Books: Promethean Playboy

JOHN REED—Granville Hicks—Macmillan ($3.50).

Communists do not believe in heaven but they have their saints. John Reed, dead at 33, buried by the Kremlin wall close to the tomb of Russia's god, is already canonized. To such Harvard classmates as Red-fearing Hamilton Fish Jr., Reed was a traitor to his class. But even within the revolutionary sect his sainthood is not unanimously acknowledged. Upton Sinclair called him "the playboy of the social revolution." To sympathetic Biographer Granville Hicks. Reed's life is an ennobling example of how revolutionaries are made. Unbiased readers of John...

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