Letters from Merchant to Son

Perhaps this book was a big hit when it first appeared in 1902, but it is preachy and unquaintly old-fashioned to the contemporary reader. Lorimer was an editor at the Saturday Evening Post, and this appears to be nothing more than a puffed-up piece from that magazine. The first ""letter,'' written to Pierrepont Graham, a freshman at Harvard, by his pork-packing father in Chicago, contains all sorts of fatherly advice about college life, and what a young man should and should not do. But, as Pierrepont ages and goes to work in Dad's company, the homilies continue with few variations, and the folksy examples (one per chapter) of how not to behave, plus endless metaphors, become boring, and the book's conceit wears thin. There is much advice (indeed, that is all the book contains), but as Graham senior himself notes, it is the same advice that young men always hear. However, there are a few bright spots. Graham's rules for business conversation are useful and still timely: ``Have something to say. Say it. Stop talking.'' (May)