The Winona Daily News from Winona, Minnesota • 35

OKS. mr US1CF ftffr Sunday, January 31, 1965 WINONA SUNDAY NEWS 11 Two Thriller Entries jj A Tale of Intrigue; Look at the Future A KIND OF ANGER, by Eric Ambler. Atheneum, 311 pages, J4 95. FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD, by Robert A. Heinlein.

Putnam, 315 pages, $4.95. By JOHN R. BREITLOW Today's selections both represent recent novels by known authors with large-followings, present company included. Neither book warrants full consideration, but both reserve a mention. This might be considered a "For Fans Only" review dealing with names at the top of the mystery-adventure and science-fiction fields.

In alphabetical order so as not to discriminate, the first book is A KNID OF ANGER by Eric Ambler, a Briton whose career as adventure novelist (usually spy stories) and screen writer (Academy Award for the screenplay of Nicholas Monsarrat's THE CRUEL SEA) spans nearly three decades. His last book THE LIGHT OF DAY was reviewed (by itself) in these columns almost two years ago, and has since been made into a marvelous film entitled TOP-KAPI. Eric Ambler has a passion for casting losers in major roles. Sometimes he rescues them, sometimes they continue to flounder, like Peter Ustinov in TOP-KAPI. In this case, there seems to be hope for Piet Maas, hero of A KIND OF ANGER.

Maas is of the world. In this, Hockney idealizes rural America with chubby clouds, a brimming silo and perfectly-shaped tree. The exhibition of 80 paintings and sculptures by 13 young English artists will be at Walker through March 14 and then will tour other major museums in the United States and Canada. WALKER EXHIBIT "Iowa" by David Hockney will be one of the paintings in the exhibition "London: The New Scene," opening Saturday at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Hockney, who did the painting during a visit in the United States last year, purposely flattens perspective, figures and objects to create elegant, confectionary-colored visions A Milestone Recalled Bryant's World Is Revisited a reporter on the European Staff of the weekly news magazin WORLD REPORTER, whose publisher is a man of imperial whim who loves to scoop his competition.

TO SATISFY this whim. Maai noses about the south of Franca in search of the vanished mistress of a murdered expatriate Iraqi Colonel. With devious misgivings, Maas finds the girl, falls for her, and together they outwit the police, government representatives, rebel agents (naturally Moscow-trained), and the rest of the WORLD REPORTER'S staff, while peddling to several interested parties, the secret documents for which the colonel was murdered. The plot is only normally complex, the motivation is thin, and the characters somewhat shallow for the type of fare Eric Ambler usually produces. A KIND OF ANGER is not bad writing by any means, but neither is it exceptionally good.

It does have all the necessary elements to be a better movie, given the right director and cast. Unfortunately, there is no role suitable for Mel-ina Mercouri (who dominated TOPKAPI) but things might work out with Bridaette Bardot nlaving the vanished bikini-clad mistress. The Dean of S-F writers is still Robert A. Heinlein, whose work launched the science fiction boom in the late forties. These days he concentrates less on the scientific aspects of the field, devoting mainly to adventures in the future featuring remarkably mid 20th Century personalities.

While neither as mature nor as deep as his earlier works, tales like STARSHIP TROOPER and GLORY ROAD are good futuristic melodrama. HIS LATEST novel of this type is FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD, the tale of a man whose family survives nuclear attack in a very well-built (though not outrageously expensive, as in Phil Wylie's TRIUMPH) almost believable bomb shelter, to find themselves transported far into the future amid a benevolent but absolutely despotic civilization of such powerful magnitude as to outdistance any tyrant's wildest dreams. The small ruling class holds unquestioned and unshakable power over ell of Earth. It is a slave society, where all but the rulers are designated as objects rather than persons. It ia disturbing to hear human beings York Review.

Four years later he became editor in chief of the roamed beneath them, seeing them as visible signs of the invisible. They were one of his great themes, giving him opportunities to teach truths. He begins his 118 line "Forest Hymn" with the beautifully contrived, metaphoric line: "The groves were God's first temples." A WOOD had power to evoke a feeling of reverence in him as he walked through the green aisles. There he could shut out the stress of life. He writes of the lofty vaulting of branches which was the inspiration for the Gothic arch.

He came to stand beneath an oak and noted its "grandeur, strength and grace." He found words to describe it "coronal of leaves." Knowing the tenurial right of a tree never dies, he saw it as a measurement of time, continuing hundreds of years in one tree and beginning in a seedling. The poem is actually a prayer of Thanksgiving for trees and their "witness" and for the special privilege given him "to meditate in their calm shades." He thought of them as being providentially bequeathed to him. His aesthetical evaluation of trees was an individual undertaking, in which he portrayed them as symbols of symmetry and grace. Bryant, whose maternal and paternal ancestors descended from Mayflower stock, had no extended formal education. His father was a country doctor who could not afford to send his promising young son to Yale as be wished, but he did have a fairly well stocked library in his home to which the lad had access.

He studied law under private guidance, was admitted to the bar, and followed the profession number of years. In 1825 he moved to New York to become co-editor of the New Mr. Anne C. Rose, Gdman-ton. is a poet, who has had over 300 poems published in state and national poetry publication.

She's won numerous awards for them. One of her poems recently was selected for inclusion in a French anthology. She has membership in a half-dozen poetry organizations. She began writing in her college days at Eau Claire and when she (aught English at a high school there. She's been inspired to this type of writing by her fondness for the pastoral Itfe.

Mrs. Rose also writes scholarly prose, several of her articles having appeared in the Sunday News. By ANNE C. ROSE 1965 marks the 140th year since William Cullin Bryant left his native Berkshire hills and moved to New York City. Of what import is that event to us? It was the year he wrote and published his "Forest Hymn." If the poem has become vague, a review of it and several others can be rewarding and should deepen appreciation of our own pastoral scenes so analogous to New England ones.

The similarity between the works of Bryant and those of the English Wordsworth has often been mentioned. Each had a locale well sated with symbols for their poetry. Bryant has been called the "Poet of the Berk-shires," those picturesque hills in western Massachusetts which compare so favorably with England's Lake Country. In them are words of ash, beech, birch, hemlock and maple. Bryant made many estimations of the aesthetic worth of trees.

During the quadrat seasons, he New York Post. He held that position until his death in 1878. The Post was a reputable newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton to oppose the American Citizen, published by the "Clinton-ians." the George Clinton faction of the Democrat Party. Bryant made his paper an organ of free trade, free speech, working men's rights and abolition. He belonged to the Democrat Party for a time, was a Free-Soiler and, later, a member of the Republican Party.

He was a presidential elector in 1861. With the "Forest Hymn" in the little volume of poems he published in 1825, was his "Death of the Flowers," an elegy expressing his grief at the death of a sister who had been his boyhood companion. It begins with the familiar line: "THE MELANCHOLY days have come, the saddest of the year," Although the verses are septenaries they have an easy flow because of the couplet rhyming. "The meadows, brown and sere" were the upland ones of the Westfield River. In the dooryard of his home in Cummington grew the "violet, brier rose and orchis." They were his "gentle race of flowers" whose death in autumn he compared so poignantly with that of his sister.

As a student, during his one term at Williams College, he often repaired to the banks of the Green River for inspiration. He had a sharp eye for details, remembering them well in his poem, "Green River." The music of streams was fascinating to him and an influence in his poetic moods. When a lad, eighteen years old, he wrote (in part) the poem, "Thanatopsis." lie sot no great LIBRARY CORNER Reviewed by the Winona Public Library Staff THE ACT OF CREATION, Arthur Koestler. "A study of the conscious and unconscious processes in humor, scientific discovery and art." THE STITCHES OF CREATIVE EMBROIDERY, Jacqueline En-thoven. More than 200 stitches are described and illustrated in easy-to-follow diagrams.

value on it and tucked it away in his father's desk where it remained several years. One day his father found it and, realizing its merit, sent it to the editor of the North American Review who thought it must have been written by Wordsworth. He could not believe the author was an American, especially one so young as Bryant. The great blank verse "Thanatopsis" contains images of nature which the author used to reveal and teach those idealistic truths which have found responses in countless minds. The idealization of nature in his poetry was the model for poets for years.

All of his poems have dignity. Many of them projected the spiritual force of his Puritan training into American literature of 140 years ago. called "it" rather than "he or "she," even in far-out fiction. There are perhaps social implications in FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD, for the ruling caste is not FARNHAM'S FREEHOLD is obviously the product of a fer tile, if faintly frightening imagination, and again displays Robert Heinlein's skill at storytelling. Read only as an adventure story, it is light, palatable but not filling.

Read as either prediction or commentary on the trends of modern society, it is disquieting food for thought and could be the basis for a vicious argument in certain company..