A STRICKEN FIELD

Miss Gelihorn is first of all an excellent reporter, with her emotions tuned to the message of suffering and tragedy. She showed this in The Trouble I've Seen. She transfers her attention this time to the Agonies of Czechoslovakia, and gives us ""a moving"" semi-fictionized picture of the annexation and the human by-products of that catastrophe. Her facts are thinly veiled in a fictional story of a young woman journalist in Prague, 1938, but it is not her story so much as the story of the innocents of all ages and creeds learning the painful profession of escape and exile. It is also a succession of pictures of the life of these refugees, in their hideouts, on the streets, under the shadow of the Nazis. A harrowing book, given undeniable intensity by a hard, fast impassioned style. Not for the thin-skinned.