Good Books

The following estimates of books much in the public eye were made after careful consideration of the trend of critical opinion:

POEMS--Katharine Mansfield--Knopf ($2.50). A collection of poems by the author of Bliss and The Dove's Nest (TIME, Sept. 10). They do not compare with her stories. In fact, the best that can be said for them is that a few --Sleeping Together, To L. H. B.-- rise above the average, and that anything done by Katherine Mansfield is likely to be at least graceful.

SIEGE--Samuel Hopkins Adams-- Boni & Liveright ($2.00). What happens when a woman of the old type, representing authority and tradition, comes in contact with the new woman, straightforward, honest to her own standards, but determined to be controlled by the standards of no one else? Augusta Ruyland is the woman of the old type. She is the head of the Ruyland family. She controls the mill town of Habersham and all the Ruylands' interests there. She is a benevolent despot who gives her workmen better terms than union labor gets. But she is a despot-- insistent upon having her own way. The new woman is Fredericka Gage, who marries Kennion Ruyland, Augusta's grandnephew. Since Fredericka will not be dominated, the fight begins. In the end--after a lawsuit, a suicide, much biting talk and a dramatic strike in the Ruylands' factory-- Fredericka wins. It is an exciting novel that moves swiftly, without faltering. But it has at least one considerable fault. It claims to be a serious "study." Yet for all its modern setting, much of it seems hardly any more connected with actuality than the incidents of a tale by Jules Verne.

MR. ARCHER, U. S. A.--R. H. Platt, Jr.--Doubleday ($2.50). The self-told tales of an old timer in the army, "translated into writing from the oral," are made into a book. It is the life story of a man who satisfied his wanderlust in the Army. He took a hand at San Juan, in Luzon, in the Boxer Rebellion, in an Honduran revolution, in the Great War, and tells about them all as his personal adventures. The book has no style except the lingo of the doughboy, but it makes a flowing tale that carries the reader off forgetfully, through innumerable adventures, human, dangerous, unbelievable, yet convincingly real.