Books in Brief

The Ambassador, by Morris L. West (Morrow, $4.95). When is a novel not a novel? When, as in this book, it strives to recast in fictional form a bitterly disputed historical incident less than eighteen months after the event itself. In this case, the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. The Ambassador opens a few months before the assassination, when Ambassador Maxwell Amberley (note the distinguished name), a cool-headed State Department trouble-shooter, is ordered to Saigon. He is to decide whether the United States should continue to support the autocratic regime of the Catholic bachelor President Phung Van Cung. And if not, how Cung is to be deposed and by which Vietnamese generals. The events of the spring, summer and fall of 1963 are recapitulated in exact detail. The firing on the Hué demonstrators in May, the world uproar over the Buddhist persecutions, the immolation of the monks, increased Vietcong military pressure, student demonstrations, U.S. sanctions, the attack on the Palace, the murder. To be sure there are fictional interpolations: what novelist could resist them? So it is that the Ambassador gives the conspirators the go-ahead publicly at a presidential banquet in the form of a toast to the president. And Cung (who comes through, incidentally, as the only sympathetic figure in the book) responds by making Amberley a gift of a beautiful Douai Bible with the passage from St. Luke marked: “And Jesus said to him: Judas dost thou betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” For anyone interested in the drama of Nov. 1, 1963, in Saigon, The Ambassador is compelling reading. But precisely because it hews so closely to the real-life drama, it is a failure as a novel. Each reader will have decided before opening page one, because of his own bias, who are to be the Good Guys and who the Bad.

P. L. BUCKLEY Red Star over Africa, by Anthony Harrigan (Bookmailer, $2.10). Fact. Quip. Fact. Fact. Analogy. Fact: Lesson. . . . So goes Mr. Harrigan’s straightforward but absorbing, hundred-page study of the massive crisis now gripping the African continent. The case of much-maligned South Africa (whose white inhabitants seem a splendid crossbreed of West European and Californian strains) is first studied in detail, then the author presents an almost-up-to-date Who’s Who of African nations (and nationlets, whose politics seem akin to those found in Black Mischief), emphasis being placed on the varieties of Communist activity in each. Following after the novel and intriguing chapters on possible Indian and Chinese designs in the Afro-Asian theatre, are forty pages of professional, concise geopolitical analysis and speculation. Because informed study and debate of geopolitics—what the Cold War is factually all about—has become a vestigial function of the communications and educational organs of the West, these pages alone recommend this excellent primer.

The Ambassador, by Morris L. West (Morrow, $4.95). When is a novel not a novel? When, as in this book, it strives to recast in fictional form a bitterly disputed historical incident less than eighteen months after the event itself. In this case, the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. The Ambassador opens a few months before the assassination, when Ambassador Maxwell Amberley (note the distinguished name), a cool-headed State Department trouble-shooter, is ordered to Saigon. He is to decide whether the United States should continue to support the autocratic regime of the Catholic bachelor President Phung Van Cung. And if not, how Cung is to be deposed and by which Vietnamese generals. The events of the spring, summer and fall of 1963 are recapitulated in exact detail. The firing on the Hué demonstrators in May, the world uproar over the Buddhist persecutions, the immolation of the monks, increased Vietcong military pressure, student demonstrations, U.S. sanctions, the attack on the Palace, the murder. To be sure there are fictional interpolations: what novelist could resist them? So it is that the Ambassador gives the conspirators the go-ahead publicly at a presidential banquet in the form of a toast to the president. And Cung (who comes through, incidentally, as the only sympathetic figure in the book) responds by making Amberley a gift of a beautiful Douai Bible with the passage from St. Luke marked: “And Jesus said to him: Judas dost thou betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” For anyone interested in the drama of Nov. 1, 1963, in Saigon, The Ambassador is compelling reading. But precisely because it hews so closely to the real-life drama, it is a failure as a novel. Each reader will have decided before opening page one, because of his own bias, who are to be the Good Guys and who the Bad.

P. L. BUCKLEY Red Star over Africa, by Anthony Harrigan (Bookmailer, $2.10). Fact. Quip. Fact. Fact. Analogy. Fact: Lesson. . . . So goes Mr. Harrigan’s straightforward but absorbing, hundred-page study of the massive crisis now gripping the African continent. The case of much-maligned South Africa (whose white inhabitants seem a splendid crossbreed of West European and Californian strains) is first studied in detail, then the author presents an almost-up-to-date Who’s Who of African nations (and nationlets, whose politics seem akin to those found in Black Mischief), emphasis being placed on the varieties of Communist activity in each. Following after the novel and intriguing chapters on possible Indian and Chinese designs in the Afro-Asian theatre, are forty pages of professional, concise geopolitical analysis and speculation. Because informed study and debate of geopolitics—what the Cold War is factually all about—has become a vestigial function of the communications and educational organs of the West, these pages alone recommend this excellent primer.