By Gerald Stanley Lee



"I must express with your connivance the joy I have had, the
enthusiasm I have felt, in gloating over every page of what I
believe is the most brilliant book of any season since
Carlyle's and Emerson's pens were laid aside. The title does
not hint at any more than a fraction of the contents. It is a
highly original critique of philistinism and gradgrindism in
education, library science, science in general, and life in
general. It is full of humor, rich in style, and eccentric in
form and all suffused with the perfervid genius of a man who is
not merely a thinker but a force. Every sentence is tinglingly
alive, and as if furnished with long antennae of
suggestiveness. I do not know who Mr. Lee is, but I know this
--that if he goes on as he has been, we need no longer whine
that we have no worthy successors to the old Brahminical
writers of New England.

"I have been reading with wonder and laughter and with loud
cheers. It is the word of all words that needed to be spoken
just now. It makes me believe that after all we have n't a
great kindergarten about us in authorship, but that there is
virtue, race, sap in us yet. I can conceive that the date of
the publication of this book may well be the date of the moral
and intellectual renaissance for which we have long been
scanning the horizon."--WM. SLOANE KENNEDY in Boston Transcript.