History Without Dates

THE ROAD WE HAVE COVERED--John Andersen Udmark -- Modern Age ($3.50).

Many a U. S. community knows the type: a great reader, self-taught and apt to be considered mildly bughouse; a man whose passionate hobby is universal history. Usually he has a special key to history; sometimes he gets it out of the Bible. If he writes his masterpiece, it tends to look like a combination of numerology, fancy cattle brands and bad dreams.

Last fortnight that tradition produced a remarkable exception. John Andersen Udmark at 50 published his first book, The Road We Have Covered, "an outline of history without dates." A Danish immigrant who came to the U. S. at 17, small, shy Historian Udmark, a bachelor, .has worked in a Grand Rapids furniture factory, been a laboratory helper in Detroit and Manhattan, farmed wheat in Alberta, Canada, and Washington State, now lives on the outskirts of Seattle, where he does building "on the side." His frustrated ambition, until he turned materialist, was to be a priest.

First distinction of Udmark's book is its eloquent simplicity. Its second: that in 361 pages he condenses the best historical outline of its kind, not excepting H. G. Wells's Outline of History. He follows the familiar materialist theories of Earth's creation as result of a "celestial catastrophe," of man's billion-year rise from the trilobite, of his history as the outcome entirely of geographical and social conditioning. What he adds is a freshness of outlook, rare in either materialists or historians, which recalls the uncorrupted wonder of a baby first discovering its toes.

Considering the billion-in-one miracle by which man came to exist at all, the fact that from primeval slime, reptiles and such unlikelihoods came a Newton and a Shakespeare, Author Udmark is a stanch believer in man's ability to overcome what seem to him man's worst hangovers: religion (whose man-invented aspects give him most delight to trace), nationalism, laissez faire, race theories, capitalism, superstitions, inertia, habit.

"From human nature," declares Udmark, "we have little to fear in planning for the future. Our troubles are all with the things that have been foisted on it in the course of time--attitudes, habits of thought, prejudices and passions that do not belong in our present world. . . . The sort of society which the wise ones among the cavemen rejected as impracticable and contrary to human nature is exactly the sort of society in which we of today, for better or worse, are living."

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