CRIPPS Advocate Extraordinary

This is an excellent biography, colored -- one must recognize -- by warm personal loyalty and affection for the man she feels is equally with Churchill, Britain's man of the hour, the man to whom the common people are looking to bear their standard in a war for a different world. She shows Cripps not as a crisis politician hurled from obscurity to high office by the exigencies of war, but a man who has a tradition of service to his country, who approaches social progress from a moral standard, and who has in turn been scientist, advocate, politician, diplomat -- and today symbolizes the active will of the people of Britain to practical realization of the Four Freedoms. Home will find the meticulous analysis of his position in various law cases, political fr, Labour Party divisions and so on too detailed. But throughout you sense a strengthening of the convictions, the tolerances, the abilities that mark him as a liberal of the finest type, clear visioned, world minded. The record ends with the failure of his Indian Mission, and a discussion of the reasons, rooted not in Britain's none-too-felicitious past, but in her present intentions and future assurances. Solid reading, but enlightening. The inclusion of important documents in the appendix gives the book reference value.