Simeon Strunsky

Sinbad and His Friends Simeon Strunsky

Plainly Sinbad is the name bestowed by the people of Bagdad, for some unknown reason, upon an American newspaper man who arrived in the capital of Mesopotamia shortly after that country had thrown in its fortunes with the Allies in the war against the Empire of Madagascar. The book is divided into two parts which are much more intimately connected than the reader may suspect at first sight. Part I deals with the adventures of a journalist named Sinbad in the city of Bagdad in the dim past of the year -1917 of the Christian era. Part II deals with the adventures of an American journalist named Williams in the New York of the year 1921. Across the gulf of Space and Time the reader will discern the ties of a common humanity between the two men. He will be struck with a definite resemblance between the thoughts, the feelings, and even the concrete problems of two epochs and two civilizations. If Williams, in our own town and in our own day, seems to be thinking and saying very much the same things as Sinbad in his alien environment, it is not at all a case of mere repetition. It is only a case of the fundamental sameness of human nature.