Tardes en Utopía

A NEW BOOK by Stephen Leacock, entirely of new material, treating the new world to a new dose of laughter and satire, is an event of no little importance.

AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA is certainly a book of exception. All the world knows Stephen Leacock as a humorist, and the academic world is well aware of the existence of Professor Leacock, the economist. The dual personality thus involved has been as frequent a subject of remark as that of the mathematical Lewis Carroll of ALICE IN WONDERLAND.

But it remains for AFTERNOONS IN UTOPIA to reveal its author in both personalities at once.

These tales of the New Time are not only laughable to the verge of tears, but at the same time philosophical to the verge of perplexity.

They are equally absurd and equally sound economics. In the tale called The Band of Brothers we get an idea, underneath the mere fun, of a serious indictment of communism.

The Doctor and the Contraption is an amusing picture of the further progress of medical science. The Fifty-Fifty Marriage shows us the directions in which the two sexes are inevitably moving with rather queer consequences.

Perhaps the most striking feature of the book is the series called Grandfather Goes to War, which sets before us, first, the adventurous and exciting warfare of a hundred years ago, then the ghastly slaughter of the War of Desolation in 1950, and finally, the fascinating but quite harmless war in Utopia, all done by clockwork and wireless.