Sheelah Brent was literally picked up by a traveling theatrical company and pressed into their services as substitute for a sick stage child, when she was only seven. For six weeks she thus tided over, with her earnings, a crisis in her family while her widowed father was ill from overwork. Later, when she came to choose her own course, it was the theater. She made good in her profession and in due time became an artist. Towards this latter development her love experiences as a woman helped. But it meant struggle and heartache for Sheelah and defiance of all conventions. Heart solitude once more overtakes her when her son Michael, the fruit of her first girlish and illicit love, is sent to school in England under the guidance of his English father. It is then that she finds so much solace in a book that she writes to the author for more spiritual help. With the coming of the war both Michael and his father volunteer and the latter rescues his son at the cost of his eyesight. The usual thing follows but not before Sheelah has turned to religion, Michael has been killed and she has discovered in her former lover the author of the helpful book.
“A good deal of the novel is well written, particularly the first two ‘books,’ but it drags badly toward the close.”
+ − N Y Times 25:170 Ap 11 ’20 350w
“The beginning is cleverly human, but the close is strongly-presented pathos of the type commonly classed as ‘sob stuff.’”
+ − Springf’d Republican p11a Je 13 ’20 190w
BOUCKE, OSWALD FRED. Limits of socialism. *$1.50 (1½c) Macmillan 335
20–7869
After having made it clear that he considers socialism as neither a chimera nor a crime the author makes an attempt at a sympathetic examination of its various tenets with a view to laying bare its weak points and demonstrating the necessity for amendments of the original creed. “Revision is a step in the onward march of civilization. Science itself is nothing if not continual growth and redefinition of terms, whose finest fruit is the advancement of humanism.” The book falls into two parts. Part 1, The limits in theory, contains: The problem; Karl Marx and the economists; The economic interpretation of history; Justice. Part 2, The limits in practice, contains: The limits in production; The limits in distribution; The limits in consumption; The limits in government; A petition. There are seven statistical tables and an index. The author is professor of economics at Pennsylvania state college.