Books: Above Pain or Fear

HEROIC HEART—THE DIARY & LETTERS OF KIM MALTHE-BRUUN (177 pp.)—Random House ($3).

This eloquent book bears a Danish boy's precocious witness to the hard scriptural paradox that he who loses his life shall find it. Seventeen and in love, Kim knocks around the Baltic as an apprentice on a three-masted schooner, fighting for peace within, while World War II rages around him. Soon this unschooled lad, who can write so tenderly to his sweetheart ("May you sleep as sweetly as a water lily on a pond"), is looking into the hearts of others—the cough-racked...