Books: Medicinal Associations

LIVES — Gustav Eckstein — Harper ($2.50 );

To his little brothers &; sisters the birds, St. Francis of Assisi used to preach. Dr. Eckstein, more catholic, includes in his audience, besides parrots, canaries, a pigeon and a macaw, cats, rats, three turtles, a Portuguese gardener and a million cockroaches. More modern than the Saint, the Doctor does no preaching, though he talks seriously to mischief-makers now & then.

In the Doctor's laboratory, as in a test tube, the Doctor's human isolation is broken down by the alchemical tricks of his more or less than human friends. The white rat, the tip of whose brain has been removed, can still show his master how gallant, how thoughtful a lover he can be to the soft white beauty who builds a nest of newspapers in the desk. Vicious, the little green parrot, loves to lie under the Doctor's coat when he goes to the symphony; warm and still, she chews his tie, his shirt. Only once, frightened at something, did she begin to talk. The man sitting next the Doctor thought he was making that remarkable noise. The Doctor covered Vicious, let the man think.

The little reddish-brown pigeon who, barren herself, kissed the Doctor's hand when he gave her fertile eggs to sit on; the extraordinary story of Joe the gardener working himself into cancer growing flowers and turning stones to bread: such things Author Eckstein depicts with the intense exclusiveness of a Japanese print. The reader, with the Doctor, will wonder what lies beyond his pictures' boundaries —it must be a dazzling landscape in which such sparkling details live and die.