21 Stayed
by , Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, $3.50.
Mrs. Pasley, an able newspaper reporter, has dug up the life stories of the twenty-one American GIS captured during the Korean War who elected to stay behind the Iron Curtain. Her findings, as might have been expected, show broken homes, poverty, inadequate education, a sense of rejection by fathers or stepfathers, a sense of social inferiority — in most cases, several of these ills combined. The most important lesson which this book points up is that the armed services must teach their men a lot more about the nature of Communism; must see that they know all about, and are fortified against, Communist “brainwashing.” Twenty of the renegades knew little more about Communism than that it was a bad word, and twenty of them had no idea of what they were fighting for in Korea.