"Tue AmeRIcaNization or EDWARD Box." (Scribners. 1921. Pp. 461.)
This is an unusual book about an unusual man, who emigrated from Holland to the United States with his parents and an elder brother in September 1870, at the age of nineteen days less than seven ears. The volume is a record of is self-education not less than of his Americanization, and the story for convenience is toid in the third Person.
The author tells us that the title aod the form of his book were chosen in 1914, so that it could not have been suggested by "The Education of Henry Adams' published later, but on the same plan of letting the writer stand outside of himself as if he were another person, thus avoiding the crime of of egotism, of which the essence is said to be "keeping the private "I" too much before the public eye. The day after the family settled in Brooklyn and within a week of their arrival Edward was plunged into a public school by his father, though the lad knew no English at all!
Here amoring other tasks he was set to practice the florid "Spencer. jan system" of writing, against which his Dutch good sense rose in a necessarily dumb rebellion. He was punished for disobedience, but the next morning his father interviewed the principal with the rewult that for a time writing was not required, and that later a simpler style was optional.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.