It Takes All Kinds. By Maurice Zolotow. (W. H. Allen.
15s.) THE century of the common man in the United States is rapidly turning into the century of the psychiatrist. It is curious that the two least exact " sciences " recently developed should be those which have most relevance to urban life—psychology and economics. We have seen what nonsense can be made in books about the " economics" Of this, that and the other.
It was only a matter of time before some- body would approach theatrical biography from the angle of psychopathology without tears. Mr. Zolotow is a good profile-writer but each of his sketches contains enough Psychiatric jargon to spoil it. " According to the late Harry Stack Sullivan, an American Psychiatrist whose insights into the human condition have clarified much of my own thinking," he writes, " a power drive ' results 'from the early frustrating of natural biological drives and the healthy expanding of the self. The self feels helpless and inade- quate ; its latent possibilities as a human being have not been allowed to develop. From this all-too-common beginning, many futures are possible. One of them is the development of verbal power operations as a method of compensating for the feeling of helplessness. . . " and so on, and hence Tallulah Bankhead ! The cliché " power 0Peration " turns up frequently in otherwise Well-written, sensitive character sketches—as Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny and the famous card-conjurer Cardini. Another article lifts some of the veils from the stage telepathist " or mind-reader.
All such turns are clever trickery. One of the best-known methods is that in which the audience writes down its requests and hands them to an attendant. The telepathist " then answers the written question without handling the original piece of paper. This illusion depends on special carbon paper and a method of getting the copy into the hands of the illusionist. Zolotow makes all this quite clear, and adds a little to lay knowledge of the classical " thought-reading " act based on intricate verbal codes and gestures which when used by the Zancigs were sufficient to convince Conan Doyle that they had supernatural
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