Books: High Jinks in Hell

TRIUMPH (277 pp.)—Philip Wylie—Doubleday ($4.50).

Polemicist Philip Wylie has found a subject more forbidding than Mom. It is the possibility of human extinction by nuclear warfare. Triumph is his second novel dedicated to his new cause. In Tomorrow (TIME, Jan. 18, 1954) 20 million Americans were wiped out. Thanks to the progress of science since then, the survivors in Triumph are just twelve men and women and two children (aged 9 and 12) out of the whole U.S. population. Europe, Russia and China are extinct, and only the Southern Hemisphere survives. Offshore cobalt time...