tion about consignments of carburetorsf? These matters are
delicate but important and -- Cohn Tells All.

It seems to me that Mr. Cohn has achieved exactly the
right tone of accurate yet diverting narration of our evolving
trade. He has neither the contemptuous Frigidaire wit of the
professional urbanites to whom Gertie Perkins and her tinted
stationery are subhuman phenomena of the Peruna Belt, nor
yet the trusting naïveté of the patriotic nostalgicist to whom
one hundred per cent of Grandma's ways and wares are in-
controvertibly examples of pioneer heroism.

During the past twenty years, America has been perceiving
that it now has the privilege, and the responsibility, of being
no longer a cultural colony of Europe, but a great and adult
and individual and slightly lonely nation, that must depend
on itself, and that hugely needs to understand the self on
which it depends. In history, in fiction, in music, amid the
extravagances of the motion pictures, it has been studying its
present and future through a surprisingly candid inspection
of its past.

In this book there is an important report of such inspection.
By your eyebrow pencils, your encyclopedias, and your alarm
clocks shall ye be known. The most scrupulous statistics on
the increasing acreage of alfalfa and soy beans, the most ele-
vated dissertations on our tendency to chronic philanthropy,
could not make us understand that cranky, hysterical, brave,
mass-timorous, hard-minded, imaginative Chosen Race, the
Americans, half so competently as Mr. Cohn's parade of the
wares that we have been buying and paying for and actually
lugging into our homes and barns and offices, these past
fifty years:

Electric Thermostats, Ladies' Percale Sunbonnets, Birth
Control Manuals, Imported Fancy Lily Bulbs, Cambric Bust
Confiners, Two-Color Bibles, 1939 Model Air Conditioners,
Vest Pocket Revolvers, Brewster Sleigh Bells, Fancy Col-
ored Mummy Effect Worsted Round Cut Sack Suits, Clarion
Harmonicas in Red Leatherette Cases, phonograph records
of Uncle Josh in a Chinese Laundry and of the Flogging

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