THE GREAT TRADITION

Frances Parkinson Keyes has a strong rental audience, and this should be her biggest book to date, taking in its stride the America, Germany, and Spain of the past twelve years. The central figure is the half-American descendant of East Prussian high nobility, who returns to the ancestral estate after an American upbringing. There all is decadent, reflecting the disaster post-war years brought Germany, and after some years over there, the boy turns to the Nazi movement, taken in by the catchwords of fraternity and regeneration he feels his country needs. When on leave from Nazi organizing, he meets a Spanish girl, Christina, marries her, and brings her back to the brutality of Fascist Germany which breaks her. She escapes back to Spain when Hansel in turn becomes the butt of Hitler's ruthless system and is put in a concentration camp. He is freed, only to find his wife killed in one of the massacres of the Spanish war. A long book, but never tedious, filled with present-day issues and implications and making accessible to everyone the motives behind the news. It should rent and sell.