Books: Wild Quaker Oats

KRISHNA FLUTING (266 pp.)—John Berry—Macmillon ($3.95).

Lady Edith is feeling rather pipped, or she would shoot the python herself. From the reports of the villagers, it is a great, ropy beast—and it will creep forth to kill again after it recovers from a two-week digestive coma brought on by swallowing Lady Edith's cook. So Lady Edith, who runs an orphanage near Bihar, India, delegates the job of python stalking to a half-Indian, half-American Quaker youth named Peter Bruff. Though courageous, Peter is an abstracted, mystical young man. He is also a poet, and his work, a heroic poem about the god Krishna,...