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Show I1"""""1 iiiiiiiiiiiiim i ii i miiiiiiiiimi minim minimi miiimiiiimiiiiiiiiiiimiim i nmm mu AMOMG THE MEW BOOKS "'" iiHiiiiiiimiii I mmmii ii imiiiimiiiiiii u iiummmmmiiiiiiiiimmimiiiimiimimmimiimiiimmimi immiiuiiiii 1 THE DESERT OF WHEAT, by Zane Grey. Harper & Brothers Publishers. Publish-ers. Book by courtesy of D. A. Callahan. Cal-lahan. HTHIS is an epic of wheat and the world war. It tells of a struggle in the great northwest between the grow-eis grow-eis of wheat and the I. W. W. captained cap-tained by German agents posing as labor leaders. Back of it all we see the Hohenzollern dynasty and its ambitions, am-bitions, but In the foreground are loyal Americans, farmers, ranchers, cowboys cow-boys battling with the motley crowds of treacherous despoilers and destroyers. destroy-ers. The action deals rather with what might have been than what was. We know from revelations at the I. W. W. trials what those vicious disloyalists planned. In this romance of the fight to save the wheat of the northwest and thereby save the world, the author has visualized a combat which might have happened had not the government so promptly smashed the I. W. W. by seizing its leaders everywhere in the land. In reality, however, all of these things happened not in one particular corner of the northwest, but at various vari-ous points in the country. The author has here massed the events in one swift and bitter struggle. Kurt Dorn, son of an aged German whose heart is with the kaiser and the fatherland, is the hero. The father becomes involved with the I. W. W., but gradually his eyes are opened. In the excitement and exertion of the fight to preserve his wheat, which the I. W. W. will not spare, the old man, expires. His last words are a prayer for his son's forgivenness. The wheat is harvested and taken to the elevator, but is burned by a gang of I. W. W. working under the command of Glidden, a man of mystery. mys-tery. There is an enthralling contest to save the village from flames and to rout the I. W. W. It is an odd feature of the fight, which is long and thrilling, that no one is killed. This is in the good, old manner of the refined novelist who hated to spill blood. Perhaps that was due to our paciflstic tendencies. In this connection, however, it is fantastic fan-tastic and unreal because, a little later, the hero goes to Fiance, where slaughter slaugh-ter is wholesale. Some of the most interesting chapters chap-ters treat of the Klu Klux Klan operations opera-tions of the vigilantes who band together to-gether to expel the invading I. W. W. The climax is the capture of Glidden, in disguise as he is engaged in wrecking wreck-ing the largest wheat harvesting outfit out-fit in the region. The vigilantes meet, vote his death and he is hanged to a railro'ad bridge. The I. W. W. are rounded up, placed aboard several trains, and are deported by way of the rails that run under this bridge. The ghastly corpse affrights them as they are banished from the land they tried to destroy. The love passages of the novel are weak and sickly sweet despite the at tempt to make them lofty and appealing. appeal-ing. The love story is dragged in, according ac-cording to the accepted canons of the popular novelist. He chooses his subject sub-ject and then insinuates his love puppets pup-pets Into as many scenes as he thinks proper. The hero is brought back from France insane and with one arm gone. The heroine insists on a wedding after af-ter all hope has been given up by the doctors. The wandering mind Is restored re-stored and the hero mends slowly. In the final chapters the novel takes on a mystico-idealistic tone, the heroine voicing those altruistic ideals by which our generation hopes to lift humanity to higher levels, and finally to abolish war. It is a novel of unequal merit. Some of the chapters, especially those in the first half of the book, are red-blooded and virile. There is all the action that the most strenuous could desire. The chapters which take us to France and through the fighting there with the hero are not so convincing, but this probably is due to the fact that we have been sated with descriptions of battles and soldiering. |