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BOOK REVIEW
CLARKE

In collecting material for this book, Philip Sterling traveled North and South, through farm regions and industrial centers, into small towns and city slums. The results of his journeys, extending over ten years, and his careful research and editing can be seen and enjoyed in this unique anthology which brings together a wealth of material from obscure and long-forgotten sources and some of the best of the already well-know writings on the subject. Saunders Redding's comment on the book shows the nature of its achievement.

"While the end is laughter," he writes, "its means are subtlety and wisdom--the wisdom of a people who know that 'laughter may save as many souls as prayer.'"

John Henrik Clarke


ONCE MORE, WITHOUT FEELING

GO UP FOR GLORY. By Bill Russell. Coward-McCann, Inc., New York. 217 pages. $5.00.

THIS REVIEWER was tempted to play his own game while reading the book to which basketball-great Bill Russell has attached his name. The game was to attempt to divulge exactly what passages represent the thinking of writer William McSweeney. I found my game more interesting than the book.

To begin with I must confess a prejudice against the plethora of tape-recorded, interview-produced autobiographies by celebrities which are flooding the market today, my prejudice possibly motivated by envy. While those of us who actually write our own sentences must struggle through layers and layers of vagueness and indolence to forge something concrete on the page, a celebrity hires a writer who interviews him four or five times, forgets about it while he spends an advance from the publisher (usually astronomical) and in one month, wham--A masterpiece!

It simply cannot be done that way. Here we are confronted with short, newspaper-style, pseudo-Hemingway sentences, a painful attempt at poetics, an attempt to make the reader feel some of what Russell feels, but this reviewer does not feel because he could not fight through that pseudo-prose to Russell the person. We are confronted

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