Books: Buzz-Saw

LUMBER—Louis Colman—Little, Brown ($2).*

Jimmie's father was a Northwest lumberman, his mother a slut. When his father was killed Jimmie did not stay home long. He bummed around the lumber country, became a millman, had a good time, made good wages. When he met Pearl he meant to seduce her; instead he proposed. They were settled in their own house and had two children when the trouble began.

Because he once saw a bum beaten up by a cop Jimmie had joined the I. W. W.; but his enthusiasm waned, he had never been active. Then the War started, wages boomed, the Wobblies started strikes in every mill they could. But it was an unpopular time to strike; soon the Wobblies were made to realize it. Bodies were found of men who had "committed suicide;" homes were wrecked, men beaten up by night-riders. Jimmie did not advertise his I. W. W. membership but it was known. By luck he escaped, but his spirit was broken; when the trouble was over he resigned as a Wobbly. But from then on nothing went right. He lost job after job, wages tumbled; first one child, then the other died of spinal meningitis. They would have been evicted from their house if Pearl had not paid a banker in a way Jimmie could not forgive. One day he did not come home from the mill. A buzz-saw had killed him.

If Doctrinaire Upton Sinclair could get as much feeling of helpless human tragedy into his propaganda novels as Louis Colman gets into Lumber, Socialists and

Capitalists alike would take more stock in Upton Sinclair. Lumber is not recognizably propaganda, but it is a story of Labor, and if you can read it without being moved, you deserve to have the Wobblies get you.

The Author. Like his hero, Louis Colman has been a millman (he has hell down multifarious jobs in a lumbermill). Though never an I. W. W.. he has been out on many a lumber strike. Now, at 26, he has finished with sawmills, lives in Manhattan, translates from the French: Lumber is his first novel.