Z

20–6757

“The purposes of psychological testing are (a) to aid in segregating the mentally incompetent, (b) to classify men according to their mental capacity, (c) to assist in selecting competent men for responsible positions.” (Introd.) Although the results given in the present volume are based almost entirely on military needs and indicate the success of this service in the army, it has been prepared in the hope that it may suggest possible uses of similar methods in education and industry. Contents: Making the tests; Methods and results; The examiner’s guide for psychological examining in the army—Directions for giving the army mental tests; Army tests in the Students’ army training corps and colleges; Practical applications; Army test record blanks and forms.

“Suggestive to an instructor or employment manager, as it gives a practical illustration of what might be done with these tests in a commercial way.”

Reviewed by P. S. Florence

Reviewed by F. L. Wells

“If the American army was not actually as wonderful as the peruser of these tests might suppose, we must realize that, as far as the theory of mental tests is concerned, an exceedingly valuable piece of work was nevertheless performed. They appear, as far as the reader can judge, to have vindicated themselves completely.”

YORK, THOMAS A.Foreign exchange; theory and practice. $2.50 Ronald 332.4

20–3331

“The author’s purpose is to explain the operation of the exchanges between gold standard countries under normal financial conditions. In the introductory chapters he discusses the meaning of the gold standard, or what constitutes money in a gold standard country. A hypothetical method of treatment is proposed in the theoretical part of the discussion. In the last few chapters the hypothetical assumptions are abolished and attention is given to practical foreign exchange operations as conducted in the New York market.”—Am Econ R

YOUNG, FLORENCE ETHEL MILLS.Almonds of life. *$1.90 (2½c) Doran

20–23027

When Fred Wootten marries a beautiful young wife and brings her home to South Africa he surprises all his friends, not least of them George and Maud Allerton. Mrs Allerton welcomes the bride and does all in her power to make her happy in her new home. But neither she nor the hapless husband is aware of the sudden passion that awakens between George Allerton and Gerda Wootten and up to the moment of flight both are unaware of what is impending. George and Gerda go to England. Wootten is willing to set his wife free but for the sake of her children Maud refuses to consider divorce. Eventually Gerda comes to feel the guilt of her action and sends George from her. The title is taken from a Chinese proverb, “Almonds come to those who have no teeth.”

“The book is smoothly written, but it has no especial charm of style, nor any particular quality either of discernment or of drama to freshen its more than well-worn plot. The proofreading is strikingly careless.”

“She has given George Allerton’s wife sterling qualities and then wasted them all. The author, in fact, has taken throughout the book a low view of love, and love has spread his wings and flown away. We have seldom found so little love in a book which contained so much talk of it. Being what it is, however, it is a well-told story.”

YOUNG, FRANCIS BRETT.Poems, 1916–1918. *$2 Dutton 821

20–9079

“This book contains poems which appeared in Mr Brett Young’s first volume of verse, ‘Five degrees south.’ But there is a large number of new poems.” (The Times [London] Lit Sup p718 D 4 ’19) “Mr Brett Young’s finer poems are of two kinds—reverie and fantasy. Both are in the nature of dreams; the one a brooding on love or beauty, a scene, a memory; the other on adventure, heathenish maybe, and magical, of the imagination.” (The Times [London] Lit Sup p779 D 25 ’19)

“His ardent appreciation of the richer, more obvious kinds of beauty makes him a remarkably picturesque writer. He possesses, in modernized form, a great measure of the talent of that much neglected writer, Thomas Moore.” A. L. H.

“The difficulty is that Mr Young has not made his verse the true instrument of his experiences. He writes about them, rather than records them. And the way in which he writes about them is by echoing other poets.” J: G. Fletcher

“Young has already made an enviable reputation as a prose writer, but it is quite safe to assert that his poetry immediately gives him a much higher place in English letters than he has occupied heretofore. There is not a mediocre poem, not a verse without its modicum of aesthetic satisfaction and impressionistic suggestion for the reader. The reviewer can but advise lovers of poetry to secure it as soon as possible.” H. S. Gorman

“Mr Francis Brett Young tries experiments in metres that are more crafty than wise. He is prone also to that kind of verse in which things well said and things not nearly so well said are set forth in undiscriminating proximity.” O. W. Firkins

“Mr Brett Young has a distinguished, ardent, and promising muse.”

YOUNG, FRANCIS BRETT.Young physician. *$2.50 Dutton

20–8520

“This story proceeds by definite stages. First of all we have the boy in the English public school. We find him suffering keenly from the roughness and cruelty of public school life. His own escape from this torment is in his dreams. He confides these dreams to his mother and she responds with an understanding which tightened the bond between them. After his mother has died, Edwin’s father has a period of poignant self-revelation. He takes Edwin on a bicycle trip to the country where his boyhood was spent. His father uses rather undue influence in persuading him to give up his chosen career in order to study medicine. It is easy to understand that the father longs to see his own personal ambitions fulfilled in the boy, but after the first Edwin himself becomes interested in the work. We see him in the medical school, in the dissecting room. When he discovers late in his medical school course that his father is planning to marry again, Edwin is forced to leave home by an interior urge too strong to be overborne. It is their definite point of cleavage.”—Boston Transcript

“Readable, yes, eminently readable—readable to a fault. If only Mr Young could forget the impatient public and let himself be carried away into places where he thinks they do not care to follow!” K. M.

“Mr Young has given us a genuine achievement, one with real revelation for every reader who likes to experience contact with the deeper currents of individual life. Edwin Ingleby should, if this book has the fate it deserves, become one of the characters with whom acquaintance is considered a prerequisite of good taste in fiction.” D. L. M.

Reviewed by H. W. Boynton

“The book is an interesting, if somewhat morbid, study of life, as seen by a youth in the egotistic years between boyhood and manhood. The main theme is the hero himself—to the detriment of several deserving minor characters.”

“But for the episode of Rosie Beaucaire and one more rather tiresome and trivial incident Mr Brett Young would have succeeded in producing a long and interesting work of fiction in which the relations of sex played no part whatever.”

“Perhaps the most striking thing about the book is the ease with which Mr Young blends poetry and realism—out of some such blend as this the great novels of the next few decades must be written. Probably Mr Young has not attained his finest balance yet. He seems to have the power of using the modern spirit to classical ends.”

“If more novelists wrote as well as Mr Brett Young, whose style is attractively clear and simple, the world would be a happier place; but manner is not everything, and the matter of Edwin Ingleby’s life is comparatively wanting in dramatic interest. We wish the author could convey to his imagination the very obvious zest which moves his pen.”

YOUNG, FRANCIS BRETT, and YOUNG, E. BRETT.Undergrowth. *$2 Dutton

20–19050

“The story which it tells is the story of a conflict between modern men and the ancient pagan forces, the ‘old gods’ who from prehistoric times have dominated the lonely Welsh valley in which the action is laid. This conflict manifests itself at once physically and spiritually. Physically, in the endless series of accidents which befall those engaged in building the great dam that is to restrain the waters of the Dulas; spiritually, in their effect upon the characters and souls of Forsyth, the young engineer with whose coming to take charge of the work on the dam the book begins, and his predecessor, Carlyon, the dead man whose diary and whose influence form important parts of the narrative.”—N Y Times

“As a short story, it would be a decided success, as a long one it is overelaborated.” C. K. H.

“‘Undergrowth’ is a novel of atmosphere. Characters and incidents alike are of value to Mr Young only as they can help to make more vivid the picture he is painting of the rugged, fear-inspiring mountains of South Wales.” D. L. M.

“We wonder whether lack of conciseness, rather than any lack in imagination or expression, is not the great rift in this book. And at the last the imagination slips the noose. The book becomes hysterical.”

“The book is interesting, dramatic at times, and full of a strange, compelling beauty.”

YOUNG, GEOFFREY WINTHROP, ed.[2]Mountain craft. il *$7.50 Scribner 796

“This book comprises 609 pages in all; about 394 pages are occupied by Mr Young in person in a discussion of what he justly calls ‘Mountain craft.’ Of the remainder, sixty-three are occupied by Mr Arnold Lunn with a section on Mountaineering on ski, which leaves 162 pages for eleven other contributors and the index.”—The Times [London] Lit Sup

“In the result the book is disproportioned and ill-arranged; it affords some compensations. Mr Lunn’s article is a very valuable treatise on a subject which deserves more attention. Captain Farrar finds it possible in a small space to say all that is necessary about equipment and outfit, writing, as he always does, with complete mastery of detail and admirable conciseness. Mr Spenser on photography is helpful and adequate.”

YOUNG, GEORGE.New Germany. *$2.25 (4c) Harcourt 943

(Eng ed 20–4808)

There is a note of optimism for Germany in this book—the Germany that has learned “to lift up its eyes to the hills” in all its misery—and a grave note of warning for the Entente. “The mistake we are all making about Germany ... is that we can’t realize what Germany today is like.... Germany has given up. It carried on until it collapsed, and now lies semi-comatose; and we, still absorbed in our quarrel, keep pestering it with solicitors and foreclosures instead of patching it up with doctors and food.” The author is, since the armistice, a special correspondent of the London Daily News in Germany. Contents: The revolution; The reaction; The council republics; Ruin and reconstruction; Council government; The treaty of Versailles; The constitution. The appendix contains a copy of the constitution with notes, and there is an index.

“This able analysis of a complicated situation makes good supplementary reading to Keynes.”

“Admirable little book.” H: W. Nevinson

“On the whole, although necessarily impressionistic and journalistic in character, the work is an intelligent account of the political transformations in Germany since the armistice, lively and readable at all times, penetrating and brilliant in places.”

“Mr Young, it must be added, is a companionable guide to this unknown land. He saw Germany in the fever of revolution, when to see it was an adventure, and we doubt whether any observer who was there, German or foreigner, saw half so much. He came to his work, moreover, with a background of intimate knowledge of the old Germany. On the folly of the peace treaty he writes with knowledge and with passion. Mr Keynes from the outside has traced its economic effects. Mr Young from within has sketched its no less tragic psychical results.”

“It is an expert view Young presents.” A. J.

“Mr Young’s interpretation is liberal and fairminded.” A. C. Freeman

“‘The new Germany’ is not a profound book and it is frequently marred by bad writing, but it is one of the best accounts of political and economic events in Germany since the armistice.”

“The writer has first hand knowledge of German political and economic conditions, and sound intelligence and an understanding of political theory illuminate his judgments.”

“Mr Young has, as all who know his other writings would anticipate, produced a book which is not only interesting and at times amusing and clever, but also parts of which deserve serious consideration by students of contemporary politics. Clever, perhaps too clever; for some there will be too much of the cheap jest and the facile alliteration. Mr Young has certainly done more than any other writer to help us in understanding what happened.”

“Despite a journalistic fondness for euphuistic phrases in their extreme form, Mr Young holds the reader’s attention. Of real value are the final chapters on the new German constitution, and the appendix, which contains the text of the constitution with illuminating annotations.” C: Seymour

YOUNG, P. N. F., and FERRERS, AGNES.[2]India in conflict. *$1.40 Macmillan 266

“This ambitious title covers a manual for missionary workers in India. But the authors—representatives of the Anglican church—know that India is more interesting than missions, and it is of India that they write. In a hundred and fifty pages they give the reader a clear impression of the ignorance and poverty met in the teeming native villages, and of the obstacles to true missionary work springing from the fact that even if the ill-paid missionary lives in the poorest, barest cabin, he seems a marvel of wealth to most natives. They define the great needs of rural India as, first, medical aid, and second, schools of a Montessori type.”—N Y Evening Post

“An instructive study of Indian conditions.”

YOUNG, W. A.Silver and Sheffield plate collector. (Collector’s ser.) il *$2.50 Dodd 739

(Eng ed 20–26554)

“A guide to English domestic metal work in old silver and old Sheffield plate.” (Sub-title) In view of the considerable literature already gathered around the above subject the author avers that no previous writer has surveyed the field solely from the standpoint of domestic requirements and that “the present volume seeks to furnish something about any and every class of article made of silver or Sheffield plate that was made between the years 1697 and 1840, provided it was of such sort as might have had a place in the homes, or about the persons of the well-to-do and middle classes.” (Introd.) Contents: Some history and a little law; Some sources of information; Marks on old metal wares; The craft of the silversmith and the plater; Six chapters on “The quest” for the various kinds of utensils; Bibliography; A glossary of terms used in connection with the silversmiths’ craft and the plater’s trade; Appendix; Index and over one hundred illustrations.

“Mr Young’s introduction is valuable and interesting, as is his first chapter. The illustrations are well chosen and excellently reproduced.”

YOUNGHUSBAND, SIR GEORGE JOHN.[2]Jewel house. il $5 Doran 739

A work by the Keeper of the jewel house in the Tower of London. “Some of the most interesting chapters in the book are those devoted to the description of the chief pieces of the regalia and to the history of the more famous gems. There is a full account of the sovereign’s three crowns—Edward the Confessor’s crown, the Imperial state crown, and the Imperial crown of India—of the Queen’s crowns, the Prince of Wales’s crown as eldest son of the king, and the different sceptres and orbs. The Koh-i-nur is, of course, one of the historic jewels dealt with by Sir George in a special chapter. Another gem with a story is the Black Prince’s ruby, presented to him after the battle of Najera by his ally Don Pedro of Castille.”—The Times [London] Lit Sup

Reviewed by E. L. Pearson

ZAMACOÏS, EDUARDO.Their son; The necklace. (Penguin ser.) *$1.25 (3½c) Boni & Liveright

19–18640

Two stories translated from the Spanish by George Allan England. In the first, an honest, faithful, industrious locomotive engineer marries a young girl of provocative beauty. In his zeal to get on, and to provide properly for her in case he should suddenly die, he insists on their taking as boarder a friend of his who is fond of “wine, women, and song.” Not until three years pass does he learn that his friend has been too intimate with his wife; and although he knows it must cost him his home, his delight in his wife and his gay little son, he kills his deceiving friend in a duel. After twenty years in prison he returns to a wife hardened and made ugly by work, and a dissolute son. He is happy again, prosperity comes; but another duel occurs through no fault of his, in which he is killed by the son who is not his son. The second is a passionate story of the power of a courtesan over a young student from the country. The translator contributes an appreciative estimate of the author.

“‘Their son’ is a novelette of a very high order of merit. The action is rapid, the pathos bare and virile, the observation of circumstance exact. ‘The necklace’ is more hectic in atmosphere and the theft of the jewels is somewhat wildly conceived.” L. L.

“The themes of both of the novelettes are antique, but the style is direct, simple and vigorous. Here is a book worth reading.” A. W. Welch

“We predict for Señor Zamacois a high appreciation among American readers.”

Reviewed by H. W. Boynton

“This author has been compared to both Balzac and Maupassant; but it seems to us that his nearest double in French fiction would be Anatole France, with whom he has in common a fine irony which directs the thought of the reader to fundamental ills in present-day social relationships.”

ZANELLA, NORA.By the waters of Fiume. *$1.35 (*3s 6d) Longmans 940.3436

20–4795

“This little book purports to have been written by an English girl who married a young Italian of Fiume just before the war. The husband had to serve as a conscript in the Austrian army, and was shot for refusing to fire on the Italians. The wife survived him only a few months. Whether or not the story is true it represents faithfully enough the Italian sentiments of the majority of the people of Fiume and their sufferings during a war in which all their sympathies were with the Allies and against their Austrian and Croatian oppressors.” (Spec) The facts of the author’s life are told by her sister, Madame de Lucchi, in an introduction.

“You can tell what Fiume is like by reading the early pages of this book.”

“It is a moving record of love, expressed with great exuberance.”

ZILBOORG, GREGORY.Passing of the old order in Europe. *$2.50 (4c) Seltzer 940.5

The author has lived through the war as an observer and is not writing an academic treatise or a book based on authorities but claims merely to be analysing his own experiences. It is his conviction that “in the course of the struggles of the present-day world, humanity has developed a very serious disease.... The disease is mob psychosis. The contagion was carried by the war, by revolution, by political lying, by diplomatic betrayal, social disturbances and moral suppression.” (Introd.) The book concerns itself with the diagnosis of the disease and the possibilities of restoring health. Contents: The impasse of politics; The debauch of European thought; The morass of war; The recovery of revolution; Revolutionary contradictions; Additional contemplations; Light and shadows; Consequences and possibilities.

“It is an important contribution, full of apposite citation from an unusually wide range of knowledge and personal experience of penetrating criticism and suggestive generalization. This message just now deserves a wide hearing.” B. L.

ZIMMERN, HELEN, and AGRESTI, ANTONIO.New Italy. *$2 (3c) Harcourt 914.5

(Eng ed 19–264)

The authors say in the foreword that Italy’s glorious past stands in the way of comprehension of her present, that she is still for the average Englishman and American the land of the renaissance and the Risorgimento, or the country of the picturesque brigand and lazzarone, while in fact the modern Italian is not a romanticist but a positivist, not an excitable, emotional individual but a reflective one. The great change that has come over the people, especially during the last twenty years, has surprised even the nation itself into knowing itself for the first time. The endeavor of the book is to give a short, synthetic view of Italy as she was at the outbreak of the war, as she is today and as she is likely to be after the conclusion of peace, for Italy’s entrance into the war marks the end of the book. The three main divisions of the contents are politics, civil questions, and Italy and the great war. There is an index.

“They know and love the old Italy, and they have packed much valuable information into their book, despite haphazard statistics and recurrent bellicose homilies on the war. There is need of an authoritative book on new Italy; this is not it.”

“The book provides a certain amount of guidebook information about Italian history, education, industry, etc. But, as an interpretation of ‘New Italy,’ it is a total failure.” A. C. Freeman

“The volume as a whole is thoroughly satisfactory, and our only regret is that its brief compass does not permit a fuller development of the subjects with which it deals.”

“Miss Helen Zimmern and Signor Agresti have tried to explain modern Italy to English readers, and their survey is both compact and intelligent. The writers have not quite got to the root of Italy’s discontents.”

“So far as it goes it gives a clear outline of the progress of Italy. But her present developments are among the most interesting in all Europe, and this book, ending the survey where it does, hardly prepares us to understand them.”

“She has written numerous books on Italy, and she has written better ones, not a little better.” F. O. Beck

ZOOK, GEORGE FREDERICK.Company of royal adventurers trading into Africa. $1.10 Journal of negro history, 1216 You st., N.W., Washington, D.C. 382

20–4623

This monograph is reprinted from the Journal of negro history, (April, 1919) and is a contribution to the history of the slave trade. The time period covered is 1660–1672. Contents: Early Dutch and English trade to West Africa; The royal adventurers in England; On the west coast of Africa; The royal adventurers and the plantations; Bibliography; Index. The author is professor of modern European history in Pennsylvania state college.

“On the whole Dr Zook has presented a clear and straightforward account of the company’s activities and relationships.”

ZWEMER, SAMUEL MARINUS.Influence of animism on Islam; an account of popular superstitions. il *$2 Macmillan 297

20–8879

The object of the book is to show how animism, the superstitious belief in spirits, witches and demons, on which all pagan religions are founded, still controls Islam in its popular manifestations. Mohammedanism, as an outgrowth of paganism, Judaism and Christianity, is characterized as a religion of compromise, that has easily yielded to the pagan survivals in the countries over which it has spread its influence. That these superstitions are popular expressions that have nothing to do with the monotheism of Islam, does not make them less pernicious. The contents are: Islam and animism; Animism in the creed and the use of the rosary; Animistic elements in Moslem prayer; Hair, finger-nails and the hand; The ‘Aqiqa’ sacrifice; The familiar spirit or Qarina; Jinn; Pagan practices in connection with the pilgrimage; Magic and sorcery; Amulets, charms and knots; Tree, stone and serpent worship; The Zar: exorcism of demons. There are illustrations and a bibliography.

“His book is well worth reading.”

2. This book is mentioned for the first time in this issue.

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