Books: Bloody Ballet

DRAGON SEED—Pearl S. Buck—John Day ($2.50).

Pearl Buck's new novel is the strongest and most instructive story yet written of China at war. As literature, it edges the first-rate. As discreet and powerful propaganda, it makes tangible the living, the suffering and the bravery of a great and obscure people under four years of hermetic tyranny, in a defeat which refused to stay put.

Ling Tan, his wife Ling Sao, their three sons, their daughters, the wives and children of their sons were one of those timeless, slightly-too-noble peasant families to whose portrayal Mrs. Buck...