Formula

SHANTY IRISH--Jim Tully--A & C Boni ($2.50).

"There was niver any fun in Ireland, me lad--it was always a wailin' and a weepin' country. Hearts full of the great sadness and stomicks empty of food--fools prayin' to God, and starvin' on their knays. Ireland at its bist was a hard country--we lived wit the pigs and the geese--we petted thim an' thin we ate thim." Grandfather Tully lived through the Great Famine "a-suckin' the wind and drinkin' the rain on the bogs,'' then migrated to Ohio there to continue his ditching, peddling, champion drinking, yarn-swapping. Whether he was better off in Ohio, who can say--his son's possessions were "a wife, six children, two cows, one hog, a blind mare, and a sense of sad humor"; his grandson's a keen Irish sense of pathos, a true Irish gift of gab.

Grandson Jim makes good telling of his drab childhood, his golden-haired mother, his whiskey-bibbling father. In Shanty Irish he attains not the strange lure of roving Beggars of Life (recently effectively distorted for the cinema; see TIME. Oct. 8), but projects instead that charming Gaelic shiftlessness which composes, cheek by jowl with uninspired Teutonic steadiness, the U. S. formula.