JOURNEY FROM THE EAST Mark J. Gayn Knopf ($3.75).
One of Mark Gayn's earliest memories is of a file of Chinese soldiers marching past his father's house in Manchuria. Civilians marching with them carried long poles from which swung a row of decapitated heads. Gayn also remembers (when he was seven) huddling with his mother on the floor while Chinese bandits' bullets whistled through the windows.
Author Gayn's father was a Russian lumberman. Most of Gayn's childhood was spent at sawmill settlements, mostly on the Manchuria-Mongolia border. Some of his closest...