Books: Track of the Grail

LEAD, KINDLY LIGHT (374 pp.)—Vincent Sheean—Random House ($3.75).

Vincent Sheean, veteran foreign correspondent, sat in Vermont in the summer of 1947 and pored over Marx, Freud and Einstein with the earnestness of a junior getting up a term paper. His purpose, says Sheean, was to arrive at a formula that would explain away the appearance of God or destiny that had forced itself on his attention in human affairs. After "very bitter suffering," he arrived at this: "The concatenation of the circumstances sometimes, or even quite often, becomes snarled in a way which produces indications of pattern in the incidence of the...