Books: LILO

THE NAKED GOD (197 pp.)—Howard Fast—Praeger ($3.50).

Howard Fast is very slow off the Marx. When he joined the Communist Party in 1943, the world had already been treated to the Moscow purge trials and the Nazi-Soviet pact, and in his successful novels (Citizen Tom Paine, The Unvanquished) he had already tried to hoist the Red flag retroactively over the American Revolution. He "saw the Communists as the bravest and most skillful fighters for man's freedom." Now he says, "I was mistaken," but it took him nearly 14 years—until Khrushchev's mid-1956 "secret report" of Stalin's "paranoiac blood lust"—to realize his mistake. His...