50 Years Ago

A Star Called the Sun by Dr. George Gamow — We are reminded of Dante on his journey to the inferior regions: “I would have cast me into molten glass to cool me, when I enter'd, so intense raged the conflagrant mass” ... the author compares the Sun with other stars and explores the nature of such old ones as red giants, white dwarfs and supernovae, the stars that “die glamorously” ... The style is popular and sometimes racy. Occasionally it will offend the English reader who has some feeling for his Mother tongue, but on the whole, in spite of his “oodles and oodles”, the author has avoided ... ambiguities and half-statements. W. L. Sumner

From Nature 21 August 1965

100 Years Ago

The Book of France edited by Winifred Stephens — The book opens with an appreciation of France by Mr. Henry James, written with the copiousness and verve which characterize all his work ...Perhaps the most arresting and striking contribution to the work is the “Debout pour la Dernière Guerre!”...done into nervous, palpitating English by Mr. H. G. Wells ... “La Basilique-Fantôme”, by Pierre Loti...is a remarkable word-picture of the present state of the cathedral of Rheims ... “The most irreparable disaster is that of those great stained windows composed by the mysterious artists of the thirteenth century ... Masterpieces that no one can reproduce showered down their fragments never to be sorted again, their wonderful golds and reds and blues, of which the secret has been lost, upon the pavement stones. Gone for ever those rainbow transparencies, gone for ever those companies of saints with the charm of their simple attitudes.” T. E. Thorpe

From Nature 19 August 1915 Footnote 1