New Books

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

A THREAD OF ENGLISH ROAD--Charles S. Brooks--Harcourt ($3.00). Author Brooks went cycling across the southern English hills, but he announces on Page One of his account of it that: "We must expect no high excitement. I cannot 'boast even of so much as a footpad; nor shall we meet a single Duke whom we may later hand about the hearth among our homespun neighbors and say thus he spoke and thus we answered." But in spite of all this, or very likely because of it, he has transcribed an altogether delightful account of this picturesque ramble. He insists, through blithe pages sprinkled with woodcuts and quiet humor, on sharing with his reader everything from the smell of quaint, stagecoachy old inns to a "stomach-ache acquired delightfully on Devon strawberries."

GOLF WITHOUT TEARS--P. G. Wode-house--Doran ($2.50). A beguiling round of golf stories, diverting enough to amuse even the non-golfer. These breezy, non-classic, ultra-American dissertations on the Great Game are touchingly dedicated to "the immortal memory of John Henrie and Pat Rogie who at Edinburgh, in the year 1593 A. D., were imprisoned for playing of the gowf on the links of Leith every Sabbath the time of the sermonses."

PORTS AND HAPPY PLACES--Cornelia Stratton Parker--Boni & Liveright ($3.00). In this whimsical, informal travelog of Europe, Mrs. Parker's happy touch flicks the dust off antiquity with ruthless ease. She has not even a bowing acquaintance with any standardized, ladylike itinerary. She and her two young sons and one small daughter "strolled" haphazardly through Europe, abiding in the most out-of-the-way, unusual places, and describing it all in the most out-of-the-way, unusual manner. They lived in a delicious, hand-painted medieval monastery, in a starched Swiss boarding house, in a "rummy little hotel in Granada"--and wherever they went, there the spirit of adventure rode high.

ANCIENT FIRES--I. A. R. Wylie-- Button ($2.00). Just why the hero of this breathless, love-and-adventure, intrigue-and-heroism tale had to be named John Smith remains a mystery. The story starts out in a quiet little English cathedral town, but the pace rapidly grows too swift for that atmosphere, so the locale is blithely transferred to one of those imaginary, comic-opera little countries in Central America.