Books in Brief

The Coming of the Whirlwind, by Constantine Brown (Regnery, $4.95). Foreign correspondent Constantine Brown was usually there when it happened: he interviewed the obscure Vladimir Ilyich Lenin while rifles still spat around Moscow’s National Hotel. He sized up Mustafa Kemal when Ankara was a grubby village in the Turkish hinterland. He played a role in the consummation of the Kellogg-Briand pact. In Washington he was a shrewd observer of the gear-stripping efforts of American democracy to prosecute World War II, and the dismal machinations which sucked China and Eastern Europe into the Red orbit. Brown’s picaresque and amusing adventures are set against a lucid analysis of this century’s crises, and an evaluation of the men who uprooted Western civilization. His recollections of Cordell Hull, Admiral Leahy and Dean Acheson illumine New and Fair Deal diplomacy, especially vis-a-vis Communism, and his engaging glimpses of significant men are tonic for those who weary of depersonalized histories. Numerous typographical errors slightly mar an otherwise excellent book.

R. S. WHEELER

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The Coming of the Whirlwind, by Constantine Brown (Regnery, $4.95). Foreign correspondent Constantine Brown was usually there when it happened: he interviewed the obscure Vladimir Ilyich Lenin while rifles still spat around Moscow’s National Hotel. He sized up Mustafa Kemal when Ankara was a grubby village in the Turkish hinterland. He played a role in the consummation of the Kellogg-Briand pact. In Washington he was a shrewd observer of the gear-stripping efforts of American democracy to prosecute World War II, and the dismal machinations which sucked China and Eastern Europe into the Red orbit. Brown’s picaresque and amusing adventures are set against a lucid analysis of this century’s crises, and an evaluation of the men who uprooted Western civilization. His recollections of Cordell Hull, Admiral Leahy and Dean Acheson illumine New and Fair Deal diplomacy, especially vis-a-vis Communism, and his engaging glimpses of significant men are tonic for those who weary of depersonalized histories. Numerous typographical errors slightly mar an otherwise excellent book.

R. S. WHEELER