book reviews

Adam Phillips’s new study, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, is an effective breviary and defense of Sigmund Freud, and not because it dazzles with a tightrope act of theory, but because it simply and directly underscores Freud’s tremendous accomplishments of comprehension. 

Dissolution is not a new theme for Edwin An lington Robinson, for it was in "Merlin" that he told of a noble civilization falling back into violence and barbarism. It was the war that made Robinson feel so. In his latest and last book, "King Jasper," he returns to this point of view, having in the meantime studied and re-studied the involved psychological effects of death on small groups of characters.

To the twentieth century, annual collections of short stories are as familiar as "Keepsakes" or "Tokens" were to the nineteenth. At first sight of still another year-book of the American short story, Thomas H. Uzzell's "Short Story Hits, 1932," readers generally might echo the question posed by the book's editor in his introduction—why a new entry into a field already crowded?