Cylchgronau Cymru

clear regional framework, though his general model could readily be applied on a smaller geographical area. Forty years ago Oscar Handlin won a Pulitzer Prize for his classic study of immigration into America, The Uprooted. It is a memorable book with a simple message. Immigrants came from peasant backgrounds in Europe to industrial America and experienced dislocations and disruptions which were described in moving terms. Dr. Holmes shows us how much things have moved on and the partial nature of such insights. In Britain, as in America, the backgrounds of immigrants were diverse, and much of the old society was reproduced in the new. Some groups migrated as family units, in others families were created or recreated in the new society. The new view is more complex but also more realistic. Dr. Holmes will not win a Pulitzer Prize for his book, but at the very least he will gain the gratitude and admiration of his fellow historians and of race relations experts. NEIL EVANS Coleg Harlech 0. M. EDWARDS. By Hazel Davies. Writers of Wales Series, University of Wales Press for the Welsh Arts Council, Cardiff, 1988. Pp. 117. £ 3.50. This is one of the better short appreciations of an eminent Welsh figure to have appeared for some time. Based as it is on a thorough acquaintance with the subject's literary output and particularly his surviving private papers, it is a very fair, sensitive and well-rounded essay. Furthermore, Hazel Davies's achievement in having produced such a comprehensive portrait and critique within the compass of little more than a hundred pages in the relatively restricted format of the University of Wales Press's Writers of Wales series deserves commendation. The author has succeeded not so much in rending the veil of sanctimonious deference which has tended to obscure vital aspects of the life and work of Owen M. Edwards as in drawing it gently aside to expose a tantalising vista to the would-be biographer. This she does without shedding one iota of respect and esteem for Edwards's influence and achievement. Indeed, as she makes clear, there is here no overt attempt to demythologize one of the most celebrated of Welsh Olympians, though the ultimate result is an injection of life into that 'chill, plastic portrait' so familiar to those who have gazed upon it over the years as it hung on the walls of innumerable Welsh schools. The introductory comments at once inspire confidence in the author's ability to ponder not only the great man's qualities but also his so-called defects which, in reality, only help to endow the image with much-needed mortal attributes: 'the inner reality, the fretting, insecure and highly nervous individual, plagued by headaches, and troubled by dreams. He lived his life in a constant state of tension, demanding too much of his own frail frame and of his loyal family.' Emotive words, perhaps, but convincing in the light of evidence produced in the body of the essay. For it is this multi-faceted, apparently contradictory amalgam of