Books: Mention- Dec. 2, 1929

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DEAR SOOKY—Percy Crosby—Putnam's Sons ($2.50). LITTLE BLACK STORIES FOR LITTLE WHITE CHILDREN—Blaise Cendrars— Payson & Clarke ($2). Dear Sooky includes letters written by Cartoonist Percy Crosby's famed U. S. small boy Skippy (TIME, May 20) to his poor friend Sooky. Crosby illustrations are plentiful. Skippy relates his first airplane ride and his first love, now caustically, now saccharinely. He signs himself "affectionately sincere." Little Black Stories have been bandied around African firesides by big black boys and girls for centuries. The book is a smash hit with French children and adults. Here rhythmically translated from the French, the stories are of hares, mice, alligators, a tree frog, a wind, an unborn chicken, all reverently humanized. France's Author Cendrars, alone in Russia at 15, made his living roaming from Lapland to the Caucasus; from Mongolia to Siberia to China. In 1908 he landed in Manhattan from a tramp steamer, turned poet. Later he lost his right arm in the War, wrote for the Swedish Ballet, compiled Negro poems, folklore.