Books: Sure Fire

MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY—Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Iron men and wooden ships—the cat-o'-nine-taiis—South Sea paradise—mutiny— shipwreck—open boats—a trial for piracy, with perjury and missing witnesses—unjust sentence—happy ending—these are the time-honored ingredients of Authors Nordhoff & Hall's surefire seafaring tale.

Founded on fact. Mutiny on the Bounty, though fictionalized and given a narrator-hero, still reads like an actual account.

On Dec. 23, 1787, H. M. S. Bounty, left England for Tahiti. She never came back.

The tale of what happened to her is told by one of her midshipmen. Roger...