ANVIL OF THE GODS

One would think that this book's message has long been accepted by pilots, but author McClement apparently thinks otherwise. He has assembled a study of airline disasters that he believes were all caused by storm turbulence and the foolishness of pilots who entered these ""anvils of the gods."" If men who risk their lives in the sky don't know this already, how will this book change their minds? One doesn't wish to accuse the author of meretriciousness and the capitalizing on sensational crashes, but on the other hand the author approaches each crash with a sort of Cheshire cat smile of interior knowledge and sense of inevitability. But there is no denying the hair-raising immediacy as he describes bouts with storms, with planes disintegrating in mid-air. air-raising, indeed, are the quotations from passengers who lived through a passage through a thunderhead, with the plane entirely out of control, the steering gear useless, the plane flipflopping and twirling hundreds of miles off course. (""Now we were enveloped in lightning...We were completely surrounded by blinding flashes..."") It's like news from the Beyond.