Books: The Crooked Paradise

THE OPERATORS (284 pp.)—Frank Gibney—Harper ($3.95).

Critics of American civilization, like most specialists, tend to be narrow in their diagnoses of what ails the U.S. David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd worries about other-directedness and herd instinct. William H. Whyte in The Organization Man examines the loss of individuality caused by modern corporate life. Vance Packard in The Status Seekers sees the trouble in a craving for the symbols of importance. Frank Gibney, a journalistic G.P., has a simpler, more sweeping and engagingly old-fashioned diagnosis: the whole place is getting to be crooked, just plain crooked.

Diagnostician Gibney, a LIFE staff writer and...