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A TIME TO KEEP by Halliday Sutherland

A TIME TO KEEP

By

Pub Date: Oct. 23rd, 1934
Publisher: Morrow

The sale of Arches of the Years last summer will create a demand and a readymade market for this second autobiographical volume by a Scottish doctor. But it is well to be prepared for a disappointment, if you -- and your customers -- are looking for a repetition of the delights of the earlier book. This is quite evidently made up of ragtag and bobtail, scraps from the literary barrel, possibly discards from the other book, bits of anecdotal material dug from odd corners of memory, and put together in more or less haphazard way to form a second volume. One gets little sense of continuity. With Arches of the Years fairly fresh in memory, one fits these odds and ends into the larger pattern; without that freshness this would seem confusing, although the anecdotes in themselves have a certain charm and originality in the telling which redeems the book from mediocrity. Boyhood vacations in the Highlands --adventures and misadventures on his uncle's farm -- school days and university days and medical school days -- occasional glimpses of bits of his career, in sanitariums and in practice -- virtually nothing of the war -- a heterogeneous assortment, loosely put together.