Humanities: Light Prose

440 LETTERS IN CANADA : 1965 In this life he has developed an intense interest in wildlife and conservation and it is in behalf of these interests that he has written this fascinating book. In it we are given an excellent description of how beaver live, travel, explore, build dams and lodges, gather food for winter and generally carry on their daily affairs. The author shows most effectively what it can mean to the countryside and to all forms of life to have the beavers restored to broad areas where they have been eliminated by over-hunting in the past. Especially is he conscious of what it can signify to Indians who' are still living under natural conditions a kind of life which, from long experience, they understand and love. T o them it is a new breath of hope. It is true that the animals are over-humanized, even to a degree sentimentalized , but the picture is essentially realistic. Moreover, it is a happy, hopeful, informative book, an encouraging and sensible directive for future action in the Canadian Northland, a plea for the establishment of a reasonable and proper relationship between man and nature, a relationship that can bene6t all of us forever. It is interestingly and persuasively written and is a book that will appeal to both children and adults. But, above all, it should be in the hands of those who really want to help our Indians to live the kind of life that most of them prefer. (RicHARD M. SAUNDERS) LIGHT PROSE Our national behaviour in 1965 seems to have left most of us speechless. (I leave out of account our national speech-makers, who left most of us gasping.) Our humourists at least have been woefully silent- and what does their reviewer do then, poor thing? He looks at cartoons. He looks, for example, at George Feyer's The Man in the Red Flannel Suit (McClelland & Stewart, not paged), which brieRy and wordlessly exposes Santa's claws. Or, in sentimental mood, he revisits Birdseye Center (McClelland & Stewart, not paged), the Ontario fanning and resort town created by Jimmy Frise for The Star Weeldy, where the humour is low-keyed and local. Or, with Peter Whalley he whisks through Broom, Brush, & Bucket: The Good Old Days of Mrs. Beeton's Housewifery (Ryerson, pp. viii, 100, $3.50), an illustrated series of HUMANITIES 441 extracts from the justly famed Victorian vade mecum for the happily unenfranchis~d female. Substituting vacuum for broom, the critic may join Whalley again, picking up some old Eric Nicol en route, in the revised edition of their Uninhibited History of Canada (new rev. ed., Musson, not paged, $2.25), which is enlarged almost entirely by Whalley 's cartoons. Since they repeat so much, I may'be forgiven for repeating a comment I made about one of their earlier books in this genre: after 1066 there is only all that. At last, chuckling slightly but without having exhausted his supplies of anti-wrinkle cream, the critic comes truly happily to the best cartoonist Canada has ever had, Duncan Macpherson. Macpherson is better than that, I must add: he is one of the very best political cartoonists in the world, and can unblushingly be compared with the great cartoonists of the past. If you don't believe me, look at his Cartoons, Volume 5 (Toronto, not paged, $2.00) and the earlier ones. If you still don't believe me, complain to the management-! shouldn't be writing about pictures anyway. 1 You will gather that there wasn't niuch of a battle for the Leacock medal last year, won by George Bain for his Nursery Rhymes to be Read Aloud by Yo~mg Parents with Old Children (Clarke, Irwin, not paged, $3.50). This whimsical alphabet book, which firmly takes the adult's side in the permanent reading controversy, deserved better competition. There is some repetition of idea and form in the verses, which illustrate the habits and habitat of each alphabetical animal, and the prose commentaries on each are unevenly quirky, but the parent who is wise enough not to read it to his children will get some needed relief. Meanwhile the child...