SICILY PRESENT AND PAST. By Ashley Brown. Illustrated. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company. 1928. $2.00.

One-half the book is descriptive of existing Sicily; the other half is historical. First of all, the traveler is reassured about brigandage and the Mefia (Sicilian 'black hand' society). Fascism and outlawry, it seems, do not flourish side by side. Long-cloaked carabinieri pop up in the most out of the way places, and invariably when they are needed most which is not often. Sicily is safer for the tourist than Chicago.

Nowhere else in the world, probably, is so much beauty and romance found within an equal area. Syracuse has its Fountain of Arethusa, temples of Athena and Apollo and Olympian Zeus, Roman amphitheatre, catacombs of St. Giovanni. Taormina is Sicily's most beautiful spot. Nothing here becomes insipid, neither the bays and sands and blue Ionian Sea nor the site of Naxos, the first Greek settlement. Taormina and Palermo divide honors as tourist headquarters. At the latter, city bathing, shopping, and visits to her incomparable antiquities may well hold one for a month or longer. Incidentally, Mr. Ashley Brown's delightful matter-of-factness puts Sax Rohmer to shame at times. Here is a description of the Convento dei Cappuccini at Palermo: 'The [mummified] bodies of the Cappuccini resemble nothing with which we have any fellowship . . . Each corpse was clothed in garments peculiar to its status in life priests in their cowls, virgins in bridal garb, crown upon the head, soldiers in uniform, old women in black, babies . . . In the course of time the gloomy subterranean corridors filled up and recourse was had to the walls. . . Time rotted the cords, laid his hand upon the silk dress of the virgin and the cowl of the monk and spread over the galleries a cloak of horror and decay . . . Behind glass, cracked or broken, many of the dead still lie in moldering finery. But from the walls others, through the failure of the cords that held them, lean forward in every attitude of ghastly invocation, their features distorted into a semblance of malignity almost human.'

Artists, architects, and archæologists must ever be grateful for the fullness of Mr. Brown's historical notes and his detailed examination of visible remains. Here is an exhaustive work that reads like a novel, written straightforwardly and without rhetorical or poetic tricks. LET'S DO THE MEDITERRANEAN. By Carveth Wells. Garden City: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1928. $2.50.

This is a light book dashed off on the way home, and of very little consequence. Now and again Mr. Wells forgets his companions

Mrs. Grabbit, the doctor, the professor and the Vassar girl to interpolate some bald facts lifted from the encyclopædia or the ancient histories. All in all, probably a fair account of the average Mediterranean cruise

one day in Rome, two-mile excursion into the desert by camel for a handsome supplementary payment, tittering at the mild

drunkenness of Mr. 'Texas' Jones, interminable lectures on the ancient religious rites of the Carthaginians, etc. etc.

THE FJORDS And Folk of NORWAY. By Samuel J. Beckett. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. 1928. $3.00.

NORWAY. BY S. A. Hammer, M.A. 32 illustrations in color by A. Heaton Cooper. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1928. $2.50.

Mr. Beckett's volume is a fairly thick handbook and reference work. The Mac

millan publication, one of Black's Popular Series of Colour Books, has 190 pages of large type and is written for the 'tourist' in the proper sense of the term. Yet those who have already visited Norway or who plan to go there should read the first book. The second is better adapted to the stayat-homes who like pictures and an easyrunning text. One suspects that Messrs. Black first found the artist, who is very good, and then chose the London Times correspondent in Oslo, Mr. Hammer, to write the text.

The Fjords and Folk of Norway cannot be too highly praised, especially in view of the antiquity and sketchiness of the previously existing works on the subject. Mr. Beckett loves Norway and its people, yet his chapter on 'The People' lacks that sentimentality that mars many another volume. He is at his best here, with a clear, dispassionate, orderly survey. The many complex elements in Norwegian civilization are threaded together in scholarly but thoroughly understandable fashion. Norse mythology, too lightly treated in most other works on the country, is here given the space it deserves. In the 'Norwegian Index' are listed all important towns, with descriptive notes. In this section Baedeker, Bradshaw, and the Satchel Guide are all eclipsed.

One is delighted by a complete index at the end of the book - but preceding it are invaluable appendixes. The best stanzas of the Havamal the moral code of the Vikings are translated. Of especial point is this:

Thou must never
Mock or laugh at

A guest or a wayfarer.

The ancient Slav churches, built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in a strangely Eastern, Chinese-pagoda style, are the subject of Appendix II. Only twenty-four of these churches have survived. Finally (Appendix III), there is a detailed examination of the Lapps, called Finns in Norway, whose domain stretches across Sweden, Finland itself, and into part of Russia.

The Black volume is really an attempt to make Norway and the Norwegians 'known among the educated classes in England.' Mr. Hammer devotes his first chapter to showing that the credit for 'discovering' Norway as a tourist country belongs to England and is no small credit to the Homeland. He treats Norway as a journalist would, in broad divisions of the country and striking generalities applied to each. No fault can be found with his facts, except that there are not enough of them. He does, however, ascribe the origins of Norwegian art and literature to purely Teutonic influences. Mr. Beckett, on the other hand, successfully demonstrates the Teutonic influence as secondary, tracing the early Norwegian artistic impulses back to Roman and Byzantine origins.

The Guide Post
(Continued from page 402)

is the distinguished authority on international affairs, Dr. Herbert Adams Gibbons, who writes that he had at first feared the new LIVING AGE Would be less attractive or less useful than the old. 'But I made a mistake,' he says frankly. 'I have examined two issues of the new

magazine and I find it just as helpful and carefully edited as the old, which is saying a great deal and much more attractive in form and scope.'

The magazine has in the last six months, however, done much more than hold most of its old friends. It has made itself many new ones. 'The magazine is splendid,' writes Miss Florence Reed, now starring in Macbeth. I am sorry to display my ignorance,' writes a new friend who had by accident seen a copy of the December number, 'by saying it is the first copy I have ever seen. At the same time I cannot refrain from telling you that as an interesting magazine it has no equal.'

The chorus of praise is, to be sure, not unanimous. There are still old friends of the magazine who find it difficult to reconcile themselves to any change — as, for example, the Cambridge subscriber who a week or two ago wrote: 'I consider the new form a tragic outrage.' But many of those who originally held unfavorable opinions are being transformed. into enthusiastic supporters.

That THE LIVING AGE's new course has the approval of its contemporaries is best proved by the fact that a few months after this magazine announced its new format, four other leading American magazines made similar changes.

The fidelity with which the editors of THE LIVING AGE are adhering to the magazine's original purpose of bringing the world to America is illustrated this month by such an article as M. Stéphane Lauzanne's interview with Marshal Foch.

Although the great leader of the Allies has frequently told his story to personal friends, this is the first time that he has ever allowed it to be told in print. Its authenticity is vouched for by the high reputation of the interviewer. M. Lauzanne is editor of Le Matin in Paris and one of the two or three French journalists best known bevond the frontiers of their own country. If further evidence of the authenticity of the interview were required, it would be provided by the confirmation contained in M. Clemenceau's official report of the Armistice meeting which Colonel House has just made public in the third and fourth volumes of his Intimate Papers, reviewed on page 467 of this month's LIVING AGE.

An even more hopeless task was assigned to Nansen when the League insisted upon his taking up the cause of the Armenian refugees. In the short space of three years the Armenian nation, which has been persecuted since the time of the Medes and the Persians, had lost by massacre and famine a million of its people. Nansen has found the Powers generally indifferent both to their own promises and to the needs of Armenia, but he has not yet given up hope that loans to make Armenia self-supporting may be won.

After these many years devoted to humanitarian labors, Nansen is now returning to his own scientific work and to the North. At the Arctic Conference held in Leningrad last summer he accepted the leadership of the AeroArctic expedition announced for next year. One suspects that it is with some relief than he thinks of going back to the long moonlit Arctic night. He will be again in the service of science, provided with such equipment as he did not dream of in 1896, crossing the polar area this time by dirigible in what is surely the greatest expedition yet conceived. But, as in all his humanitarian labors, Nansen is searching for new security for mankind. His purposes are to determine the depths and the currents of the Arctic Ocean, to trace the threatening ice-floes, to follow those uncontaminated streams of Arctic waters which at a point in their southward flow suddenly teem with life and give food to fish which in turn shall feed his people through generations to come.

World Business

(Continued from page 465)

6. THE NERVES OF EMPIRE The British Parliament's approval of the Imperial cable-radio deal, by

WORLD BUSINESS

which the consolidated communications systems of the British Empire are to be privately operated under governmental supervision, has world-wide significance. The 'nerves of empire' thus pass under the control of a carefully guarded group which takes over the state-owned cable and beam wireless rights and combines with them the historic private concerns that pioneered the 'all-red' communications system. This move is directed in part against growing American competition offered by the International Telephone and Telegraph, the Radio Corporation of America, and other New World enterprises. The Marconi International Marine Communication Company, indeed, has been so alarmed at the threat of American competition that its articles of incorporation have been changed to prevent 'foreign penetration.'

8. AMATEUR IMPERIALISTS? However successful what our European critics call our methods of 'peaceful penetration' may be, nothing more clearly reveals the amateurish nature of United States 'imperialism' than the politics being played with our Philippine possession. This Far Eastern 'trusteeship,' as Americans prefer to call it, now finds itself in a most embarrassing situation. Filipino leaders are alarmed at the strenuous efforts being made in Congress by two American economic interests to restrict the commercial relations of the islands with the American mainland. One is represented by the Timberlake Resolution, which would restrict the amount of Filipino sugar entering the United States duty-free. The other is the trade-union-inspired plan to extend Asiatic exclusion to Filipino labor, which is moving across the Pacific into Hawaii and the West Coast of America in man's everlasting search for higher and higher standards of living.

this review of the fourth year of German stabilization becomes a document of crucial importance in the duel now going on between Paris and Berlin.

The Reparations Commission's representative, naturally enough, emphasizes the favorable aspects of Germany's economic position. Those in charge of the execution of the Dawes Plan report that industry, trade, and transportation appear to be in excellent condition, and that the healthy state of public finance clearly reflects the reorganization and rationalization which has been so notable a feature of German industrial development since the crisis of 1924. To counteract the effect of these expert appraisals, which represent an embarrassingly authoritative statement of the situation, German business has hastened to point out wherein they appear to exaggerate the prosperity of the Reich.