Books in Brief

Adventures in Black and White, by Philippa Duke Schuyler (Robert Speller & Sons, $4.95). It’s allegro sostenuto all the way as Philippa Schuyler, onetime child prodigy, now a concert pianist, takes off on a world tour: 60 countries in 300 pages, from Uganda to Anchorage, from B.A. to Helsingfors. Crop statistics, the weather, conversations, local color, political and sociological comment, fashion notes, concert programs, the scenery, all tumble from Miss Schuyler’s pages in a state of amorphous but attractive confusion. The book is crammed with interesting, if often irrelevant, data: how to deal with ants in Usumburu; what kind of a piano Albert Schweitzer uses; who not to hire as an impresario on a concert tour of Latin America; what Chief Bwong Gwom wore at the concert in Jos; the words of that famous old Baganda ballad “Basiba embuzi mwesimye” etc.). Miss Schuyler, who is of mixed parentage (her father is George Schuyler, the distinguished Negro journalist), emerges from this book as a woman of rare courage and vast resources (which she is constantly called upon to tap). But as a writer, she has some crippling faults, many of which good editing could have corrected. Someone, somewhere along the line, should have excised a thousand or more adjectives. p. l. buckley

Ten Years of Storm, by Chow Ching-wen (Holt, $6.00). The “experts” tell us that Khrushchev is sorely tried by Mao’s thesis of war’s inevitability, and that the West may soon be required to make common cause with reasonable Mr. K. to ward off the yellow peril to peace. Chow Ching-wen, a high-ranking Peking official for eight years, tells us something else again: that “Maoism” is a figment of Western wishful thinking; that the vast human poultry yard of Communist China seethes with unrest, making Mao and his brutal henchmen more than ever dependent upon Moscow. This incisive eye-witness study of China’s bloodiest decade is worth a thousand fatuous “analyses” of the alleged Sino-Soviet doctrinal dispute; Chow’s chapter on Peking’s foreign policy alone is an invaluable antidote to the pap of the armchair experts. And his conclusion that the spirit of free China has not been broken by its incredible suffering is a warning that a new Hungary may one day burst upon us with a thunderclap from the East. r. whalen

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Adventures in Black and White, by Philippa Duke Schuyler (Robert Speller & Sons, $4.95). It’s allegro sostenuto all the way as Philippa Schuyler, onetime child prodigy, now a concert pianist, takes off on a world tour: 60 countries in 300 pages, from Uganda to Anchorage, from B.A. to Helsingfors. Crop statistics, the weather, conversations, local color, political and sociological comment, fashion notes, concert programs, the scenery, all tumble from Miss Schuyler’s pages in a state of amorphous but attractive confusion. The book is crammed with interesting, if often irrelevant, data: how to deal with ants in Usumburu; what kind of a piano Albert Schweitzer uses; who not to hire as an impresario on a concert tour of Latin America; what Chief Bwong Gwom wore at the concert in Jos; the words of that famous old Baganda ballad “Basiba embuzi mwesimye” etc.). Miss Schuyler, who is of mixed parentage (her father is George Schuyler, the distinguished Negro journalist), emerges from this book as a woman of rare courage and vast resources (which she is constantly called upon to tap). But as a writer, she has some crippling faults, many of which good editing could have corrected. Someone, somewhere along the line, should have excised a thousand or more adjectives. p. l. buckley

Ten Years of Storm, by Chow Ching-wen (Holt, $6.00). The “experts” tell us that Khrushchev is sorely tried by Mao’s thesis of war’s inevitability, and that the West may soon be required to make common cause with reasonable Mr. K. to ward off the yellow peril to peace. Chow Ching-wen, a high-ranking Peking official for eight years, tells us something else again: that “Maoism” is a figment of Western wishful thinking; that the vast human poultry yard of Communist China seethes with unrest, making Mao and his brutal henchmen more than ever dependent upon Moscow. This incisive eye-witness study of China’s bloodiest decade is worth a thousand fatuous “analyses” of the alleged Sino-Soviet doctrinal dispute; Chow’s chapter on Peking’s foreign policy alone is an invaluable antidote to the pap of the armchair experts. And his conclusion that the spirit of free China has not been broken by its incredible suffering is a warning that a new Hungary may one day burst upon us with a thunderclap from the East. r. whalen