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BROOKS ATKINSON GIVES A RAVE REVIEW TO NATURE, A MIXED REVIEW TO CIVILIZATION An elderly English professor of mine occasionally conducted our writing seminars on the patio of his house, hard by a woods on the outskirts of Nashville. One day, while we sipped beer and he played his folk guitar-on such afternoons it seemed we rarely discussed writing-we were interrupted by a songbird that had come to feed in the backyard. The professor stopped his playing and we all listened for a while, amused and somewhat embarrassed. Finally the old man said, That bird is mine, you know. We understand each other. My English professor and Brooks Atkinson, the former drama critic and foreign correspondent, would have gotten along famously. In This Bright Land (Doubleday/Natural History Press, $5.95) Atkinson writes about the natural wonder of America and its systematic despoiling by four centuries of civilized man. Yet his is not the usual polemic leveled against the abusers of our continent. Rather, it is a low-keyed description of our natural resources and an appeal for their preservation. It is not the kind of book that makes one want to throw oneself in front of bulldozers, but rather to take long walks through a Vermont woods or pole a flat-bottomed boat into the quiet of the Florida Everglades. Atkinson tells us what America once was- Earth's only paradise, in the words of an Elizabethan poet-then gives us a gentle tour of what is left. He takes us down the Mississippi. He guides us through the Grand Canyon, at whose edge the first explorers turned back in disgust, branding it a wasteland. He celebrates the wonder of New Jersey's Great Swamp, which some would prefer as a jetport. He shows us the Everglades, nearly killed by drought a few years back when the Army Corps of Engineers, in the interest of flood control, shut off the imperceptible flow of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee that keeps the 'Glades alive. The point of the book is nowhere stated so cogently as in its last chapter. Atkinson lives in the Catskills near a section of state forest planted in the 1930s when local farms and pastures became unproductive. One August morning, Atkinson notes, a solitary rose-breasted grosbeak sat in the top spray of a tall spruce and sang with great resonance and beauty.... There seemed to be no practical motive for singing...[but] after thirty-five years, the spruces had created an environment in which a grosbeak felt content, and he said so gloriously. In other words, Atkinson seems to say, we don't need cosmic reasons for saving what we have. The song of a grosbeak on a summer morn will do nicely. Kim Chapin Sports Illustrated June 12 1972 THIS BRIGHT LAND: A Personal View . Brook Atkinson. Doubleday. $5.95 Retired from playwatching, the longtime New York Times drama critic, Atkinson has for some years immersed himself in birdwatching and the pleasures and protection of nature. Atkinson the naturalist-ecologist is no whit less interesting than he was in his former role. The beauty of his book lies in the purity of his feeling as he writes of the Great Swamp in New Jersey's flatland, the vanishing California condor, the redwood, the Everglades, the Grand Canyon, the once great Mississippi River and Florida's South Biscayne Bay-all classical subjects for the militant ecologist. Atkinson brings little fresh information to the veteran reader in this genre, but his civilized horror at what civilization has done to our land and water, and his blend of learning and style, are attractive. Illustrated with linecuts. March 10, 1972 Publishers Weekly

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JUSTIN BROOKS ATKINSON (November 28, 1894 - January 14, 1984) was an American theatre critic. He worked for The New York Times from 1925 to 1960. In his obituary, the Times called him the theater's most influential reviewer of his time. A war correspondent during World War II, he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1947 for his work as the Moscow correspondent for the Times. Atkinson attended Harvard University where he began writing for the Boston Herald. He graduated from Harvard in 1917, and worked at the Springfield Daily News and the Boston Evening Transcript, where he was assistant to the drama critic. In 1922, he became the editor of the New York Times Book Review, and in 1925 the drama critic. Atkinson married Oriana MacIlveen, a writer, in August 1926. On the drama desk, Atkinson quickly became known for his commitment to new kinds of theater-he was one of the first critical admirers of Eugene O'Neill-for his interest in all kinds of drama, including off-Broadway productions. In 1928, he said of the new play The Front Page, No one who has ground his heels in the grime of a police headquarters press room will complain that this argot misrepresents the gentlemen of the press. In 1932 Atkinson embraced the witty, direct writing style that became his hallmark. His reviews were reputed to have the power to make or break a new stage production: for example, his panning in 1940 of Lawrence Riley's Return Engagement led to that comedy's closure after only eight performances, this despite the fact that Riley's previous comedy, Personal Appearance, had lasted for over 500 performances on Broadway. Atkinson, who was dubbed the conscience of the theater, was not comfortable with the influence he wielded over the Broadway box office. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Atkinson requested a reassignment to war coverage, and the New York Times sent him to the front lines as a war correspondent in China, where he covered the second Sino-Japanese war until 1945. While in China, he visited Mao Tse-Tung in Yenan and was captivated by Mao, writing favorably on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) movement, and against the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, which he saw as reactionary and corrupt. After visiting Yenan, he wrote that the CCP political system was best described as an agrarian or peasant democracy, or as a farm labor party. Atkinson viewed the Chinese Communist Party as Communist in name only and more democratic than totalitarian; the Times effusively titled his article Yenan, a Chinese Wonderland City. After the end of the war, Atkinson stayed only briefly in New York before being sent to Moscow as a press correspondent; his work as the Moscow correspondent for the Times earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence in 1947. After returning from the Soviet Union, Atkinson was reassigned to the drama desk, where he remained until his retirement in 1960. He is given much credit for the growth of Off-Broadway into a major theatrical force in the 1950s, and has been cited by many influential people in the theatre as crucial to their careers. David Merrick's infamous spoof ad for Subways Are For Sleeping-in which he hired seven ordinary New Yorkers who had the same names as prominent drama critics to praise his musical-had to wait for Atkinson's retirement, because Merrick could not find anyone with the right name. There was only one Brooks Atkinson in New York City. Atkinson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. He came briefly out of retirement in 1965 to write a favorable review of Man of La Mancha; his review was printed on the first page of the show's original souvenir program. After his retirement, he became a member of The Players who organized a tribute dinner for Atkinson's 80th birthday which was attended by Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, and other prominent actors and playwrights.

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