slight story, one of the important pieces of contemporary fiction.

Using the heart of an adolescent boy as a foil against the stifling traditional concepts of sin and the human will, Soldati throws into high and dramatic artistic relief the fact that human authority, completely ignorant of its own limitations, has lost contact to a pathetic degree with the essence of the human problem.

The drama of young Clemente. Perrier consists in the mad efforts of his rather pious family and his pompous Jesuit teachers to wrap his boyspirit in mummy-clothes of 'sin' to the point of positive suffocation. Sin, of course, is Woman, and a boy's dream-like speculations on the opposite sex. Were Clemente a more mature person, this whole thing would be rather a colossal bore; but since he is that unpredictable mass of unshapen creative miracles that is every boy at fourteen, his drama reaches heights that are well-nigh unbearable.

And just at the point in any dilemma beyond which no one can safely go, Clemente's problem is suddenly resolved, easily, accidentally, in a brief human gesture, which no one could have foreseen. He happens to touch the naked hip of his playmate, Luisito, with the palm of his hand. Immediately the whole beautiful world of young physical innocence is known to him. And for the reader, this moment casts comically revealing shadows upon the huge bumbling corpse of industrialized morality— that organized stalemate which tries to force the idea of justifiable and holy war into the same brain in which it has already been at some pains to implant the commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill'.

With such a denouement, there is no need for Soldati to attack, berate, or judge anything or anybody. His method as a writer is descriptive, economical, highly dramatic, tinc-

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tured with a blush of self-evident irony. This is beautifully seen in the fact that Clemente, to whom his playmate has been presented ardently by his confessor and his family as God's answer to man's sinful relationship to womankind, is, after all, unable to deny the truth of the words Luisito speaks to him in the midst of their first intimacy: 'Between us kids, it's not wrong!'

Rene

ONE INSTITUTE QUARTERLY: HOMOPHILE STUDIES, James Kepner, Jr., Editor, One Inc., $3.50 yearly; $1.00 single copy.

No contribution to the study of the position of the homosexual in human life seems to be more timely or more important than the appearance of ONE QUARTERLY.

The coverage of inquiry within its pages reaches into the outer areas of study. And the combination of sympathetic understanding and scientific objectivity is noteworthy. From James Kepner we have a sweeping editorial on the continuing struggle facing the homosexual; from Henry Hay, a scholarly monograph based upon long investigations of the Semitic peoples in the second millenium B.C.; from W. Dorr Legg a pin-pointing of some of the problems facing the serious student in the method of studying this subject. All articles are presented in a fashion marked by freedom from bias and dogmatic statement.

The need for such a periodical is all the more keenly felt when one realizes that no homosexual organization in the world is attempting to devote its attentions to the academic side of the homosexual problem. And it should be obvious to everyone that non-homosexual investigators have found it impossible to approach the

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