Books in Brief

Incredible Victory, by Walter Lord (Harper, $5.95). The Battle of Midway, turning point in the sea war with Japan, gets the traditional Lord treatment: we whoosh from tight closeups (who wore what color pajamas on the eve of battle, what Ensign Soandso thought when he saw his bomb hit) to wide pan shots of the whole Pacific theater. Such an approach requires Herculean research: not content to rummage in archives, the author trotted hither and yon to interview the men who were there—over 400 of them, American and Japanese. The treatment works, as usual, thanks to Lord’s skill at keeping track of dozens of simultaneous goings-on. Out of the confusion of battle, he has wrought an engrossing minute-by-minute account of the defense of that three-square-mile speck of sand and coral, Midway, c. H. simonds

The Jewish Stake in Vietnam, by Meir Kahane, Joseph Churba and Michael King (Crossroads Publishing, $3.95). The authors call on their fellow Jews in America to ponder the problem of freedom, pointing out that if it is diminished in Vietnam it will affect the liberties of all of us everywhere. A special target of Communist totalitarianism, they contend, are the Jews in general, and the state of Israel in particular. Ample quotations from leaders of the Liberation Fronts from Vietnam and Palestine show the affinity for total terror that unites them in their hatred of Israel. Sixteen pages of photographs, illustrating the kind of horror committed on South Vietnamese and American captives by the Vietcong do, indeed, remind one of Auschwitz. These gruesome portraits of torture and terror are balanced with cartoons from the Soviet press showing the Jews as beak-nosed monsters, typical of the graffiti which are the stock-in-trade of the gutter antisemite the world over. The book is highly recommended to all those who fail to make the connection between the attacks on freedom in the Far East and those which imperil the rights of sovereignty and nationhood in the Middle East. They emanate from the same ruthless sources. M. GELTMAN

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

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Incredible Victory, by Walter Lord (Harper, $5.95). The Battle of Midway, turning point in the sea war with Japan, gets the traditional Lord treatment: we whoosh from tight closeups (who wore what color pajamas on the eve of battle, what Ensign Soandso thought when he saw his bomb hit) to wide pan shots of the whole Pacific theater. Such an approach requires Herculean research: not content to rummage in archives, the author trotted hither and yon to interview the men who were there—over 400 of them, American and Japanese. The treatment works, as usual, thanks to Lord’s skill at keeping track of dozens of simultaneous goings-on. Out of the confusion of battle, he has wrought an engrossing minute-by-minute account of the defense of that three-square-mile speck of sand and coral, Midway, c. H. simonds

The Jewish Stake in Vietnam, by Meir Kahane, Joseph Churba and Michael King (Crossroads Publishing, $3.95). The authors call on their fellow Jews in America to ponder the problem of freedom, pointing out that if it is diminished in Vietnam it will affect the liberties of all of us everywhere. A special target of Communist totalitarianism, they contend, are the Jews in general, and the state of Israel in particular. Ample quotations from leaders of the Liberation Fronts from Vietnam and Palestine show the affinity for total terror that unites them in their hatred of Israel. Sixteen pages of photographs, illustrating the kind of horror committed on South Vietnamese and American captives by the Vietcong do, indeed, remind one of Auschwitz. These gruesome portraits of torture and terror are balanced with cartoons from the Soviet press showing the Jews as beak-nosed monsters, typical of the graffiti which are the stock-in-trade of the gutter antisemite the world over. The book is highly recommended to all those who fail to make the connection between the attacks on freedom in the Far East and those which imperil the rights of sovereignty and nationhood in the Middle East. They emanate from the same ruthless sources. M. GELTMAN