PROUD DESTINY (625 pp.) Lion FeuchtwangerViking ($3.50).
This is another novel whose success is as predictable as next year's Democratic majority in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Screen rights to this novel of 18th Century France sold for $350,000 last May; it is the Literary Guild choice for October, and thus sure of sales in the hundreds of thousands. To these rewards, critical acclaim is not likely to be added on the same scale. Proud Destiny resembles War and Peace in the general aim of treating great events (in this case France's part in the American Revolution) in terms of the people who enact...