Books
The Descent from Cézanne
The retrospective show of Georges Braque cleanly installed at the Museum of Modern Art, its solid catalogue, Braque’s notebooks, each page adorned with stubby doodles, and the handsome exhibit of Cubist pictures at the Buchholz Galleries illustrating the appearance of Kahnweiler’s historic The Rise of Cubism, compels a new estimate of the descent from Cézanne, and of modernism in our arts, as style or statement. READ MORE >>
Harlem Teacher
The Invisible Island, by Irwin Stark (The Viking Press; $3). This first novel by Irwin Stark, a young New York school teacher, is an encouraging performance. Decidedly it has its faults. It is too long, not because it grows tiresome or because it seems at times a trifle overcrowded with detail, but because the extent of its preoccupation with the sex life of its hero and its record of his spiritual adventures among the liberal and radical ideas of the thirties has a way of overpowering its central theme of a white teacher in a Harlem school. READ MORE >>
Portrait in Film
Chaplin: Last of the Clowns, byParker Tyler. Illustrated with Photographs (Vanguard Press; $3). Parker Tyler’s Chaplin, Last of the Clowns, has all the virtues and weaknesses of his earlier books. It is an inextricable blend of real depth and false glamor. Reading this book is like riding on a seesaw: at one moment you are fascinated by the author and at the next exceedingly irritated. READ MORE >>
Handful of Dust
The Loved One, by Evelyn Waugh (Little, Brown and Co.; $2.50) READ MORE >>
Let the Reader Beware
Lenin: A Biography, by David Shub (Doubleday and Company; $5). I’ll Never Go Back: A Red Army Officer Talks Back, by Mikhail Koriakov (E. P. Dutton; $3). Tell the West, by Jerzy Gliksman (The Gresham Press; $3.75). READ MORE >>
Return to the Jungle
A review of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is his outstanding single achievement. Written in 1905, it remains to this day—despite the fact that the lot of most workers has improved relatively—almost unmatched in America as a condemnation of the basic evils of capitalism. Dedicated “to the workingmen of America,” it is a pamphleteering novel which expresses a passionate and urgent cry for social justice. READ MORE >>
Politics and the English Language
Jackson and the Intellectuals
THE JACKSONIAN REVOLUTION rested on premises which the struggles of the thirties hammered together into a kind of practical social philosophy. The outline of this way of thinking about society was clear. It was stated and restated on every level of political discourse from presidential messages to stump speeches, from newspaper editorials to private letters. It provided the intellectual background without which the party battles of the day cannot be understood. READ MORE >>
Henry Moore
A review of Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings. READ MORE >>
