* * * * * _The Great Desire_ (HODDER AND STOUGHTON) is a novel full of shrewd philosophy and excellent talk. Mr. ALEXANDER BLACK sets out to prove nothing, to justify no political or social attitude, but just to draw his fellow-Americans as he sees them going about their war-time business, the "great desire" being simply the thing that is uppermost in the mind of each one. As a composite picture of what New York thought about the business of getting into the War the result could hardly be bettered. One never feels that latent antagonism which readers, even though they may agree with him, unconsciously experience towards an author who seems to be arguing a point. Mr. BLACK gives the extreme views of the blatant patriot, and of the anarchist and socialist who cannot see the distinction between arguing against war on paper and arguing against this War on the street corner. He makes us realise the people who think only how to make the War an adjunct of themselves and those who desire only to make themselves a useful adjunct of the War. He draws his types cleverly and states the case of each one fairly, but with a humorous restraint and from a standpoint of absolute detachment. _The Great Desire_ has plenty of charm regarded merely as a story, but I recommend it especially to those who are apt to judge the Americans by their politicians or to assess New York on the basis of the HEARST newspapers. * * * * * If it were only for his complete fearlessness in following well-worn convention and his apparent reliance on his readers' ignorance or want of memory, Mr. J. MURRAY GIBBON'S _Drums Afar_ (LANE) would be rather a remarkable book in these psycho-analytical days. His hero actually has the audacity to have blue eyes and fair hair, to start his career in the House, and to end it, so far as the novel is concerned, lying wounded in a hospital, where his _fiancee_, a famous singer, happened to be a nurse in the same ward. Nor does the young man disdain the threadbare conversational _cliche_. "Don't you think there is something elemental in most of us which no veneer of civilisation or artificial living can ever deaden?" he says in one place (rather as if veneer were a kind of rat poison). Still bolder, on leaving America, where he has become engaged to a wealthy Chicagan's daughter, he quotes-- "I could not love thee, dear, so much Loved I not honour more."