Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 131

COUSINS GOES CALLING Visit To Schweitzer Indestructible, My Dear Holmes same way when he compared Schweitzer's role with that of a "European master peasant who insisted on running his hospital in his own may." Some of the most revealing pages in the book are those in which Cousins records his private talks with Schweitzer, when the old man became gentle as he discoursed on his writing. He has been working off and on for many years on two manuscripts a "Philosophy of Civilization" and a theological work entitled "The Kingdom of God." Of the latter Schweitzer said: "This book is practically complete, the thesis is that Christianity has veered away from Christ." And the "Philosophy?" Much of it has been written, but "I don't know whether I shall ever finish it." In both works, it seems to ine, Schweitzer will probably continue to address the conscience of man long after he himself has passed from the scene. (He is S3.) Mr. Cousins is entitled to our gratitude for having taken the precaution of photographing the manuscripts. To set the seal on his visit, he also obtained a statement from Schweitzer on nuclear war that subsequently went reverberating around the world.

I should mention that the book also contains an account of a brief visit the author made to South Africa. Long, long before the recent riots in that country he wrote of apartheid: "It was more than a wall of color separation. It was a declaratioi of white ownership and control. It meant a license just to live." J.B. AMONG BOOKS AND AUTHORS volume.

He has taken at its face value a dictum of Holmes' in "A Study in Scarlet," namely, that "there is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps." Mr. Harrison magnifying glass in hand, no doubt has traced Holmes footsteps up arid down the length and breadth of London. The results fill a book that will please devoted followers of th Holmes canon. Every pilgrimage of this kind begins, of course, with a visit to 221B Baker Street, where Holmes and Watson sojourned between cases. I made that search myself on my first visit to England long ago, only to discover to.

my chagrin that 22TB, wasn't there! Mr. Harrison' 'has! i sdrnle theories as to where the house might have been, but Co-nan Doyle the only man who really knew coyly refused to tell. Vincent Starrett in his "Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" (now reissued by the University of Chicago Press) made a better stab at it. With the help of a diligent medico from St. Louis, he placed the original Holmes headquarters at No.

Ill Baker Street. Remember to look tor it next time you visit London. The truth is that the Holmes stories, for all their rudimentary form and uncomplicated detection, possess a haunting charm that age cannot wither nor fashion stale. Ten years ago Somerset Maugham predicted that the modern detective story was on its last legs. Probably but as long as Sherlock Holmes remains with us, it will be a long time a-dying.

J. B. A Look At Frost IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. By Michael Harrison. New York: Frederick Fell.

292 pp. S. THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. By Vincent Starrett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

135 pp. M-75. The story of pure detection or mystery, if you will has fallen on lean times. The fictional sleuth who functioned by sheer brain power has given way to the hard boiled "private eye," who substitutes fisticuffs for deduction. Now we even have the cop engage, who, as often as not, is himself the target of the criminal.

The whole process of logical detection in fiction has, in fact, been debased by the substitution of violence for reason, mostly, 1 fear, by American writers. This means that readers like myself, who prefer brain to brawn in their sleuths, have to turn largely to European practitioners like Si-menon and Agatha Christie. Of course, there's always Sherlock Holmes, whose indestructibility remains the surest proof that the story of pure detection was once a viable branch of the novel, whatever current writers may be doing with it. If you doubt me, consult your library. Better still, take a look at the handsome new edition o( all the Holmes tales ever written now issued in new type, binding and jacket by Doubleday.

At $4.95 it's a bargain. The Holmes Higher Criticism constitutes a library on its own, to which Michael Harrison, a British disciple of the Master, has just added another reverential What nicer gift? BOOKS for the Bride BOOK OF All TYPES Wedding Reeord Books Guest tookt whife Bibles-Proyer Books and TeSTamenr. DR. SCHWEITZER OF LAM-BARENE. By Norman Cousins.

New York: Harper Bros. S5I pp. $3.95. Most of the visitors who "drop in" to see Dr. Schweitzer at his jungle hospital in French Equatorial Africa are drawn there by a desire to see, with their own eyes, a man who voluntarily, turned his back on the comforts and rewards of civilization half a century ago.

Others go there to observe a practicing Christian in action, a spectacle not as common as it might be. Norman Cousins, the peripatetic editor of Saturday Review, went to Lambarene for two additional reasons. First, he wanted an appeal to the world to renounce nuclear weapons from the man who, above all others, had come to symbolize a reverence for life. Secondly, he wanted to learn what books Schweitzer was working on, and, if possible, to protect the manuscripts. The mission if can call it that has produced this vivid and illuminating book.

It is neither a biographical memoir nor an analysis of Schweitzer's achievements, but a heartwarming picture of the man in action. Cousins was not disillusioned, as some visitors are, by what he found the primitive hospital, rudimentary sanitation, Schweitzer's own gruffness with those around him. He discovered that, while "Herr Doktor" looked on Africans as children, he treated most whites the same way. Schweitzer's feeling for life, in whatever form, was a very real thing. Cousins tells the story of Adlai Stevenson, who swatted a flea on the doctor's arm.

"You shouldn't have done that," said the Doctor sharply. "That was my mosquito." His role, the author concluded, was that of a father with a "sense of total personal responsibility for everyone and everything at Lambarene." In his recent book, "Days with Albert Schweitzer," Dr. Frederick Franck put it in much the Drury Tackles Second Novel Allen Drury, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, "Ad vise and Consent" (being reprinted in The Times, passed through New York the other day en route to Washington from Europe, whither he had gone to report the abortive summit conference. Not to waste any time about it, the good news for his many thousands of readers is that Mr. Drury has begun to write another political novel in the vein of "Advise and Consent." He has been hard at work on it, with interruptions only by Premier Khrushchev and the forthcoming political conventions.

He expects to finish it before the year is out. Many of the characters in "Advise and Consent" will reappear in the new book. Indeed, Mr. Drury sees a whole series of political novels with his now famous cast opening out in the future. J.

B. book on and off for 11 years. She began in 1949 and got a good deal of research done before becoming occupied with her fine biography of Willa Cather, published in 1953. Thereafter she resumed work on the Frost and finished the manuscript last October. The poet, incidentally, did not read the work until the book was done.

Several outstanding collections of Frost's letters, Miss Sergeant added, are held by certain universities, and she believes that these will be published in due course. Also ripe for collection in book form arc Frost's admirable prose pieces, many of which are introductions to books. What did she most admire about Frost? "His love of reality, his ability to live life in the full sense of the word, and the larger meaning he is able to give to small things in his poems. He feels that his whole lite has been a dare to fate, and his work reflects it." Or as Frost himself put it in one of his poems: "I have a mind myself and recognize Mind when I meet with it in any guise. Bw at Witfli-Crio' far ho finest C9ntio BOOK ttvwlabf ofiywltft ACTION INTRIGUE DRAMA ARTS TRAVEL POETRV HISTORY CLASSICS PLUS A HOST Of OTHERS BOOK Mair, Floor 1 THIRD AND CENTRA! By JOHN BARKIIAM Robert Frost is in his 87th year, and thanks be, still hale and hearty.

Serious works on his poetry despite his vigorous objection to exegesis are now beginning to appear, with more planned. One is due from a Southern university press in midsummer. On June 17, however, perhaps the most important book on Frost to date is due from Holt, Rinehart Winston. It is "Robert Frost: Trial by Existence," by his longtime friend and admirer, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. Miss Sergeant has much in common with her subject.

A few-years younger than Frost, she is, like him, descended from a long New England line. She first got to know the poet in 1925, when he had just turned 50 years of age. "At that time only three or four little volumes of his verse had been published," she told me in an interview. "I had read them all and brought them with me. To my pleasure and sus-prise, he wrote what amounted to his esthetic philosophy in the pages, plus annotations in the margins.

I still have them, and, being no book collector myself, I am going to leave them to my alma mater, Bryn Mawr." Since that time Miss Sergeant has come to know Frost and his family well. Her book is part memoir, part critical analysis, and wherever possible, she has used the poet's own words. The general theme of the book is apparent from its sub-title, "Trial by Existence," which appears also on one of Frost's poems. She brings out how hard was his childhood. He was raised by a father who was addicted to the bottle and who died when the boy was only 11.

Thereafter his mother had to raise him on a pittance as a country schoolteacher. "He knew adversity as a child, and he knew life in the raw, too. His father used to take him to the stockyards, where the boy watched him drink warm blood, then considered a cure for tuberculosis." Years later, when a woman friend expressed the hone to him that the saloons would be closed by Prohibition, Frost said: "What's wrong with saloons? 1 was raised in them." Miss Sergeant worked on her PV ffS lS W1 I 3.7S to 10.00 4 2.25 to .00 us fo ,.,5 326 CENTRAL OR 1-8121 Etiquette New Edition Emily Post How to Plon Beautiful Wedding. Solly Newton Etiquette. Amy Vonderbilt whif.

Scrap Book, Photo AH-J. white or acetate poges YOU EXPECT MORE FROM AD YOU GET IT! Page Sixteen SUNDAY, June 5, 160.