AMERICA CHALLENGED

By the time this stimulating book is published Justice Douglas will have delivered the two Walter E. Edge Lectures at Princeton of which this is the text. It is not a book to comfort the average citizen, but rather to alert him to the dangers confronting us in our apathy and false sense of security. He charges Americans with a dangerous trend toward conformity, an unwillingness to accept leadership in a fight against hunger and substandard conditions in underprivileged parts of the world, a tendency to think that democracy can be sold- American plan by industrialization rather than studying human needs. The two sections are subtitled:- The Individual and the Crowd and The Nation and the World. In the second half he poses the problem of Red China as our major threat, and questions our unrealistic, ostrich-like attitude towards its very existence. The answer he finds in joint private and governmental efforts, in recognition of the fact that Soviet Russia is providing a practical answer closer to the needs and understanding of the uncommitted world than America. There is already interest in the fact that Justice Douglas is giving these lectures, and curiosity as to what he will say.