Shorter notices
g'isden Cricketers' Almanack /968 edited by Norman Preston (Sporting Handbooks 25s). Under headings such as 'Handled Ball,' 'Ob- structing the Field' and 'Remarkable Analyses,' Wisden continues faithfully to record every minutest event in the cricketing world. A. E. J. Collins. the Clifton College marvel, is still accredited with 628 not out in the course of a five-afternoon Junior House match and the Rev W. Fellows is still hitting them for 175 yards. The perfect loo-side book.
Bury Me in My Boots Sally Trench (Hodder and Stoughton 25s). Sally Trench spent four years among London's dossers, hippies and meths drinkers; the style of this extraordinary book is flawed, the self-portrait often un- appealing, but the facts—the despair, the sickness, the bottle of lake,' the stinking ab- scessed feet, Miss Trench's inexhaustible devo- tion—are eloquent. This is not a success story: Miss Trench's work falls painfully short of a solution to the problem, and if her readers have consciences they will remain unsalved.
Censorship: the Irish experience Michael Adams (Scepter 42s). An elaborate—and, inci- dentally, the first—full-length study of censor- ship in Ireland. Mr Adams concerns himself strictly with the history and processes of cen- sorship, here 'the dead hand of subtle clerical- ism,' rather than with its ethical implications. On the other hand, he is assiduous in recording evidence of public and largely approving opinion on the matter, with the odd dissenting
voice—AE's, for instance, in 1928: . . a con- sequence of arrested growth; or in other words, moral infantilism.'
Atoms at Tea-Time Pia Paoli (Deutsch 21s). Pia Paoli contracted cancer of the thyroid, had it removed, and suffered twelve years of regular hospitalisation, isotope treatment and wildly vacillating hopes before she finally recovered. Although a modest and potentially gloomy account, she recounts it with the grace and the dispassionate clarity of someone who is herself a judicious and critical reader. No mean feat.
Two Half Moons Eric Bligh (Alden Press 25s). Mr Bligh's third and final volume of auto- biography moves out from London to sleepy, sunny, rural Sussex half a century ago. Much good stuff on cats, churches, pubs, books, flowers, local Midhurst anecdote and a splen- did portrait of his formidable, unbending and sagacious landlady, Bertha Goatcher. But the sweet-tempered, ruminative tone of this idyll is somewhat spoilt by a querulousness increas- ingly brought on by the motor-car and any- thing invented since.
Previous page
