+ − New Repub 23:183 Jl 7 ’20 260w
“The publishers of this volume have performed a genuine service in offering to American readers in an attractive form these literary gems from a language in which public interest is constantly increasing.”
+ N Y Times 25:28 Jl 18 ’20 280w
“There is a clear simplicity and naive directness to be found in the work of all three writers which marks them as of the same race.”
+ Springf’d Republican p11a Jl 25 ’20 300w
MACMURCHY, HELEN. Almosts: a study of the feeble-minded. *$1 50 (4c) Houghton 132
20–5606
The book is a study of “the fool” in literature, the author maintaining that valuable suggestions for the treatment and care of the feeble-minded can be obtained thereby. “Sometimes the poet sees more than the scientist, even when the scientific man is playing at his own game. The novelist can give a few points to the sociologist, and the dramatist to the settlement worker.” The great writers have studied the feeble-minded from life. They have “discovered long before the modern ‘uplifter’ was born, that we must reckon with the mental defective as one of those many things in heaven and earth that are not dealt with by some philosophers, and yet that make a great difference to the community and social progress.” The writers from whom the characters are taken are: Shakespeare, Bunyan, Scott, Dickens, Bulwer Lytton, Charles Reade, Victor Hugo, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hawthorne and others.
“The value of the book is perhaps the greatest in pointing out concretely to the general reader the common characteristics of defectives through these well known examples.”