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ELT 43 : 3 2000 come into play, governing the selection and writing-up of data, I cannot help thinking that a better-rounded picture of imperialism, one that takes due cognizance of the reasons why, at the turn of the century, so many men of good will believed in the Tightness of it, as well as the failure of almost all Englishmen to perceive that the crushing economic costs of acquiring, maintaining, and defending so far-flung an empire would—sooner rather than later—destroy it. Schneer's book is well worth reading, but it is far from being the last word even on the year which it memorializes. Harold Orel ------------------------------ University of Kansas Return to the Modern Michael North. Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 269 pp. $ 35.00 MUSSOLINI marched on Rome. Howard Carter opened Tutankhamen 's tomb. Niels Bohr, following Albert Einstein by one year, won the Nobel Prize, making quantum physics official. Gandhi went to jail. Fatty Arbuckle was tried, acquitted, and ruined. Michael Collins founded the Irish Free State and was shot dead for his pains. The Deutschmark, ominously , collapsed. And: Ulysses appeared. The Wasteland appeared. The Tractatus appeared . So did Jacob's Room, Aaron's Rod, The Beautiful and the Damned, Siddhartha, Babbitt, The Forsyte Saga, The Enormous Room, and major works or collections by Freud, Valéry, Rilke, A. E. Housman, Rebecca West, Eugene O'Neill, Katherine Mansfield, and Edward Arlington Robinson. Back to Methuselah opened in New York. In the cinemas you could see the latest Charlie Chaplin, or Nosferatu, or Nanook of the North. Louis Armstrong had a hit. So did Igor Stravinsky. The year was, of course, 1922, and a book has been waiting to be written about it. Here, for better and worse, it is. In Reading 1922, Michael North has at least started with—I don't think he finishes this way—the good idea of turning his head into a time capsule of that one amazing year, when, as he informs us, Willa Cather felt that "the world broke in two." He has viewed, listened to, or read—especially read—everything he could find, high and low, famous and forgotten, that came out in that one year, selected a wide array of them for consideration, and drawn connections . 334 BOOK REVIEWS The connections can be fun. Wittgenstein-Hemingway-Le Corbusier. E. E. Cummings rooming at Harvard with the future publisher of the Dial. D. H. Lawrence and the Prince of Wales in the company of a dead elephant in Ceylon. What usually carries the day is the author's deep familiarity with seemingly everything that was going on, assisted by a crisp style and an eye for the memorable detail. One sample: In both countries [Britain and America] there seemed to be a generalized anxiety about anxiety, which produced a number of odd how-to books like Outwitting Our Nerves, with advice on "How to Free Yourself from the Shackles of Repressed Instincts," and a host of products like Genasprin, which promised to control "Stage-Fright and other forms of nervousness" in addition to preventing colds and headaches. There was also the more positive route promised by Emile Coué, the major apostle of "positive thinking," who made triumphant tours of both the United States and Great Britain in the course of 1922. Coué worked by autosuggestion, but even relatively orthodox Freudians might promise the same sort of results, as James Oppenheim did in a series of newspaper articles ultimately published as Your Hidden Powers. If all of Reading 1922 were like this, it would, I think, be a great and unqualified success, a triumph of the Pound-inspired ideogrammatic method earlier on show in the criticism of Hugh Kenner and Guy Davenport , or for that matter in James Burke's television series Connections. But I'm afraid that for much of the book North fails to capitalize on his sterling premise, for reasons that would doubtless lead him to consider the metaphor behind the preceding clause deeply significant and sinister . The book's head may be in the culture of 1922, but its heart is in 1999...

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