Secret Thoughts

THE THOUGHT-READING MACHINE-- Andre Maurois--Harper ($2).

Everybody has wondered what would happen if people could read each other's minds. In The Thought-Reading Machine amiable, yea-saying Andre Maurois gives them the power, finds people's secret thoughts are not so bad. Professor Dumoulin was lecturing at a U. S. university when a colleague handed him what looked like a rolled-up copy of FORTUNE, said it was an invention for recording secret thoughts. Dumoulin secretly tried it on his wife, unearthed a startling hodgepodge of sentimental memories of an early lover, resentment against himself. But when he taxed her about it, she used the machine on him, found him dreaming about a pretty student. With Gallic good sense they decided to let the machine alone, while promoters got hold of it, did a roaring business with jealous husbands, suspicious partners. Frenchmen stopped buying it first, said it was good only for Anglo-Saxons. But even Anglo-Saxons soon got tired of secret thoughts; and when politicians turned against it, a few people committed suicide, open minds called a truce.

A good idea, but a slight story, The Thought-Reading Machine combines Wellsian fantasy and well-buttered Gallic irony, makes a pleasantly mild addition to the literature of Let-Your-Mind-Alone.

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