THE LIBERATED ZONE

Mr. John Pairman Brown's ""Liberated zone"" is not a place. It is people: the men and women who liberate themselves from the ""occupied zone"" of war, violence, injustice, ghettos, foreign adventures. The book defines this occupied zone in political, historical, social and biological terms, and proposes the expected means of liberation: union of the churches, social reform, and environmental restoration. The trouble with all this is that it has been said so many times before, and said so well, that Mr. Brown hardly appears to the reader as the grand eveille which pervades the book, he considers himself to be. One can hardly contest his premises -- that the world is surely going to hell in a handbasket; or his conclusion -- that something drastic must be done immediately. But a rational liberalism will require the reader to rebel at Mr. Brown's apparent conviction that everyone who is not blessed with ""liberal"" views is either insane, or criminal, or benighted, or all three.