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Perhaps because he is an unpolished writer, Engineer Walter Arnold Rukeyser is bluntly convincing. He wrings the reader's heart by telling how the hearts of himself and wife were wrung when the merciless Gay-pay-oo (Soviet Secret Service) would seize and carry off, perhaps to Death, some Russian engineer with whom Mr. Rukeyser had worked. Relating how he had to point out the honest mistakes of one such Russian engineer to a Soviet technical authority, Engineer Rukeyser writes: "I felt as though I had killed a man."
Soon the Gay-pay-oo did make off with this man and "I never saw him again." But Engineer Rukeyser bluntly concludes that to force a people like the Russians into Industrialization such methods are necessary, adds that for a Russian to be arrested by the Gay-pay-oo does not mean either death or molestation in most cases, always means a heart-straining scare.
*Still best is William Henry Chamberlin's Soviet Russia (Little, Brown, $3.50), completely revised and brought up to date, so that it is again a new book.
*RUSSIA—MY HOME—Mme. Pierre Ponafidine—Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50)
†UPHEAVAL—Olga Worninoff—Putnam ($3).
*The Manhattan telephone directory contains nine Romanoffs and two Romanovs, one of these being listed as "Marie Grand Duchess 14 Sutton pl S. ELdorado 5-6273." (See p. 24.)
†Covici-Friede ($3).