Another Outline

MAN'S OWN SHOW: CIVILIZATION-- George A. Dorsey--Harper ($5). Less than two hours after receiving the final revision of the MS of this book Author George Amos Dorsey died (TIME, April 6). Publisher Harper says Dorsey had been working intensively on Man's Own Show for four years, implies that overwork hastened his end. If Scientist Dorsey's excitement over Why We Behave Like Human Beings excited you, you will probably want to read his hard-wrought magnum opus. Says Dorsey: "I have attempted to . . . discuss human beings and civilization as objectively as though I were neither human nor civilized, but nevertheless had retained my human right to be curious about everything, my acquired interest in anything or anybody, and my constitutional privilege to speak my mind about anything I am taxed to support. On the other hand, I have not tried to prove something or improve anybody; exploit somebody or expound anything; point a moral or point with pride; sound a warning or forecast the future." In short, Dorsey wanted to get his mind Clear About Things. In the course of reading this 958-page digression you may not always agree that he has fulfilled his promises; his continued excitement may even at times have the opposite effect on you; but you will certainly find Man's Own Show: Civilization a respectable book. Dorsey has divided his book into three parts: 1) As It Was in the Beginning, or Man's Natural Endowment; 2) Our Cultural Inheritance, or How We Came by Our Civilization; 3) What Shall We do to Be Saved? His conclusion: "Man has built a great civilization, and this nation is the greatest force in the world today. I am glad I am alive and I am proud to be an American. But I am even prouder to be a human being; and our nationalism to day, it seems to me, is humanity's great enemy, civilization's greatest threat."

The Author, Anthropologist Dorsey was 63 when he died, still as interested in man as he was when Harvard gave him its first doctor's degree in Anthropology (1894). For over 30 years he worked at his job all over the world, which every anthropologist must take as his province, went on many an expedition organized by Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. When he wrote Why We Behave Like Human Beings (1925) it caught the crowd. Author Sinclair Lewis wrote a bad but enthusiastic sentence in praise of it: "As a layman with a vast curiosity about life, but no scientific knowledge, I find that Dorsey answers better than any one book all my questions."

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