THE OWL OF MINERVA (375 pp.)Gustav ReglerFarrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5).
If Gustav Regler's autobiography reads as if it were ghostwritten, it is probably because it was written by a ghost. The ghost is Regler himself, in his time a noisy political poltergeist. With a good man's dedication to his delusions, he played a man's part in inhuman situations throughout three dreadful decades.
Like a German Malraux, but endowed with less literary talent and less luck, he touched all wars, all revolutions, all causes; born a Roman Catholic in 1897, he was by turns...