Books: Realism Without Obscenity

THE CAINE MUTINY (494 pp.)—Herman Wouk—Doubleday ($3.95).

Lieut. Commander Philip Queeg of the U.S.S. Caine, a four-piper destroyer converted to minesweeping, was a phony and misfit skipper. A pallid little man turning to fat, one of the low men in his Annapolis class, he could handle neither his ship, his officers nor his men. He was a martinet, a liar, a petty tyrant, and, when the chips were down in combat, a coward. On escort duty in the Pacific, all this became painfully obvious, even to a raw ensign like Willie Keith. When a typhoon hit the fleet in the Philippine Sea...