Reporter's Return

NOT PEACE BUT A SWORD--Vincent Sheean--Doubleday, Doran ($2.75).

A sound reporter keeps his private opinions out of his copy. James Vincent Sheean was once such a reporter. In Personal History he chronicled the stages by which he went on to become a crack foreign correspondent, began to take sides violently, learned that he was "no longer a newspaper man." But Ex-Reporter Sheean made an even better living by writing slick-paper magazine stories, historical novels with up-to-date political implications, touring the U. S. lecture circuit. Last year he turned to personalized history again. Not Peace but a Sword, his firsthand account of that disastrous twelvemonth for the democracies, March 1938-March 1939, shows that he is as brilliant, as partisan a reporter as ever.

Reporter Sheean begins with a bus ride through London which set him musing on England's insularity. "In such a state," he concludes, "what preoccupations can there be other than the desire to make money, and more money, and to keep it . . . with no thought for the world that crowds steadily in upon this would-be tight little island." He was in Spain when Franco drove to the Mediterranean in April 1938, when Barcelona fell. He visited Austria during the savage Jew-baiting that followed the Anschluss, attended the Evian Conference and pours scorn on it: "To the best of my knowledge and belief, no Jew who has escaped from the hell of life in Germany owes anything whatsoever to this meeting. . . ."

Sheean spent September in Czechoslovakia waiting for the war which never came. Instead came "the series of blunders by which the democratic powers surrendered the domination of Europe to Fascism . . . and condemned Europe and the world to a certainty, as I believe, of general war."

In his bitter epilogue he blames the "diplomatists and prime ministers, dignitaries and dictators," declares: "Upon the will and instinct of the proletariat reposes such hope as we are justified in retaining for the future progress of humanity."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.