NO SECRET IS SAFE

An account of life in China under Communist rule by the author of Chungking Listening Post (1945 -- Creative Age) told in a quiet matter-of-fact way that serves to deepen the authority of the telling. The Maryknoll priest describes his own experiences at the hands of the Communists from 1949 to 1951, of his house confinement, his imprisonment on trumped charges, his release and final exile to Hongkong and freedom. Here is the entirely credible and entirely horrible working of a police state, which seeks to indoctrinate, by ""brainwashing"" and propaganda, to liquidate landowners and intellectuals, to tax the masses unbearably in order to feed the burgeoning swarm of government workers necessary to the universal spying and sentencing. The breaking of the spirit of a great people through mental torture and thought control seems to work at least temporarily- the author feels with other missionaries that no true countermovement has evolved though the people fearfully whisper about their oppression. A must for all Americans as a description of what the forces of freedom must fight against and of the dread result if those forces fail. A personal parallel to the previous 1951 book by Edward Hunter, Brain Washing in Red China, deserving serious attention.