The Crimson Bookshelf

HARRY A. FRANCK has written a new book of travel. It is his seventeenth, and will be avidly welcomed by thousands of members of the Franck Fireside Club. This time America's perennial rambler goes tourist for a thirty day excursion among the wonders of Sovietland from Leningrad to Tiflis, from Moscow to Odessa.

Franck has done a good book for such a short visit in a country that presents so many aspects and such varied problems. Harry Franck is--as always--immediately disarming as he informs you in the preface "But," you cry, "only thirty days!" Yes, but that seems as long as the erudite Dr. Durrant or the intrepid Carveth Wells or the portly Alexander Woollcott spent there--yet they each got a book out of it." Perhaps, Mr. Franck himself best sums up the value of this book's contribution to knowledge about the Soviet when he adds "You couldn't get the whole truth about the USSR in a single book if you went and lived there until Doomsday. Russia is too big a subject for any one writer." Indeed, this homely philosophy of Mr. Franck's seems right. Franck honestly professes to "know" little about Russia and refrains from uttering any obiter dictums. Thus he attains an case and fluency of his subject not common to the vast majority of tomes on Russia.

Read Franck's "Vagabond in Sovietland" if you would see Russia and Russian conditions with a photographic and unprejudiced eye. The book will not excite you because the author does not try to pack his book with sensational facts, but the book will hold you interested from the very first page to the last line.