Adventuring

LAND WITHOUT LAUGHTER--Ahmad Kama/--Scribner ($3).

I MARRIED ADVENTURE--Oso Johnson --Lippincott ($3.50).

THE WANDERING LAKE--Sven Hedin--Dufton ($3.75).

ASIAN ODYSSEY--Dmitri Alioshin--Holt ($3).

ADVENTURES OF A BIOLOGIST--J. B. S.

Ha/dane--Harper ($2.75).

As used in book titles, adventure is one of the world's most elastic words. It is as likely to title a book about a bus trip or stamp collecting as about Tibet. Books have even been written about adventures in thinking. But among any season's adventure books, year in & out, the majority tell about Africa and Asia. No exception, last month's crop was somewhat better than average.

P:Land Without Laughter. Real name of Ahmad Kamal is Cimarron Hathaway, 28, redheaded, scimitar-scarred. Great-grandson of a Tatar chieftain, he spent most of his childhood on U. S. Indian reservations, where his German-born mother did tribal research for the U. S.

Government. Too sickly to attend school, he was tutored in Turkish and in military strategy by a disinherited German nobleman-cowboy; a Turkish scholar taught him Asiatic lore. Thus primed, in 1935 Hathaway went to Bombay, thence to Tibet and Turkestan, where he fought with a bloodthirsty Mohammedan chieftain against the Bolsheviks. Captured, he spent 116 days in solitary confinement in a Soviet prison, made his lucky exit via the Gobi desert to Shanghai. Whatever the facts of his curious adventures, Author "Ramal" is a vivid writer, nearly rivals the fantastic imaginings of Frederic Prokosch's The Asiatics.

P: I Married Adventure. Osa Leighty was a small-town Kansas girl, the spunky, snub-nosed daughter of a brakeman on the Santa Fe. At 16 she met a lanky young candid-camera bug named Martin Johnson, from the neighboring town of Independence. Lately famed as crew member on Jack London's cruise of the Snark, he was part owner of two nickelodeons--Snark No. 1 and No. 2. In darkened Snark No. 1 he abruptly proposed marriage. A few months later Mr. & Mrs. Martin Johnson started a vaudeville lecture tour, saved enough to head for the South Sea cannibal islands with a secondhand movie camera. Their main asset: nerve.

Beyond these first 100 pages Osa Johnson's story is more familiar; in their famed animal films (Simba, et al.) Mr. & Mrs.

Johnson virtually told a serialized story of their adventures for 25 years in the South Seas, Africa, Borneo. But because Osa Johnson also makes a companionate idyl of their life together, many a reader will agree that their adventures are worth telling twice.

P: The Wandering Lake. In 1933 Sweden's famed Explorer Sven Hedin was hired by the Chinese Government to explore the Silk Road, ancient caravan route of Marco Polo fame. Purpose: to build a motor highway connecting Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan) with Soviet Russia. (Completed in 1938, this 2,000-mile highway soon became one of China's two last links with the outside world.) The Wandering Lake is Sven Hedin's third book to result from that 1933-35 expedition (others: The Flight of the Big Horse, The Silk Road).

The "wandering" lake was Lop-nor.

Around A. D. 330 it suddenly disappeared, reappeared farther south. Lou-Ian, the city bordering it, became a sandswept ruin; the rich surrounding country went back to desert. In 1901 Hedin predicted that the lake would return to its old bed. In 1921 it did. He tells the story of Lop-nor, describes his explorations on and around it.

Among adventurers Hedin has one unusual fault: his writing is often too stiffly exact.

P: Asian Odyssey is the grim memoir of a White Russian artillery officer, who served under General Kolchak and Baron von Ungern-Sternberg against the Bolsheviks in Siberia and Mongolia. While many a book has been written about the Russian Red and White armies, and at least two biographies about the fantastically sadistic Ungern-Sternberg, none has more simply or vividly described the incredible hardships and cruelties of a fight which will long rank with the more shuddering chapters of Russian history.

P: Adventures of a Biologist. Famed problem child of British scientists, prolific science writer, expert on poison gas, big, bristly-tempered, 47-year-old Biologist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane believes that life without adventure is "like beef without mustard." But his idea of adventure is not safaris; it is exploring the ultramicroscopic world, the stratosphere, the nature rather than the surface of the earth. Besides essays on the biologist in relation to everything from town-planning to death, Biologist Haldane speculates on the effect of weather on history, on the possibility of a new ice age, on the chances of a sun explosion, on machines run by atomic energy, on penetrating 40 miles into the earth. Naturally such adventuring sometimes goes Wellsian. But his book opens genuine new horizons for adventure. With Africa and Asia rapidly becoming as familiar as the Lincoln Highway, new horizons are needed.

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