The author of No Mean City (Non-fiction) has tapped the same vein of intimate knowledge of New York that is neither guide, travel nor history. But this time he make a lame attempt to incorporate it in a novel, an unbelievably bad novel written with commendable purpose. Two delegates to the UN arrive from Hyperia (somewhere off the earth it seems) and are avid to observe all in New York. A thorough tour of the city leaves no historic spot unvisited, with loving attention to detail of traffic lights, street and subway-stops, interspersed with intellectual discussions of most current and political and economic questions among a cab driver, a newspaperman, and the two Hyperians (one representing totalitarian ideas, the other having democratic leanings). The reader is wafted along- at a snail's pace- towards the happy conclusion that after all he's not insane. It's only a cab driver's nightmare.