Books: Holand's Crusade

AMERICA: 1355-1364 (272 pp.)—Hjalmar R. Holand—Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($4).

U.S. soil is not so rich as Europe's in buried clues to the great treasure hunt of history, but it has had its moments. In 1827, Joseph Smith told of finding near Palmyra, N.Y., the cache of inscribed golden tablets* later translated into the Book of Mormon. Some years later another Mormon named James Jesse Strang found another cache of engraved tablets (brass this time) in Walworth County, Wis. In 1869 diggers near Cardiff, N.Y. unearthed what was thought to be petrified proof positive of a vanished race of American supermen—until...