G. M.

GENERAL MANPOWER--John S. Martin--Simon & Schuster ($2.50).

Suppose a body-builder like Bernarr Macfadden took a tip from a professional strikebreaker like Bergoff, and then prospered like nobody's business until he turned into a potentate like the late, generally unlamented Sir Basil Zaharoff. On such an alarming supposition John Stuart Martin bases General Manpower, his first novel.

Jonathan Orestes Jones was a puny lad, but he was smart enough to get a job as usher at Roxy's Theatre, and do bodybuilding exercises on the side. Result: he became a Grade-A physical specimen, soon headed his own body-building establishment, General Manpower, Inc. But Orestes ran his racket with a difference: he rented out his customers--as strikebreakers, loggers, steelworkers, etc. These "units" of General Manpower not only drew high wages but owned a share in the business. Worked intensively but never long, they were guaranteed intermediate periods of "reconditioning" at the company's California plant, with hard exercise and easy women.

Orestes Jones kept his real ambitions under his hat until the time struck, contenting himself with filling such small orders as six football linemen for a worthy university, a guaranteed victorious Olympic team for Manchukuo. The big bee in Orestes' bonnet was war, which, he was convinced, "like any other business, could be vastly improved by those planning to engage in it." His first big order was for 500,000 men to mop up a threatened Communist outbreak in the Netherlands East Indies. Unfortunately for Orestes, the job was too easy. His supercharged G. M. units, just nicely warmed up by the exercise, ached for a real workout, and when the fatal suggestion was made, "Let's take San Francisco--," it was the end of Orestes' career.

If some of Author Martin's implications were to be taken seriously, democratic readers might well start after him in a posse. But these implications, like the story itself, are content to be arresting. The book, unlike the idea behind it, has lots of bang but little dynamite. Though General Manpower can justly be accused of ingeniously sketching out an ingenious notion, it will not be convicted of undue seriousness, in any court.

Author Martin, 38, edited hundreds of thousands of words before he wrote his first book. At Princeton, he was Chairman of the Daily Princetonian, became a charter member of the TIME staff before he left college. At various times he has filled nearly every editorial post on TIME, had a hand in FORTUNE, LIFE, MARCH OF TIME (radio and newsreel). A keen golfer, fish erman, huntsman, he once made a hole in one at Stoke Poges. In 1937 he broke the North American record for tuna (821 Ib.) off the Nova Scotian coast in a storm. General Manpower was written shortly afterwards, between ducks and woodcock, on a ten-month sabbatical.

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