Recently Published Books

Of Life's Oddities: a book published recently from the pen of Mrs. Madeleine Arqash. In it the author takes up political, social, and family problems, and has made her affirmations and discussions unfold on the tongues of four women companions, the easier to treat them...

In her book the author surveys the most important social ills, especially those that touch the family; she analyzes them, calls attention to their gravity, and proposes solutions for them... For she has formed for herself — from her experience, her reading, and her travels — an opinion of her own on most of the international problems that perplex minds in this age, her warrant for doing so being her sincerity and her yearning for general reform.

Worth mentioning is that Mrs. Madeleine Arqash has five other books: She Is Your Sister, So Do Her Justice; Literature and Language; The Letters of Mayy; Mona; and In the Courts of the Temple...

Poetry and Its Question in Modern Arabic Literature: from the pen of Mr. Ibrahim al-Urayyid, one of the publications of "Sawt al-Bahrain." It is the lecture delivered at the Conference of Arab Studies at the American University of Beirut in 1954; in it is a detailed survey of Arabic poetry through the ages, then the question of poetry today and the renewal and imitation that surround it.

For every theory he sets forth, Mr. al-Urayyid cites contemporary verse in evidence, and he gathers these poems that appear in his lecture into an appendix with which he closes the book. And in his long tour through the horizons of Abqar, al-Urayyid calls at every Arab country, plucking its finest flowers and bearing them all off as one fragrant bouquet.

• Mr. Ibrahim al-Urayyid also has a diwan of poetry newly published by Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayin — Beirut. The poet has named his diwan "Candles"; it is the fourth collection of verse by al-Urayyid to appear so far — this overflowing poet, though in what he composes he draws his inspiration from the atmosphere of Bahrain!!

"Candles" is the story of a heart between the years 1945 and 1952 — lyric poetry of the heart expressing the deepest human feelings, which the poet sets in a frame radiant of word and pulsing with meaning...