A Childhood in Prison, by Pyotr Yakir; introduction by Robert Conquest (Coward, 150 pp., $5.95). A bit of nostalgia about the good old days in the Great Socialist Motherland. When Stalin launched his purge of the Red Army in 1937, General Ion Yakir was among the first shot. With its accustomed thoroughness, the NKVD broke up his family. Pyotr, then age 14, began a five-year odyssey through camps and prisons. Because he liked to ride horseback, he was accused of trying to form a band of “anarchist cavalry.” One NKVD man found the boy’s coin collection: “Foreign currency”! Another found a little pen-knife: “An offensive weapon”! Eventually, Pyotr was sentenced to five years under Article 58 of the Penal Code, for being a “socially dangerous element.” As the son of his father, he was eligible for “member of a traitor’s family”; other unfortunates were put away for five, ten, twenty years for “anti- Soviet agitation,” “counterrevolutionary activity” (“Trotskyite” or “Bukharinite,” depending), “complicity in espionage” and so on and on. One day, all persons of Persian birth in the city of Astrakhan were hauled in; another, all the men who had worked on the Chinese Eastern Railway, with their wives and children—tens of thousands of families—got five to ten for “complicity in espionage.” Pyotr served out his term and was released in 1942; since the Khrushchev thaw he has spoken out repeatedly against Stalinism and other excesses of the regime. Last June 21, he was arrested for “anti-Soviet activity.” c. h. simonds
Ears of The Jungle, by Pierre Boulle (Vanguard, 224 pp., $6.95). Pierre Boulle, I’m afraid, is still in orbit. We whistled and cheered him across The Bridge over the River Kwai. But then he took off for the Planet of the Apes, and he hasn’t been the same since blastoff. Ears of the Jungle is the best since Kwai, but Boulle is still a long way from splashdown. The “Ears” of the title are tiny sensors, disguised as foliage, dropped by American planes into the Vietnamese jungles. These sensors pick up every jungle sound, from cricket croak to tiger belch. And when they pick up the sound of a North Vietnamese convoy rolling down the Ho Chi Minh Trail computers call in air strikes. But a North Vietnamese Dragon Lady commissar works out a way to outwit the sensors, and the result is jungle comedy in which bumbling missionary-minded insensitive Americans stumble through a series of computerized pratfalls toward an explosive conclusion. I don’t hold it against Boulle for being unable to draw a believable American. I couldn’t draw a believable Frenchman. And I can forgive his anti- Americanism. The French, after all, are nursing a hell of an inferiority complex about Indochina. And I’m not even offended by the semilove story which proves that that twain still can’t meet. But the science-fictionalist hokum does bother me. If Boulle expects ever again to regain his stature as a serious novelist, he’d better eschew that Apishness and prepare for splashdown soon. J. r. coyne jr.
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