More August Titles: Thomas E. Dewey and His Times (Simon & Schuster, $22.50), by Richard Norton Smith, looks to be an excellent biography, presenting its subject as a figure well worth sympathetic reconsideration.
Robert M. Blum’s Drawing the Line: The Origins of the American Containment Policy in East Asia (Norton, $18.95) has some interesting moments, as in the part where the author avers that in 1949 Chou En-lai made secret overtures to the United States suggesting plans for a “Chinese Titoism.” Blum, a professional historian, has served on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. . . . Report from Afghanistan (Viking, $12.95; Penguin paper, $4.95), by Gerard Chaliand, is a brief book about the activities of six major Afghan resistance groups by a writer who has written sympathetically about revolutionary insurgencies in the Third World. In the case of Afghanistan, Chaliand believes that the fruits of Soviet invasion will be the birth of modern nationalism in that country.
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