Word: authority
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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AFTER the exaggerated, somewhat pathological stories of travel that have been holding forth of late, the wholesome, credibly adventurous tone of this book is very refreshing. It is not entitled to very high praise, either for originality or skillful style, but the author, realizing her limitations, keeps from the danger of affected writing, and her work reflects sincerity and ability, if not literary brilliance...
...story concerns two American girls, who, with an eye for pioneering possibilities, discover the account of a barque that is to make its farewell voyage from Vancouver to the Fiji Islands. There are numerous difficulties of practicality and convention to be overcome, but the author and her friend are signed as midshipmaids, and depart, aboard a ship with a cannibal cook and a crew of old-time sailors. The journey takes about two months; the body of the book is made up of the ship's log, which was kept by Miss Cooper...
...author has been extremely apt in his choice of similes and metaphors to clarify the technical language of physics which necessarily permeate such a volume. The ordinary reader, therefore, begins to see the glimmer of the movements of mentality traced by Professor White-head from the seventeenth century to the present time, even though be falls to follow much of the reasoning that lies beneath unfamiliar terminology. And although it requires a deep study, despite the fact that the work is for beginners, to to grasp the full meaning, nevertheless the treatment of scientific ideas in scientific terms is more...
...this foundation, the author builds a singularly pungent tale of ship yards, cotillions, the rigours of a mid-winter passage of the Horn, the frenzy of the Gold Rush, the economics of the China Trade--in short, the spirit of those adventuresome times...
...their play about the Shelleyan young physicist who discovers the secret of the atom, and causes an upheaval in the cabinet chamber at 10 Downing Street by his presentation of the consequences thereof. And perhaps in this play more than in most others, one is acutely conscious of the author's difficulties. The time of the play is tomorrow, and certainly any solution but the scientific one of a cosmological problem, and one which seems as valid as this, strikes an excitement-craving audience as a lame solution indeed. But Messrs, Nichols and Browne lay no claims to clairvoyance...