Books: Discovery of India

AMBASSADOR'S REPORT (415 pp.) —Chester Bowles—Harper ($4).

When Fair Dealer Chester Bowles, onetime ad-agency tycoon, onetime OPA administrator and ex-governor of Connecticut, asked Harry Truman for the ambassadorship to India, he let himself in for some unexpected complications. Spending their first night on Indian soil, Bowles, his wife and their three younger children huddled together in one room of Bombay's Taj Mahal Hotel, awed and made uncomfortable by the five barn-sized rooms of the viceroy suite, in which their attendants had distributed them. Bowles faced his first formal call on President Rajendra

Prasad with his cutaway and striped pants still in transit from...