URTAIN OF IGNORANCE

Somebody's wrong!"" is going to be the reaction of every American who reads this book. Mr. Greene, whose Awakened China was controversial enough, is here writing about that country again, but his real subject is the fourth estate. If he is only partially correct in the case he presents, our journalistic pundits have a great deal to answer for. Informed by his own eyewitness evidence and copiously quoting from European and Canadian news sources, Mr. Greene asserts that every important opinion held in the U.S. regarding Communist China is erroneous--as, for instance: China does not want war and actually spends less than 10% of her budget on the military as opposed to our more than 50%; the Chinese are poor but not starving; the communes work, and were a force in seeing them through a period of bad harvests; the family is not being destroyed in the process; China is not a poor credit risk on the international market, rather she pays cash on the barrelhead and is building up a favorable balance of trade. Mr. Greene reviews how we came by our present beliefs as well, in a volume which deserves to be met squarely, point by point, and not passed over in frosty silence like the faux pas at the dinner table.