BOOKENDS

THIS is the rawest book I have ever seen. It is like a burnt over forest of scrub pine. There is not one bit of human warmth in its two hundred fifty odd pages, just the lowest form of men and women crawling over bleak rock with one cut throat instinct "to persist". To say the book is depressing is to say nothing. "Bottom Dogs" is a social document of man neither civilized nor un-civilized.

Mr. Dahlberg's novel records everything that the man who wrote the introduction for it hated D. H. Lawrence sees in "Bottom Dogs" savage America conquered and subdued as the expense of the instinctive, and intuitive sympathy of the human soul . . . the collapse of the flow of spontaneous warmth between a man and his fellows. No one could read this book without having the realization flash across his mind that all is not well in this nation of Prohibition and Listerine advertisements.

There is no pleasure in reading this testament of uglyness. But it deserves, nevertheless, to have a wide circulation among people who are at all concerned with the future of American civilization.