Quick Skim

BEHIND THE CURTAIN (363 pp.)--John Gunther--Harper ($3).

John Gunther's ambitious Inside reports (Europe, Asia, Latin America, the U.S.) made lively reading for two reasons: 1) Gunther was driven by an insatiable hunger for facts and impressions; 2) his style was as breezy as a tabloid newspaper's, as terse as a telegram. A hardly avoidable consequence of this hop-skip-and-fly journalism was that Reporter Gunther frequently fell into glibness and superficiality. When he might have been mulling over the information he had just collected, he was already on the run to collect more.

In Behind the Curtain, the faults of the Gunther system are more noticeable than the virtues. Written after a six-month trip through Eastern Europe, Behind the Curtain says little of. importance about its fascinating subject that newspaper and magazine readers are not likely to know. It has less insight into national behavior and outlook than the Inside books, and few ideas not readily found in the U.S. left-of-center press.

At times, the old sharp-eyed Gunther breaks through the over-chewed, juiceless summaries of East European history with which Behind the Curtain is stuffed. But in the end, Behind the Curtain adds up to little more than a recapitulation of recent journalism on Eastern Europe.

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