According to this “story of the English revolution and after,” (sub-title), the revolution broke out in 1924. During its first skirmishes Jeremy Tuft, physicist, is overtaken by a bomb while inspecting a new scientific discovery. Thanks to the new “ray” he awakens from the shock and crawls out of his hole in the ground in the year 2074 into a ruined and degenerate world. Almost all traces of our civilization are gone and the people are too ignorant and tired to restore what is left or to rebuild better. What is left is a ruling house in England, landlordism, and a degenerate industrialism in the north of England. In the ruler—an old Jew known us the “Speaker”—however, some of the old ambition survives. The form it takes to desire to reconstruct, with the aid of the oldest surviving mechanics, the onetime efficient gun. Now Jeremy Tuft is pressed into his services and the gun becomes a fact. Immediately there is war and more disaster in which the Speaker, his daughter Eva, and Jeremy, her lover, all go down to destruction together.
“The author writes entertainingly, imaginatively, and with a creative skill that makes his work pleasant if not nutritious reading.”
+ − Dial 70:231 F ’21 50w N Y Times p22 O 24 ’20 800w
SHANNON, ALASTAIR. Morning knowledge: the story of the new inquisition. *$5 Longmans 192
“For two years and a half a prisoner of war in Turkey, the author devoted nearly half of that period to the writing of this work. If, perhaps, somewhat premature as a presentment of philosophy, the book is at all events an essay at the expression of a young man’s ‘positive assurance in the value of man as a real creator.’ Beginning with negations, the author advances by degrees to the conclusions that there is ‘more in life than mechanism, and more in reason than intellect’; that intellect is ‘so formed as to grasp mechanism wholly’; and that reason is so formed as to reflect life wholly and to find for life a purpose which is not yet palpable, though psychologically evident.”—Ath
Ath p125 Ja 23 ’20 120w Cath World 111:691 Ag ’20 140w
“A very beautiful and a very sane philosophy will be found in these pages. The poetry in them has a lyrical quality reminiscent of Mr W. B. Yeats, and the prose at times glows at white heat. Although Mr Shannon’s work is uneven, and sometimes baffling, it is never commonplace.”
+ Sat R 129:373 Ap 17 ’20 490w