I HAD TO KNOW

An intensely interesting record of a spiritual pilgrimage which ended in the Roman Catholic church. Miss Baker, herself a journalist with a reputation for ""scoop"" interviews tells her own story as though it, too, were a feature piece with a by-line, high-spotting the personal adventure of the spirit with some of her sensational interviews with such inaccessible people as Mussolini and Ataturk. In her wanderings around the world she went far from the Episcopal faith in which she had been reared to various cults and philosophies. Neither they nor her husband's Congregationalism supplied the answer she sought. A mysterious illness which left her a cripple intensified her sense of need, and she turned to Catholicism under the guidance of Msgr. Sheen. As a human interest story it is absorbingly interesting, for she traces the course of instruction, records many conversations with Sheen, and conveys in word pictures the impact of this forceful personality on her questing spirit. Non-Catholics with a sounder basis of knowledge and judgment will find some faulty reasoning and questionable statements. The author reveals herself as having deserted not the faith of Protestantism but a pagan philosophy of a secularized world. Read as a human document, however, it is appealing for both Catholics and Protestants.