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LITERARY NOTICES

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Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 16, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 16.

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LITERARY NOTICES.

"BIBLE NATURE STUDIES." A Manual for the Home and School. By Marion Ernest Cady. Cloth, 512, pp., price $1.00. Pacific Press Publishing Company, Oakland, Kansas City, New York.
This book in no conventional or cant way fills a long-felt want. It takes a vacant, waiting place. Its design is to aid parents and teachers in instructing the children and youth to behold the Creator in His creation. It uses as its foundation the Bible; and presents in a series of simple and interesting lessons our Lord's relation to nature and nature teaching, the earth in the beginning, Light, Heat, Air, Sound, Water, Lands, Plants, Sun, Moon, and Stars, Air Animals, Land Animals, Man, etc., etc. No parent, no teacher, can faithfully use it without profit to himself and those he instructs. The book is well printed and neatly bound.
"CAPTAIN JINKS, HERO." By Ernest Crosby. Cloth, 393 pp., illustrated; price, $1.50. Funk & Wagnalls Company, New York.
This book is a humorous satire on war, in which the folly and wickedness of the war business are made to stand out in no enviable light. War and the education for it are pictured as they are, without the glamour of "glory" so often thrown around them. The book purports to give the biography of Captain Jinks, including the home education which turned his head toward a military career. Jinks himself is a creation of the imagination, but the biography is composed of incidents of the Spanish, Filipino, and Chinese wars individualized in Jinks' experience, and made to appear what they are in reality, acts of cruelty, savagery, and vandalism.
"HOW TO ATTRACT AND HOLD AN AUDIENCE." By J. Berg Esenwein, A.M., Lit. D., professor of English Language and Literature in the Pennsylvania Military College. Hinds & Noble, 4, 6, 12, 14 Cooper Institute, New York City.
This little work is a popular treatise on the nature and preparation of public discourse. It is based on practical work, and seems to be a clear, systematic text-book for all who would learn the art of public speaking. Its aim is to be practical, not merely theoretical, and popular instead of technical. And yet it is concise, clear, and methodical. The appendix to the book contains some fine examples in oratory.
"HOW TO GET ACQUAINTED WITH GOD; the Meaning of the Christian Science Movement." By Theodore F. Seward. Cloth, 12mo, 148 pp., price 50 cents net. Funk & Wagnalls Co., New York and London.
This little book, in a striking, taking sort of way, sets forth a mixture of truth and error with all the sublime inconsistency of "Christian Science." We are told that matter "is nothing, and has no reality and no existence outside of our own mental concept." Nevertheless it is true that matter not even conceived of breaks the leg, crushes the head, and pierces the heart of persons whose thoughts ranged in entirely other fields. Its reasoning is based on the baseless supposition that there is nothing but mind, but spirit, and there is no wonder that the discourse limps in its goings which tries to harmonize the thousand and one facts against it. To get acquainted with God we are told is becoming acquainted with love. God is in the "infinite heavens," but the "infinite heavens" lie in the realm of our own consciousness. God is not a personal Father, but an "Infinite Principle." We are told, and it is true, that to get acquainted with God "is to do His will;" but as to what His will is we are left in the mazes of Mrs. Eddy's text-book, which this little work seems written to advertise. He who can see no difference between black and white, who can feel no difference between heat and cold, who can taste no difference between bitter and sweet, who has experienced no difference between evolution and creation, may find help in this book. Others will prefer the blessed Word of God.
"THE BLACK CAT CLUB." By James D. Cornothers. Silhouette illustrations by J. K. Bryans. 12mo, cloth. Price, $1.00 net; postage, 10 cents. New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls Company.
This little book is a series of character studies in Negro life as seen in Chicago, the meeting ground of every type of the American Negro. The author, of Scotch-Irish, Indian, French, and Negro extraction, aims to portray the Negro as he is, especially on his humorous and superstitious side. And morally he has not given us a pleasing picture. We are prone to believe that it is the worst side of Negro life.
"THE POLITICAL FRESHMAN." By Bushrod Washington James. Bushrod Library, 1717 Green Street, Philadelphia, Pa.
And this is a politico-romantic novel under a non-romantic name. It is as good as most of the romances turned out we presume, better than many doubtless; but the vast majority of them all do more harm than good. The great horde of novels, religious, political, historical, mechanical, are educating young and old into unreal conditions, unreal fancies, feverish unrest, abnormal ideas of life. The perusal of the great mass of feverish fiction in our world to-day is rendering in the minds of the readers works of real merit insipid and tasteless.
"GEMS OF THOUGHT." By Henry B. Damon, South Lancaster, Mass; 20 pp., embossed paper cover, bound with silk cord.
This is a neatly printed little booklet, containing short selections, or gems of thought, from a number of well-known authors. While this little booklet is evidently designed as a gift book, yet it is to be regretted that it does not contain a greater number of "gems" on a wider range of topics. Price, 25 cents post-paid.
"STRAWBERRY CULTURE," by M. Crawford, is a little pamphlet for ten cents, printed by the M. Crawford Company, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, which gives much information upon the raising of strawberries and their insect foes.