WHAT IS REMEMBERED by Alice B. Toklas, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963, $4.00, 186 pp.

We are what we remember we were remember we are remember we will be. In remembering we are ourselves remembering even though some one else remembers. What is Remembered by Alice B. Toklas is not Gertrude Stein remembering Alice B. Toklas remembering nor is it Alice B. Toklas remembering Gertrude Stein remembering. It is Alice B. Toklas remembering Alice B. Toklas remembering.

In her most private and unique memories, unique and private because surrounding adults are too busy with the present in the light of their own memories to tamper with the person or event at that moment becoming the child's memory, she remembers as a child remembers. When Alice B. Toklas was seven or eight years old, 1870 and Louis Phillipe became inseparable from an aging French music hall singer who when she sang in San Francisco wore a turquoise brooch set with diamonds. Years later and six thousand miles away a voice would seem to speak from a brooch and a friendship began which ended only when that voice became a memory.

What is Remembered by Alice B. Toklas of the San Francisco earthquake foreshadows the way she will remember everything. What is unpleasant is turned to gentle anecdote and the many pleasant memories are often underwritten as though some one had paused in conversation hoping she would lighten and personalize an account which abstract ideas or ponderous outside forces, such as two world wars, were about to carry beyond the bounds of polite conversa-

tion.

Let there be no mistake. The world of the "transatlantiques,' the world of Alice B. Toklas and Ger-

one

trude Stein, was neither the world of Bohemia nor the rebellious world of the expatriates. It was a world of close family ties and sound family investments, protected in its privacy by the conventional manners of the well-to-do middle class and secure in a cultural heritage common throughout the Western world.

What is Remembered by Alice B. Toklas is not an addendum to The

Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein. It is integral to it and to an understanding of it. Miss Toklas is no treble cannon to Miss Stein's clear middle register statement, rather hers is the answering voice in a two part fugue so interwoven in time and place that without it the dominant theme lacks the close harmonies and overtones that lend color and depth.

Brooke Whitney

THE PASTOR'S COUNSELING HANDBOOK by James Christensen, Fleming H. Revell Company, N. J., 1963, $3.95, 181 pp.

Increasingly significant in the contemporary minister's everyday concerns is his role as Christian counselor. James L. Christensen has written a book designed to equip today's minister for intelligent, effective service in this area. This book should be of value to most protestant ministers. It is sound regarding general guidance, and it gives good advice in pastoral procedures. The use of the Bible "with wise discrimination" is a wonderful sugges tion. Too often ministers use passages from the Old and New Testaments without careful consideration of individual needs.

I have learned that psychological emergencies must be handled on an individual basis; there are no two alike. And, although Rev. Christensen is well versed in general needs, he is not prepared for the homosexual.