Books: Hammer, Sickle & Cross

THE NINETY AND NINE (343 pp.)—Imre Kovács—Funk & Wagnal/s ($3.75).

This novel burns a hole in the Iron Curtain with a moral blowtorch. A white-hot account of the Red tyranny in Hungary, The Ninety and Nine is fired less by skilled prose than searing passion, less by action than ideas. Hungarian-born Author Kovács, a World War II underground fighter and onetime secretary-general of Hungary's National Peasant Party, now works for the Free Europe Committee in New York. Lacking the theoretical brilliance of a Koestler, he nonetheless brings to his grade B Darkness at Noon a fingertip knowledge of the Communist mind...