THE WILD FLAG

by E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 5, 1946

Despite -- and in face of- public opinion that the New Yorker is lightweight reading for entertainment only, we list this collecting and excerpting of EBW's editorials in that magazine's Notes and Comments as MUST READING. We accept and appreciate the author's own conviction that ideas are often ""too purely theoretical""- ""too sweetly reasonable"", and add our own opinion that their simplification is naturally impractical, nevertheless they produce an elucidation and clarification of ogre-like problems in everyday terms, stressing and restressing the preoccupation with government and law and the price they cost. No discussion, illumination nor illustration does he feel is wasted on these world points. Pedantic theory falls before his ability to reduce the issues to personal, intimate, comprehensible terms. Problems become non- existent before his logical, loyal and appealing vision. However, any feeling of cloying sentiment is lost in his astringent treatment of half-baked attitudes toward compromise, injustice and intolerance, in his deliberate, delicate definitions of terms, in his excoriating useless approaches to the necessity of world government. The author of Stuart Little may possibly give a mouse-eye view of global concepts but his pared running commentary through the war years to the peace, dependent on universal structure, with a place for human rights, if it adds only small cubits to our thinking, at least it does not lack specific gravity. We'll take our universal, structural ABC's from E.B.W.

Pub Date: Nov. 5, 1946

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton, Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1946

Categories: NONFICTION