetrated to Kufara, which lies hidden in the heart of the Libyan desert, a section of the Sahara. This is the region of a fanatical sect of Mohammedans known as the Senussi. No other white woman has ever been known to enter the sacred city of Paj, a gloomy citadel hewn out of rock on the edge of a beautiful valley. The Secret of the Sahara is illustrated with pictures taken by the author, many times under pain of death if she were detected using a camera.
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C. E. Andrews is a college professor who saw war service in France and relief administration work in the Balkans. His gifts as a delightful writer will be apparent now that his book of travels, Old Morocco and the Forbidden Atlas, is out. This book, unlike the conventional travel book, has the qualities of a good story. There is colour and adventure. There are humorous episodes and there are pictures that seem to be mirrored in the clear lake of a lovely prose. The journey described is through a region of Morocco little traversed by white men and over paths of the Atlas Mountains frequented chiefly by wild tribes and banditti.
Of all places to go, old New York remains, for many, the most appealing. Does it sound queer to recommend for those readers A Century of Banking in New York: 1822-1922, by Henry Wysham Lanier? Mr. Lanier is a son of Sidney Lanier, the poet, and those who believe that a chronicle of banking must necessarily be full of dry statistics are invited to read the opening chapter of this book; for Mr. Lanier begins his tale with the yellow fever epidemic of 1822, when all the banks of New York, to say nothing of the thousands of people, fled “from the city to the country”—that is, from lowermost Broadway to the healthful village of Greenwich. This quality of human rather than statistical interest is paramount throughout the book.
I go back almost four years to call attention again to Frederic A. Fenger’s Alone in the Caribbean, a book with maps and illustrations from unusual photographs, the narrative of a cruise in a sailing canoe among the Caribbean Islands.... It is just a good book.
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Robin Hood’s Barn, by Margaret Emerson Bailey, should be classified, I suppose, as a volume of essays. It seems to me admirably suited for this chapter, since it is all about a pleasant house inhabited by pleasant people—and surely that is a place where everyone wants to go. Margaret Emerson Bailey is describing, I think, an actual house and actual people; not so much their lives as what they make out of life in the collectivism that family life enforces. At least, I seem to get from her book a unity of meaning, the lack of which in our lives, as we live them daily, makes for helplessness and sometimes for despair.
With even more doubt as to the exact “classification,” I proceed to speak here and now of L. P. Jacks’s book, The Legends of Smokeover. Mr. Jacks is well known as the editor of the Hibbert Journal and a writer of distinction upon philosophical subjects. I should say his specialty is an ability to relate philosophical abstractions to practical, everyday existence. Those familiar with his essays in the Atlantic Monthly will know what I mean. And is the Smokeover of his new book, then, a place to go? It is, if you wish to see our modern age and industrial civilisation expressed in such terms—almost in the terms of fiction—as make its appraisal relatively easy.
I suppose this book might make Mr. Jacks memorable as a satirist. It brings philosophy down from the air, like a peaceful thunderbolt, to shatter the vain illusions we entertain of our material success and our civilised strides forward. The fact that when you have begun to read the book you may experience some difficulty in knowing how to take it is in the book’s favour. And why should you complain so long as from the outset you are continuously entertained and amused? You can scarcely complain ... even though at the end, you find you have been instructed. In a world thickly spotted with Smokeovers, Mr. Jacks’s book is a book worth having, worth reading, worth reading again.