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New Books In Review
Branch Libraries to Close for Two Weeks
By MATHILDE WILLIAMS, The Public Library
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AS AN economy measure the five subbranches of the Public Library will be closed for two weeks, July 16-31. This will affect the community libraries of Conduit Road and Tenley. Registered borrowers may take a reasonable number of books from either subbranch during the week preceding the closing. These books will be charged for one month, and fines will not accrue until after August 13. The book may be returned, however, at any time after the reopening of the subbranches on August 1. 
A bright, satirical literature of sophistication apparently in the spirit of the times has been very popular during the recent years of our post-war period. In conception and purpose it is not unlike the polished satire with which Alexander Pope flayed his contemporaries during an analogous period some sixteen years following the Peace of Utrecht which closed the devastating War of the Spanish Succession. 
One of the most skillful exponents of this type of literature in out own day is Dorothy Parker whose poems and short stories are like sharp, skillfully cut wood-blocks mirroring figures familiar to our streets, restaurants, and apartments houses. There is not an inessential line, and each unit, whether poem or story presents a complete picture with all its implications of past and future. 
Mrs. Parker's recent volume of short stories After Such Pleasures, is typical of her method. Like that of the most skillful satirists her work is touched by an undercurrent of tender pity. This is well illustrated in "Horsie" the first story in the volume where it is delicately shaded in beneath the contrasts employed to make the nurse "Horsie" unforgettable. The reader is compelled to share the humorous annoyance of the young Krugers at the intrusion of "Horsie's" personality in the light-hearted, fastidious gayety of their home, to laugh aloud at the sallies of the young husband, but only the most obtuse individual could escape the tragedy that undefined, but subtly permeating radiates from the cool, starched figure of the nurse. 
This is perhaps the finest story in the book but a notable company of modern figures passes through its pages: the bride and groom of "Here We Are," quarreling bitterly on their wedding journey, even when "there was a silence with things going on in it"; the wife in "Too Bad" who broke the bonds of an unbearable impasse in her married life with a husband who as Mrs. Ames observed, was one of "those awfully jolly men who at home are just the kind"; the modern youth and the unfortunate girl of "Dusk Before Fireworks"; the pathetic figures of "Lady with a Lamp"; and the precious little wife who met the actress in "Glory in the Daytime."
Some three or four years ago Mrs. Catherine Carswell wrote a life of Robert Burns. It is fitting, therefore, that she should have been chosen to write the shorter life appearing in Macmillan's series of Great Lives, also published in England by Duckworth. The series consists of slender, pocket-size volumes selling at a moderate price and covering the biographies of writers, statesmen, and other world renowned persons, by authors of skill and distinction. Among the volumes which have already appeared are Dickens, by Bernard Darwin, Thackeray, by G.U. Ellis, The Bronies, by Irene Cooper Willis, and Shakespeare, by John Drinkwater.
The little study Robert Burns, by Mrs. Carswell is written with understanding and tolerance for the foibles and weaknesses of her subject. She manages to excuse the too obvious faults of Burns and to trace them to possible sources while not condoning them. Like many writers influenced by the revelations of modern psychological studies she finds the key to many of Burns' salient traits in the hardships of his childhood combined with the conflicting strains in his heredity. The picture of William Burns, father of the poet, is drawn with care and kindness for the man of whom it was characteristic "that returning from each day's toil, he should cart down surplus siones from Mount Oliphant to replace the walls of Alloway churchyard which had fallen ruinous."
Altogether she gives us a better picture of the man than of the poet, but the figure of the peasant as poet laureale is fairly clear, and enough short quotations from his songs are interjected to carry the thread of his poetical development through the troubled vicissitudes of his career.
Lovers of fine photography will appreciate the illustration in First Over Everest, the story of the Mr. Everest-Houston Expedition, named for its generous sponsor Lady Houston. Since the discovery of the two poles Mt. Everest has remained the greatest challenge to man's spirit of adventure.