18 JULY 1925, Page 20

THIS WEEK'S BOOKS

PROFESSOR FERDINAND OSSENDOWSKI is inexhaustible inf his memories. In his new book Front President to Prison (Allen and Unwin) he records his adventures during the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905 they are as vivid and various and well told as any he gave us before.. The very kind of warfare he shows us must seem very strange to us now—wars in which a man could go hunting for food and for human beings at the same time, in which he is stalker and stalked by turns. And the intimate, almost neurotic i life in fortresses and prisons under the Tsar, when prisoners of all classes were crowded together in "stone sacks," as Professor Ossendowski calls them, is brought most con- cretely before us.