The Month's New Reading

There’s variety in this month’s reading. Nevil Shute is top of the class with his novel of the South Pacific, but for those who prefer fact to fiction there’s a first class account of the ad ventures of a lioness in two worlds, and the story of the Great Barrier Reef.

ascinating Account

)f Wild Life

yORN FREE, by Joy Adamson, is J the unique story of Elsa, a lioness of Kenya, who was reared s a cub and then set free to return 3 the wild. Elsa not only returned 3 the wild, killing her own food nd giving birth to cubs but she till maintained her friendly re itionship with Joy Adamson and er husband, who is Senior Game harden of the Northern Frontier district of Kenya.

Elsa is free today—the last hapters of this beautifully produced ook were completed only a few lonths ago. No doubt the world rfil hear more, for it is the first ime that anybody has been able 3 have this kind of success with a on, and her career is being observed ith interest.

Success in this case is undoubtedly ue to the Adamson’s knowledge f and sympathy for wild animals, 'his fact shows through every page f Born Free, as Austrian-born Irs. Adamson (who has had 22 ears experience in Kenya) details i clear, simple English the events lat followed the arrival of Elsa as cub, with her eyes not yet open, ntil the time she was released to 2nd for herself.

The release was not a simple pro edure, Elsa had to be taught to ill, and her confidence had to be uilt up, if she was to survive mong lions who might otherwise ill her because of her human taint.

Many pages of large glossy photo raphs, including some in colour, ake us through each step with lisa.

This is a book not only for animal )vers, but for anybody looking for n absorbing story of wild life. (BORN FREE. Published by Collins ustralian price, 31/-.)

levil Shute at His

itory Telling Best

SHUTE, who died this i year, was a first-rate story teller. although his output fluctuated i Quality like most writers. He was t his best when he remembered lat he was a story teller and not nrophet of doom.

J/ustee from the Tool Room, hich is his last novel, is in the est of his story telling tradition,

and it might well be the best novel he ever wrote.

It is certainly a first-class piece of entertainment—warm, friendly, human, full of interest—a pleasure tQ read And its fairy tale happy ending will make most of us realise what we have been missing these last few yea rs at the hands of those authors (including, at times, Shute) who see m to want to prove that happy endings are out of fashion, Trustee from the Tool Room is the s t o ry of Keith Stewart, who lived in Ealing with his wife, and worked very hard for a small salary as chief contributor and experi menter with the Miniature Mechanic, a magazine run on a shoe-string anc j catering for engineering hobbyists.

Stewart is a careful man, never hasty in his decisions, painstaking i n everything he does, yet a con tented man. and one of thousands of Englishmen who take a pleasure i n minding their own business, when his sister and her husband che in tragic circumstances on an island in the Tuamotus, and create f or him and for the small daughter they leave orphaned, a whole series 0 f new problems, Stewart meets them as he has met everything else —carefully and thoughtfully, The result is that he gets himself to Honolulu and then makes a 2,000-

mile voyage across the Pacific in a small yacht with one rather odd companion.

Shute s South Pacific is real.

There was no air connection be tween Honolulu and Papeete when the book was written —and this is an important link in the story although there is now. There are splendid descriptions of life aboard a cruising yacht—particularly one account of a storm at sea which is memorable.

Englishman Stewart’s packing for the South Seas is a delight. He and his wife, Katie, “decided that he should travel in his best blue suit and the heavy woollen overcoat that he had bought after the war and kept for best, and wear the imita tion Panama hat that he reserved for his annual August holiday in Cornwall He packed a suitcase with his cricket shirts, blazer, and grey flannel trousers, two suits of heavy woollen underwear, and a clean grey workshop coat. He got from his bank £lOO worth of dollar traveller’s cheques and took with him a few pounds in notes. Then he was ready to go.”

Naturally, he found it pretty hot in Honolulu, and what was worse, the hotel showers there were some thing of a problem until he learned what to do about them. He had never used a shower in his life be fore.

Keith Stewart, and all associated with him, deserve their happy end ing, and it is a pity, too, that Nevil Shute was not spared a little longer to give us more of this kind of pleasant fare.

(Trustee From The Tool Room:

Published by Heinemann, Ltd. Australian price, 17/6.)

A College Scandal

In Muted Tones

IT may disappoint some that Tin Affair is a scientific scandal ant not a juicy dalliance, but in hi: story of a miscarriage of justij and the struggle to right it, autho: C. P. Snow has an absorbing then® and a scholarly style to match $ On a return visit, Lewis Eliot (exi Fellow of a Cambridge college when his brother, Martin, is a Fellow tutor) learns of Dr. Donal Howard’s dismissal after beirij caught out in a piece of scientiffi fraud. The scandal has been I tightly hushed up that only th college’s 20 Fellows know th

details. I

Then, in circumstances dim! like Vaffaire Dreyfus (hence th title) a doubt springs up. Secret! the college is split into two factiol —one led by Martin Eliot and coj vinced that the scientist (ai uncharming character) is victim I his own lack of critical sense; an the other equally certain thl Howard faked a photograph to u| as decisive experimental evidenci in his Fellowship thesis and a pubi lished paper.

lly, the brothers marshal a r majority of dissentients and he reluctant college Court of 3 to re-open the case, with the lawyer in the role of pro ci interrogator. author’s mature men of the entsia show up as real and perceived people, and he y paints in with affection rivate, cloistered world of dons, their ambitions, their linded intentions and their unshakable devotion to their >de. ly regarded in British j circles, C. P. Snow has i seven other books, all well d, part of a novel-sequence ill run to 10 or 11 volumes, designed to be read in tently of the others. The which will have the title of ers and Brothers (after the 30ok) , deal with the ex jes of one man, Lewis Eliot, us direct experience and, as ! present, eighth book, that he gains through others’

AFFAIR Published by Macmillan , Ltd. Australian price, 22/6.)

ort Little Tale

\ the Old NEI

,IA DERMOUT, who wrote Days Before Yesterday, is a Dutch woman in her 70’s who most of her life in the old East Indies. Those were the days before Soekarno, and jails some childhood memories , odd little book—her second, first, a novel called The Ten md Things, was begun when as 68, but although she cer left it late before taking up ;n, her work does not appear e suffered, for she is a charm riter, with an eye to a de ve phrase, and a way with s Before Yesterday is hardly than a snapshot which can id in an hour, but it has a ing quality about it and will special interest to those who the Indies long before the

S Before Yesterday. Pub

jy Seeker and Warburg. Australian 5/6.)

)ugh Road—

lont Style

rGH ROAD HOME is about memory, too, but it bears as uch relation to the Dutch book as chalk to cheese, a Mather is an American n, the kind who writes letters nators, and with opinions on things, who took her young t to a farm in Vermont fol l the sudden death of her • husband in 1950. tunately he left her pretty provided for, insurance-wise, ;he got plenty of help from Is, relatives and neighbours, so

she wasn’t exactly staring poverty in the face.

But she had her troubles—some of them made by herself by the sound of it, for she doesn’t shine through this autobiography as a person everyone would take to—and here she sets them out in detail on The Egg and I principle.

She has a bright turn of phrase and she generally manages to be interesting, even when you don’t like her.

But there are occasions when she manages to be tedious, such as in the chapter on the Great Hartland School Fight. Here she gets herself embroiled in a Battle for Better Education for the American Child — including, of course, her children — and just about all the details of this battle will be a great mystery to everybody living outside of Hart land, Vermont.

Anvway, this book may help some outsiders to understand why a cer tain type of red-blooded American woman is like she is. (ROUGH ROAD HOME. Published by Heinemann, Ltd. Australian price, 20/-.)

A Book About a

Triangle—or Something

Eddie, Bette and Cliff found themselves united by a love so simple and perfect that it was as if they had found “a rent in the fabric around Eden and had

crept in past the Bearer of the flaming sword”. ... It was perfect but brief. , A .

That’s what the dust jacket has to say about Kathleen Sully’s new book, Shade of Eden. After having read it we can say the novel is any thing but perfect, but happily brief.

Miss Sully apparently has a reputation for writing novels about squalid events in surburbia. although according to some of the critics she manages to turn ugliness into poetry. She certainly doesn’t make this one rhyme.

It tells of a handful of tedious and dreary suburbanites having hysterics about each other’s dull matrimonial love life, and of a few others who would like some love life without matrimony, and are supposedly frustrated because they don’t know how to go about it.

It’s no doubt all meant to be somewhat daring. We couldn’t find a shock, or anything else worth re membering, in 175 pages. (SHADE OF EDEN. Published by Peter Davies, Ltd. Australian price, 17/-.)

Pablo Wins the

Fair Juanita

THE Spanish Fan, by Paul- Jacques Bonzon is one for the youngsters. Girls of about 12 should love it.

It’s the story of Pablo, an orphaned boy of 13 who sells

de from a street barrow in who takes an interest in roung Juanita, who sells fans •ists outside the cathedral, i is a mystery about Juanita, ;ed on by the pangs of love — arently they start fairly early n—Pablo makes up his mind out what it is all about, he help of a blind man, a if gypsies and various odd round and about, he finally the mystery and when we im he is on the way to whi le fair Juanita. The setting book is realistic.

SPANISH FAN. Published by nn, Ltd. Australian price, 15/6.)

alia's Unique

ir Reef

a distance of more than 1,200 es, stretching from Rock npton northwards to Cape nd beyond, the vast, labyrin maze of the Great Barrier ias been raised hundreds of im sea, floor to surface, there le the long swells of the wide Ocean on the north coast bralia. only is the structure the of barrier reefs, but it covers sa greater than any other fields—Bo,ooo square miles, approximately the combined f England, Wales and Ireland, in size is the coral reef framing New Caledonia, 00 miles farther to the east, aces, the crowded coral banks Great Barrier Reef are as as 45 miles across, and for sater part they are still only ly charted and explored, diere there are intricate and g channels and it is this 1 which makes the Great • Reef highly dangerous to tion. r, deep water passages across ral barrier are comparatively here are only 10 well defined or openings, and of these a number are in regular use as

shipping lanes. One is Trinity Opening, near Cairns; another is Flinder’s Passage, off Townsville.

The seaway between the coast and the reef is a hemmed-in channel, studded with islands and isolated coral banks, but its width varying from 15 to 70 miles.

At some times of the year along at least a lengthy section of the southern part of the Reef, fortunate visitors can enjoy the unusual ex experience of travelling eastwards from the coast for 40 and 50 miles over a sea like a mill pond.

At its northern extremity, the Great Barrier Reef reaches to with in a few miles of the picturesque volcanic isles of the Murray Group opposite the Gulf of Papua. The rather abrupt ending to the coral banks at this point is due to the influence of the rivers pouring into the sea from the high mountain ranges of New Guinea. Their fresh water with a high silt content, are detrimental to the coral growth.

An important strategic role is played by the Great Barrier Reef in the natural protection it gives against sea-borne invasion of the north-eastern Australian coast. With the counter of effective air power, enemy ships might well be trapped in confined waters.

Everything that anyone might want to know about this unique coral barrier has now been collected into a superbly produced book, The Great Barrier Reef and Adjacent Isles. The book is a comprehensive survey for visitor, naturalist and photographer. The general text is by Mr. Frank McNeill, Curator of Invertebrates at the Australian Museum, Sydney, and the photo graphy and related text is by Mr.

Keith Gillett.

The book, which has many colour photographs and charts in addition to more than 130 black-and-white photographs, all on art paper, dis cusses all matters that would in terest either naturalist or layman, including the reef structure and its inhabitants, with an important secion on coastal and reef shells.

In addition, it gives detailed tech nical data for photographers, in cluding those who want to take their camera underwater.

Miss Elizabeth Pope, of the Aus tral i a n Museum, contributes a chapter on Lord Howe Island, which is 600 miles south-east of the Great Barrier Reef—and contains the most southerly coral reef in the world; the Pacific counterpart of Bermuda in the north Atlantic.

Lord Howe is not part of the Great Barrier Reef but is included in this book because there is a strong affinity between the marine fauna of both reefs, and from the marine naturalist’s point of view, Lord Howe can be regarded as a kind of zoological outlier of the north reefs. A valuable book, this.

(The Great Barrier Reef And

ADJACENT ISLES. Published by the Coral Press Pty., Ltd., Sydney. Australian price, 70/-.)

What's New in Paper Backs

THE usual variety—something for

everyone—in the latest batch of paperbacks from Fontana and Pan. Our copies from William Collins (Overseas) Ltd., Sydney.

KIDNAPPED, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Though written almost three-quarters of a century ago, the adventures of young Scottish orphan David Belfour, who sets out to claim his rightful inheritance from wicked Uncle Ebenezer, still makes exciting reading, through the measured prose of R.L.S. (FONTANA, Yellow).

Miss Bungle’S Book, By D. E.

Stevenson. Dorothy Emily will never at tain the eminence of her distant relative Robert Louis, but she has apparently found her niche in feminine lending-library fiction. About the stir a maiden lady causes when she anonymously writes a book about the local villagers. (FONTANA, Blue).

THE HOUSE IS FALLING, by Nigel Fitz gerald. A lively, romantic thriller with a tightly constructed plot involving death at a family reunion in a west of Ireland setting. (FONTANA, Yellow).

GUIDE FOR LIVING, arranged by Maurice Quinlan. A selection from the letters and addresses of the late Pope Pius XII. In four parts: Family Life, War and Peace, Science and the Technical Age,

and Buka

[?]asta Ben

ers to Laymen (on industrial and tblems). (GREAT PAN), by Philip MacDonald. Because a eral was absent on leave with his , a report was neglected by his 700 men died one night in a 1918 episode. The self-appointed 12 years later begins to execute me the officers he blames for the (FONTANA, Yellow).

Diamond Smugglers. Lan

(creator of super-spy James Bond) s the factual story of the Inter- Diamond Security Organisation’s ainst a smuggling racket that away £ 10-million worth of s from Africa each year. As grip iny of his fiction works. (GJIEAT listrated).

Er Round The Corner, By

Meynell. Rigby’s death in South looked like suicide, but his widow on thought otherwise. She per irivate investigator Hooky Heffer ; names they think up!) to go to Eca to find the answer among and sundry shootings. (FON rellow).

JG ALWAYS PAYS, by Thomas ig. Sam Pilling, Yorkshireman, his father’s bookmaking business mkruptcy and builds it into a us concern. His children, given ig they want, grow up selfish, md spoilt. So Sam evolves a plan them to their senses. (FONTANA, IN IN ANTIQUITY, by Charles A frank appraisal of women’s the early Mediterranean civilisa jn which our present Western way based. (GREAT PAN, Illustrated).

COAST STORIES, by Erskine The sultry, steamy region of cans, USA, is the setting for these hort stories of innocence and ex in the relationship between men

Len. (Great Pan),

alian prices: Great Pan, 3/9; Pan /-; Pan Major, 7/6; Fontana, 3/9 : otherwise marked.)