Books: Half-Baked Hero

THE EARTH IS OURS—Whelm Moberg —Simon & Schuster ($2.75).

Last week Swedish Novelist Vilhelm Moberg published a novel that was written with great earnestness, a restrained love of the Swedish countryside, an earthy knowledge of peasant types. In sheer acreage (687 pages) The Earth Is Ours outbulked Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil (406 pages). But Growth of the Soil told an ageless legend of a land-loving peasant's conquest of and by the soil. The Earth Is Ours tells the story of a book-loving peasant's efforts to reshape his native countryside along the lines...