Men Like Gods

THE MAN WHO CANNOT DIE-- Thames Williamson--Small Maynard ($2.50). Strange and wonderful people appear in this strange and wonderful book. Richard Bacon, debonair and demoniac son of Alchemist Roger Bacon, visits Philadelphia about 1830. He is 567 years old. There he injects Arthur Pentland, young Pittsburgh snob, with the elixir of life.* Soon after, he breaks his neck, being no longer useful to Author Williamson Arthur Pentland, who as a child suffered from night fears and grew up to love only his mother (now dead), soon marries a girl that reminds him of his mother. Being ageless, however, he outlives her too and wanders thereafter, unhappy and confused, through the rest of U. S. history, down to the present. His old hatred of death as the source of fear has been replaced by hatred of life, source of despair. But a mysterious blond man who has haunted him all these years, takes him for an automobile ride and explains that Arthur must love his fellowmen; that the future of humanity is divinity. . . . The tale is not unreadable. It does nothing if not rush. Over the last 75 years it puts on such a burst of speed that the landscape blurs entirely save for landmarks like Abraham Lincoln, Pittsburgh factories, modern "go-getters." But the book itself is more interesting than its contents. It is the third in a series called "The American Panorama." The first two, far better books, folklore rather than fantasy, were Run, Sheep, Run and Gypsy Down the Lane. Author Williamson, onetime hobo, sailor, sheepherder, circus hand, newsgatherer, wrestler, linguist, social worker, Harvard student and African explorer, has French, Irish, Norwegian and Welsh blood. Unless this is his autobiography he may be said to have imagination.

* Roger Bacon's cryptic scripts, announced finally translated last week, describe the "elixir"(see SCIENCE).