SCHOLARLY BOOKS IN THE HERALD TRIBUNE BOOK REVIEW

The Herald Tribune Book Review gave more attention to books published by university and small presses than The Sunday Times did. The books reviewed were:

MAN ON A ROCK by University of North Carolina professor Richard Hertz was an indictment of modern materialism and a call for a return to a quest for the infinite. It was reviewed by feminist and pacifist writer Frances Witherspoon.

THE GROWTH OF CONSTITUTIONAL POWER IN THE UNITED STATES by political science professor Carl Brent Swisher. In his review, Harvard Law professor Mark DeW. Howe brought up the conflict over Roosevelt’s proposal to reorganize the Supreme Court when “questions of extreme complexity were argued with bludgeons.” The book is a collection of Swisher’s lectures at Johns Hopkins which delineated the number of questions that roiled the controversies then and today. Did the growth in power of administrative agencies challenge the rule of law by a tripartite government? Is it “enough that the principle of federalism ‘still reserves great areas of powers to the states’ when local apathies and national necessities make these areas largely unproductive?” These questions resonate today.

IF MEN WANT PEACE: THE MANDATES OF WORLD ORDER was from the Faculty of the University of Washington who argued that “'man is a creature of the universe’ not to be set as odds with himself by irrelevancies of nation, race, class or creed” according to reviewer Frances Witherspoon. The book discussed the various paths- politics, economics, law, science, education, the arts and religion- which need to converge into a single path for peace. Obstacles included the political idea of national sovereignty, power politics, and conflicting ideological, political and religious interests.

THE LAST POEMS OF PHILIP FRENEAU, edited by Lewis Leary, was a collection of 50 poems from the Revolutionary Era poet and political satirist, that originally had appeared in various periodicals between 1815, when the last collected volumes of his work appeared, and his death in 1832. Most were topical poems about events of the time like the construction of the Erie Canal, the fall of Napoleon, the Yellow Fever epidemics, the death of Robert Fulton and the populating of the Illinois territory. Leary was the author of a 1941 biography, That Rascal Freneau. He taught at Duke at this time after serving with the OSS during the war.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS by Joseph Lewis was reviewed by Stewart Holbrook. Lewis was a fanatical atheist who established the Free Thought Press to publish his own and other works. He had dropped out of school when he was nine and was largely self-educated. His style was polemical, running to the invective like an angry blogger, and it is somewhat surprising to see him get such a respectful review in a mainstream publication. In this work, he reviewed a number of sources to dissect the origin and original meaning of each of the Ten Commandments, providing evidence of earlier versions. Holbrook wrote that he included a “fascinating account of folk habits and beliefs.” For instance, he discussed the animistic significance of names behind the Third Commandment; the synthesis of Sunday and the Sabbath; the fear of pollution by an outsider reflected in the Seventh and the tribal meaning of “neighbor” in the Ninth. Holbrook was a colorful former lumberjack and well-known character who called himself a "lowbrow historian" and had taught at Harvard despite his lack of a high school diploma. He called the book a “sound piece of scholarship” with a lively, light style.”

RACE AND DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY by the late Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas who had died in 1942 was reviewed by Albert Guerard. It was a collection of his addresses, articles and papers. “Boas’s chief contribution to anthropology was his exploding of the race fallacy,” Guerard wrote. While he may have won the scientific battle, he did not convert the so-called practical world which still conflated nationality with race and made gross generalization about different "races." Guerard pointed out that the US had a racist immigration quota system that assumed “that immigrants from the land of Goebbels and Goering were superior to those from the lands of Borgese or Michael Pupin.”

THE DUNCIAD by Alexander Pope, edited by James Sutherland, was the third of six authoritative volumes of this classic work. The anonymous reviewer thought the introduction was more enjoyable than the text since the subjects of Pope’s satire were now long forgotten.

JAPANESE PRINTS BY HAUNOBU SHUNSO IN THE COLLECTION OF LOUIS V. LEDOUX. 50 plates. Introduction by Ledoux. Reviewed by Una E. Johnson, curator, Department of Prints and Drawings, Brooklyn Museum.

CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON AND FRANCIS WALKER GILMER 1814-1826, edited with an introduction by Richard Beale Davis. Letters between Jefferson and the man he sent to England to recruit faculty for the University of Virginia. “An admirable piece of scholarship” that unfortunately “adds little to our knowledge of either man,” according to the unsigned review.