Passionate Pundit

When George Bernard Shaw received a letter from a lady asking him to explain Socialism, he wrote a 200,000-word reply entitled The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. Who it was who asked Dorothy Thompson to write Dorothy Thompson's Political Guide, published this week, the author does not reveal. Miss Thompson, who calls her book "the intelligent Woman's Guide to Isms," approaches the fulminating Fabian in garrulousness and dogmatism, but falls far behind in endurance--her book is only twice as long as Shaw's table of contents.

Where Miss Thompson excels is in enthusiasm. "I know now that there are things for which I am prepared to die," she writes. "I am willing to die for political freedom, for the right to give my loyalty to ideals above a nation or above a class. . . ." Miss Thompson's other offers, in print, to die: (for Austria; rather than accept fascism).

When, in March 1936, the conservative New York Herald Tribune hired Miss Thompson to write a thrice-weekly column, she was known as: 1) an unusually alert foreign correspondent with vaguely radical leanings; 2) the wife of Nobel Prizewinner Sinclair Lewis. Guided by her most passionate emotion--a consuming hatred of Hitler--Columnist Thompson began writing with shrill assurance that startled readers. As insistent as a katydid, never at a loss for an answer, almost invariably incensed about something, her column has pleased a national appetite for being scolded. Today, her On the Record is printed in 155 newspapers with more than 7,000,000 readers. She is in constant demand as a radio and platform speaker.

Miss Thompson's Political Guide will be familiar reading to followers of her column or her monthly contributions to Ladies' Home Journal. Effervescent with bromides, it is less a guide to U. S. politics than to Dorothy Thompson's. Most persistent katydid note is for a liberalism which she defines as "a type of mind, a kind of spirit and a sort of behavior, the basis of which is an enormous respect for personality."

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