BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Notices and reviews of books, articles, plays and poetry dealing with. homosexuality and the sex variant. Readers are invited to send in reviews or printed matter for review.

OBSCENITY & THE LAW.

Norman St. John Stevas

LONDON: Secker & Warburg, 1956, $5.00

Mr. St. John-Stevas has tutored in jurisprudence at Christ Church, Oxford, and lectures at King's College, London. In OBSCENITY & THE LAW, he gives us a comprehensive survey of the history of the concept of obscenity in the Western world, with primary emphasis on its development in British-American law and jurisprudence. As a lawyer as well as a writer, the author brings scholarly competence to bear on this timely and controversial subject.

Chapter VII traces the experience of the United States with obscenity. statutes, and outlines some of the more famous obscenity trials, such as those involving ULYSSES and GOD'S LITTLE ACRE. The text includes excerpts from the now-famous liberal opinions of Justices Hand, Woolsey and Bok.

Readers who have previously tended to think of obscenity in "black-orwhite" terms will quickly discover how varied and changing have been the concepts of obscenity from Medieval times into the Twentieth Century. One of the turning points in the history of this subject is described as the development of the printing press, and the consequent increase of the reading public which took place during the 18th Century. The author describes these developments in Chapter II, with liberal quotations from the popular literature of that era, compared to which many of our modern publications seem conservative indeed.

In his concluding chapter, the author discusses the concept of obscenity broadly, summarizing with a critical distinction between LITERATURE, as the "description of life and thoughts about life rather than . . . acts," and PORNOGRAPHY, which concerns only acts themselves.

The Appendices and Bibliography, which occupy almost a third of the book, are a gold-mine for researchers in this field, & include tables of English law, comparative studies of the laws of the Commonwealth countries and foreign nations, lists of books banned by religious and secular authorities, and other valuable data.

LAW & CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS School of Law, Duke University. Autumn 1955, Vol. XX, No. 4, $2.00 Duke Station, Durham, No. Car.

The Duke University School of Law devotes this issue of its quarterly entirely to the subject of " Obscenity & the Arts." In a series of eleven essays, prepared by distinguished scholars and professors in the field of law, the reader is presented with a brilliant analysis and criticism of the problems of censorship and of the concept of obscenity itself.

Titles from the Table of Contents show the diversity of approaches which were made to this subject. Included are discussions of obscenity from anthropological, esthetic, and psychodynamic viewpoints, sex censorship in its cultural context, and various legal studies. An extremely valuable presentation for the millions of modern thinkers concerned with American rights to publish and to read.

ROBERT GREGORY