Kai Lung's Golden Hours
Book Excerpt
I do not know how often I have read it since I first possessed it. I know how many copies there are in my house--just over a dozen. I know with what care I have bound it constantly for presentation to friends. I have been asked for an introduction to this its successor, /Kai Lung's Golden Hours/. It is worthy of its forerunner. There is the same plan, exactitude, working-out and achievement; and therefore the same complete satisfaction in the reading, or to be more accurate, in the incorporation of the work with oneself.
All this is not extravagant praise, nor even praise at all in the conventional sense of that term. It is merely a judgment: a putting into as carefully exact words as I can find the appreciation I make of this style and its triumph.
The reviewer in his art must quote passages. It is hardly the part of a Preface writer to do that. But to show w