Word: epics
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...EPIC OF AMERICA-James Truslow Adams-Little, Brown ($3). Not Prohibition but the U. S. itself, thinks James Truslow Adams, is the noble experiment. He calls it the "American dream." In this one-volume history of the U. S. he shows the beginnings of the dream, its sinkings into nightmare, its lapses into crude daylight reality, its volatile rises. Professional historian, no mealy-mouthed panegyrist, Adams has written his epic in curt, clear narrative; but "the epic loses all its glory without the dream. The statistics of size, population, and wealth would mean nothing to me unless I could still...
...Epic of America does not seek to compete with the ordinary historical or economic narratives of the U. S. With only four brief footnotes, few formal statistics, a broad brush Adams paints a rapid but effective picture, tries at the same time to show "how the ordinary American . . . has become what he is today in outlook, character, and opinion.'' Such oft-told stories as the events of the Revolution and the Civil War, Washington at Valley Forge and Lincoln in his cabin Adams does not retell; but he comments on their causes, their effects on the national character...
...author of so many fat and respectable books of history. In 1921 Founding of New England won him the Pulitzer Prize. Other books: Revolutionary New England, New England in the Republic, Jeffersonian Principles, Hamiltonian Principles. Book-of-the-Month Club judges had no difficulty in making The Epic of America their unanimous selection for October...
...HERO-Alfred Neumann-Knopf ($2.50). You frequently hear post-War literature criticized for being ugly, brutal, bereft of nobility. Many a novel of contemporary Germany can be tarred with this stick. But Herr Neumann's psychological epic, his portrait of a modern hero, while it is compact of journalistic realism, is neither ugly, brutal, nor ignoble. Neumann has translated old virtues into modern terms, but their values remain...
...Selznick saga is a fantasy told in light signs over Broadway, a loud scandal whispered in file copies of Variety, a legend forgotten in the smoke that curled out of spittoons in the Claridge Hotel from cigarets that had gold tips and monograms. An epic and a joke, it has made Selznick the name of a dynasty in the weird peerage of the cinema industry. It helped give the industry its reputation. It concerns a Japanese valet who learned how to pickle herring, a girl who was born in a Pennsylvania coal town and killed herself in Paris, a gold...