Books: Prophet, Card, Born Writer

H. G. WELLS: PROPHET OF OUR DAY (338 pp.)—Antonina Vallentin—John Day ($4).

When the atom bomb landed on Allied headquarters in Paris, the boiling waters of the Seine surged into the streets of the stricken city. There appeared to be "nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound ... A great ball, of crimson-purple fire, like a maddening living thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of falling masonry that seemed to be ... burrowing into [the earth] like a blazing rabbit. . .'

The late Herbert George Wells wrote this...