Books in Brief

Duel at the Brink, by Roscoe Drummond and Gaston Coblentz (Doubleday, $4.50). Veteran correspondents Drummond and Coblentz have succeeded where many have failed—in painting a fair, balanced picture of the man who almost singlehandedly shaped American foreign policy through seven crucial years. John Foster Dulles is correctly appraised not as “inflexible” or blindly uncompromising, but as a supreme diplomat with heartfelt convictions. Arguing in his behalf, the authors even shade the case a bit too much on the side of “realism”: they say he intended not “liberation” of the Soviet satellite regimes, but “containment” of further Communist expansion—not a radical departure from the policies of Kennan and Acheson, but a continuation of them. The reviewer would disagree. There were certainly occasions when Dulles shied away from the concept of liberation—notably the East German uprisings in 1953 and the Hungarian revolution three years later. But Dulles’ policy of “brinkmanship” usually had more to offer than Kennan’s sterile containment. The landing of troops in Lebanon, the authors observe, “risked Russian counteraction and war.” And the orders to sail U. S. warships under the muzzles of blazing Red guns during the 1958 Formosan crisis might well have led to world war— had not Dulles correctly calculated the political and military realities of the situation. w. schulz

The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare, by John Lawlor (Harcourt, $3.75). This is a refreshing departure from the codifying of imagery which has occupied Shakespearean critics for so long. Lawlor looks to the play of opposites in Shakespeare’s plots, and tempts us at the outset with a glimpse of the dialectics of tragedy. But, after a fine essay on the plotting of the Hal-Falstaff conflict, he makes that most fatal of transitions in Shakespeare—from metaphysics to ethics—and soon we are caught

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Duel at the Brink, by Roscoe Drummond and Gaston Coblentz (Doubleday, $4.50). Veteran correspondents Drummond and Coblentz have succeeded where many have failed—in painting a fair, balanced picture of the man who almost singlehandedly shaped American foreign policy through seven crucial years. John Foster Dulles is correctly appraised not as “inflexible” or blindly uncompromising, but as a supreme diplomat with heartfelt convictions. Arguing in his behalf, the authors even shade the case a bit too much on the side of “realism”: they say he intended not “liberation” of the Soviet satellite regimes, but “containment” of further Communist expansion—not a radical departure from the policies of Kennan and Acheson, but a continuation of them. The reviewer would disagree. There were certainly occasions when Dulles shied away from the concept of liberation—notably the East German uprisings in 1953 and the Hungarian revolution three years later. But Dulles’ policy of “brinkmanship” usually had more to offer than Kennan’s sterile containment. The landing of troops in Lebanon, the authors observe, “risked Russian counteraction and war.” And the orders to sail U. S. warships under the muzzles of blazing Red guns during the 1958 Formosan crisis might well have led to world war— had not Dulles correctly calculated the political and military realities of the situation. w. schulz

The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare, by John Lawlor (Harcourt, $3.75). This is a refreshing departure from the codifying of imagery which has occupied Shakespearean critics for so long. Lawlor looks to the play of opposites in Shakespeare’s plots, and tempts us at the outset with a glimpse of the dialectics of tragedy. But, after a fine essay on the plotting of the Hal-Falstaff conflict, he makes that most fatal of transitions in Shakespeare—from metaphysics to ethics—and soon we are caught