LITERATURE
Some Recent Books
CAMP-FIRES ON DESERT AND LAVA, by William T. Hornaday Sc D., is a book of the outdoors, by a true outdoorsman. To us it is more fascinating even than his "Camp-Fires In the Canadian Rockies." It Is a story of exploration into one of the few remaining practically unknown bits of the earth's surface not adjacent to the Poles. It is the narrative of an exploration from Tucson, Arizona, southwesterly across the desert to the mysterious and desolate Pinacate region in Northwestern Mexico. If you read Professor Hornaday's book, and then go and get yourself shipwrecked near the extreme head of the Gulf of California, you can sight Pinacate on your northern horizon, and remembering Mr. Hornaday's description you can possibly find water. Otherwise you will not get home.
But that is not the object of the book. It is to entertain you, and make you acquainted with something new about the earth's surface that has not been "covered" in the Sunday Supplement. Professor Hornaday is one who can play upon hardship and rough adventure, without pulling out all the stops of the tragic and the dreadful. He can go across the desert without going mad from thirst, and "with swollen tongue and burning eyeballs pursue the mocking mirage." Like all true lovers of the free out-of-doors, he makes you long to be there too. He sees the grim and the humorous side of things without over-doing either in describing them. There is a Rooseveltan vigor and manliness through all his chapters.
The book tells of the marvelous varieties of animal and plant life encountered on the trip; incidents of the trail and of camp life; and the adventures of the party In pursuit of game, including the Rocky Mountain Big Horn. The numbers of the latter found in the heart of the black region of five hundred dead volcanic craters, are no less extraordinary than the tameness of the animals, few or none of whom, doubtless, had ever before seen a human being. Charles Scribner & Sons, New York, $3.00.
GANTON & CO. "A Story of Chicago Commercial and Social Life," by Arthur Jerome Eddy, is neither altogether depressing nor especially cheering, pessimistic nor optimistic, tragic nor humorous; but it mixes these elements mildly and agreeably, and it is instructive without being "preachy." And this is not faint praise that might help to damn the book, for we hasten to add that it is very interesting. "Give me," said Walter Besant, "a story that grips and holds me,—a book that will not let itself be laid aside,—that is all I ask of a book." Few readers will lay down "Ganton & Co." until it is read through. The central figure is Ganton, the head of one of Chicago's largest packing plants; not a lovable figure,—selfmade, able, brutal, vulgar, big, bold, unscrupulous,—quite the regulation thing In the first-generation-Chicago-packing line. But he is mortal;—notwithstanding his potency he develops a "pain in his stomick" before the middle of the book, and we have a lot about that pain until its quietus in the last chapter. He says a lot of good things—rough-hewn business aphorisms, sophisms and brutal truths. There are a half-dozen well-sketched minor characters, and a deal of clever dialogue. The author attempts nothing intricate or novel In the way of plot, but gives an interesting "inside" picture of a great labor strike at the stockyards. Evidently his study of the history of a typical strike has not stimulated respect for strike-leaders like Ballard,—a thug and blackmailer; nor for employers like Ganton, a briber and cruel manipulator, who buys off a strike at one time, only deliberately to encourage it later, when conditions permit profit from "going short of ribs, pork, corn and wheat on the Board of Trade." One sympathizes with the deluded and rioting strikers, and the deliberately robbed and equally deluded public that has to pay "fancy" prices for Its meat. Romantic love Is, of course, out of place In such a story, and properly the author introduces no Romeos or Juliets. However, a touch of sentiment, here and there, lends a bit of perfume to the Chicago "atmosphere" which is over all.
