Books: Pompless Circumstance

ILL WIND — James Hilton — Morrow ($2.50).

Though not a popular theory nowadays, it is still held by some that, in Orator Edmund Burke's words: "A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature." That is the thesis of Author Hilton's circumstantial Ill Wind: without ever obtruding himself or appearing to state a case, he makes it brilliantly clear how far a single action can fling its consequences.

Charles Gathergood, British Agent in the Malaysian island of Cuava, in...

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