Book Notes
ALTHOUGH Norman Marshall has been the producer of a number of successes on the London stage—Victoria Regina, Of Mice and Men, The First Gentleman, are three which will be remembered—he is better known for his work at the Gate Theatre which he directed from 1934 until it became a casualty during the Slim. His chief interests have always lain beyond the boundaries of the West End stage, with what is sometimes contemptuously styled the "non- commercial theatre," but which, in fact, has saved the ordinary theatre from stagnation by supplying it with a constant stream of new ideas, new plays and new personalities. Mr. Marshall is, therefore, well qualified for the authorship of his new book, The Other Theatre (Lehmann), which is about the experimental theatre in England during the last twenty-five years. Far from being a formal history it is a personal record of the author's experiences both as producer and playgoer, and it contains very full studies of theatrical pioneers stAch as Nigel Playfair, Lilian Bayliss, Barry Jackson and William Armstrong. Andre Guibaut, author of Thibetan Venture (Murray), is that com- paratively rare combination—scientist, adventurer, writer. But it was as scientist, and only incidentally as adventurer, that he under- took an expedition through the little-known country of the Ngolo- Setas, involving a difficult journey among wild and aggressively- minded tribesmen. Ambushed on a lonely mountain pass he lost his friend and companion, Louis Liotard, and barely escaped with his own life. His book contains descriptions of the remote Thibetan landscape, of the life of peasants and officials, and of the customs and observances of the huge Thibetan monasteries.
It frequently happens in mountaineering books that the hills of Scotland are lightly dismissed as being no more than nursery slopes on which the climber gets experience before attempting the giants of France or Switzerland. But Mountaineering in Scotland (Dent), which deals with rock, snow and ice climbing on the great cliffs, gullies and buttresses of the Scottish mountains, treats British climbing as an end in itself and not as an exercise for the Alps. The author, W. H. Murray, is a member of the Scottish Moun- taineering Club, and was climbing regularly from 1935 until the _outbreak of war. Among the routes which he describes are the euphoniously named and famous Cioch and Crack of Doom, Stob Coire nam Beith and Raven's Gully and Crypt. The book, which makes a feature of winter-climbing, was written in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
General Wingate's scheme for penetrating the Japanese lines in Burma was approved at a time when British fortunes in the Far East were at their lowest ebb and something was needed to prove that the Japs could be outfought in jungle warfare. The plan received the backing of Wingate's superior officers—Wavell and Alexander—and it was finally carried out by an assortment of troops most of whom had been sent out from England for garrison duties. An account of the campaign, with its antecedents and a postscript describing the following campaign in which Wingate lost his life, appears in Wingate's Phantom Army (Muller) by W. G. Burnett, Daily Express war correspondent, who was commissioned by the authorities to write it. The author had access to all the expedition's reports, including the unpublished one by Wingate himself.
A new series primarily designed to raise the standard of book- production, but also dealing with the related arts such as the history and technique of books, is planned by the Sylvan Press. The first three titles are The Typographic Arts by Stanley Morison, The Crystal Goblet : An Invitation to Typography by Beatrice Warde, and Printing Management by Noel Montague.
The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Seeker and Warburg) is a sociologist's impression of the Japanese—their beliefs, customs and codes. The author, Ruth Benedict, was commissioned by the American Office of War Information to write the book in the closing months of the Japanese War. Her first book was Patterns of
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