THE ROAD TO HUDDERSFIELD: A Journey to Five Continents

ook about the World Bank may seem like an unlikely choice for the Book-of-the-Month Club's mid-summer selection, but it was an inspired one. The major idea behind the World Bank is brought down to comprehensible proportions by the author's continuous analogy of the industrialization of modern nations to the example of uddersfield where bewildered and exploited workers once smashed the machinery that replaced their handcraft economy. Capitalism can work best when it is well understood and new nations, as well as the reawakening old ones, are examined here at two levels: their industrialization projects and their rate of adjustment to the changes brought by the infusion of World Bank loans. The countries Mr. Morris visited-- Ethiopia, Columbia, Southern Italy, Siam and India-- are put into context in brief outskillful word pictures that demonstrate the socio-economic gait of each. Although this ""bank biography"" was authorized, it is not especially laudatory-- the impressions reported are often as caustic as they are admiring. The short history of the bank in terms of dates and places is covered as is Eugene Black, its first resident. This is good journalistic writing at its best for the book is neither balance sheet nor a financial fever chart but a long and careful look at ideas, oney and people.