Shorter Notices
Mountain Holidays. By Janet Adam Smith. (Dent. 15s.) THE mountaineer will not be in need of encouragement to. read this book because, next to the pleasure of exposing himself to _continued physical discomfort, comes the delight of reading of others behaving in like fashion. The layinan, however, who takes his exercise scaling to the top of a bus will need ,a little more persuading. But persuaded he should be, for Miss Janet Adam Stnith recaptures in her pages something of the feeling of the hills : the sheer plodding labour ,of the climb, the superb satisfaction.of reaching the summit, the boredom and bickering of the valleys when bad weather keeps the climber from his pleasures. The author does not claim to be an expert, and for the most part she covers familiar mountaineering country in the Cairngorms, the Dolomites, the Oberland and the Alps. She writes of each climb, sometimes rather repetitively, in considerable detail, and possibly credits her reader with possessing rather too much technical knowledge. But for all that she caused one uninitiate to catch for a moment something of the spirit that makes people climb mountains and then write books about it-'after- wards.
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