Books: Life with Grandfather

• Share

GRANDFATHER STORIES—Samuel Hopkins Adams—Random House ($3.50).

Samuel Hopkins Adams is the author of some 50 books ranging from a scandalously sensational novel of the early '20s about President Harding's secret love life and his death to a judicious biography of his late friend Alexander Woollcott. He started writing as an ace reporter for the famed New York Sun of the '90s, then became one of the leading muckrakers of the Teddy Roosevelt era. Later he turned out a whole series of popular romances, one of which, Flaming Youth, trademarked a generation. Finally, from his ancestral seat in New York's Finger Lakes district, he knocked off a succession of York State historical novels. Now, at 84, Sam Adams displays his tireless versatility anew in an amusing collection of sketches written out of his boyhood recollections. Grandfather Stories, most of which first appeared in The New Yorker, is the Book-of-the-Month Club's midsummer selection.

The sprightliest of these stories center around Grandfather Myron Adams, a patriarchally bearded forebear who was born in the late 18th century, helped build the Grand Erie Canal, and on occasion proved altogether willing to relate the bizarre hazards and furies of pre-Civil War life in the very language of those wonderful, distant days. His racy and ebullient yarns of plugging canal leaks, spiriting runaway slaves along the underground railway, and keeping books for a traveling circus are crammed with theologasters, dawpluckers, makebates, hoodledashers and such archaic huncamunca. His grandson's version of baseball in the Abner Doubleday country may not be so uproarious as James Thurber's rowdy recollections of the game in Columbus, Ohio. But his saga of Hop Bitters ("The Invalid's Friend& Hope"—alcoholic content: 40%), which Patent Medicine Man Asa T. Soule of Rochester put over by promoting a baseball team and a hilariously crooked sculling championship, invites comparison with Thurber's immortal tribute to the life-preserving elixirs concocted by Aunt Margery Albright. This book is good fun for summer readers, especially for those who remember.