A VERY STRANGE SOCIETY.""

Novelist Drury, in this violent and provocative book, returns to an earlier phase of his career when he was a Journalist on political matters, including a stint for the New York Times. Merging his old traits with his newly developed talents, the author has fashioned a novelesque-journalistic inquiry into the achievements and failures of the civilization being wrought in the Republic of South Africa. Drury combines interviews, newspaper stories, government edicts, and statistical snippets into a pastiche that is meant to grab the ultimate ethos of a nation that is at once so rich and so beset by singular problems. Utilizing a pro and con format, Drury presents a rather convincing case why a minority of whites should be in a position to totally dominate and manipulate a vastly larger non-white population. Although he scores Afrikaan provincialism, police-state methods, and obduracy, it is done in a manner that suggests redemption will come from the purging of traits rather than ideology. In a sense, this book derives its lethality from what it most certainly isn't--crackpot and extremist. On the other hand, it most certainly fails as a dispassionate and objective handling of the South African dilemma.