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BRIEFER MENTION
Elizabeth Cary-Agassiz, by Lucy Allen Paton (illustrated, 12mo, 423 pages; Houghton Mifflin), is a biography of the first president of Radcliffe College, who was also the wife of the scientist. The author gives a full account of the external details of Mrs. Agassiz's life; and conveys an excellent idea of her personality by including a number of letters she wrote to her husband and friends.
Debs: His Authorized Life and Letters from Woodstock Prison to Atlanta, by David Karsner (illustrated, 12mo, 244 pages; Boni & Liveright), throws a number of intimate, journalistic sidelights upon a man who never better upheld the banners of traditional Americanism than when, upon trial under the Espionage Act, he threw away the possibility of a favourable verdict in order more forcefully to declare his convictions. Karsner's memorabilia may some day prove ironically to be a contribution to the literature of American patriotism.
Horace Traubel: His Life and Work, by David Karsner (illustrated, 12mo, 160 pages; Egmont Arens, New York), though its subject wrote its introduction and pronounced it a "bit of genuinely good work," is too jealously addressed to Traubel admirers, too undiscriminating in its appraisal to be the biography deserved by that robust, intransigent humanitarian with a double genius for friendship and unpopularity. He will be longest remembered, no doubt, as Walt Whitman's Boswell; but his own full life and his timpanic pen should challenge a more detached critic.
A Quaker Singer's Recollections, by David Bispham (illustrated, 8vo, 401 pages; Macmillan), is the autobiographical story of America's most popular and dramatic barytone. The style, unfortunately, is plainly that of a singer, and wavers continually between the exclamatory and the sentimental. But since there is little attempt at literary distinction, the book, in fairness to music lovers and to Mr. Bispham, should be read not as a literary memoir but as the informing gossip of a man who, by remaining original, has supplied the United States with the best imitation extant of the German lieder singer, Ludwig Wüllner.
