Books: Impersonal History

THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1917-1921, Vols. I and II — William Henry Chamberlin—Macmillan ($10).

Sixteen years ago a U. S. newspaperman, John Reed, wrote the first eyewitness account in English of Russia's Bolshevik revolution, in Ten Days that Shook the World. Brief, brisk, emphatically pro-Bolshevik, Reed's account won Lenin's approval, earned its author burial space in Moscow's place of honor in the Red Square, has served as a valuable source book for historians ever since. Last week another U. S. newspaperman, William Henry Chamberlin, for ten years Russian correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, offered the first definitive history of the turbulent period,...