The Atlantic Bookshelf: A Guide to Good Books

THE new novel by Pearl S. Buck comes to us at a time when our regard for Her writing has been sharpened by the award of the Nobel Prize. In The Patriot Mrs. Buck returns to the style and substance of her early work; the austerity one felt in her American portraits is gone. Once again China is her theme. Not China of The Good Earth, but China of the revolution, and beset by Japan. In her novel she has done what probably no other American writer could do: with firm and sympathetic knowledge and without bitterness she has illuminated those differences which seem to-day so fundamental between China and Japan, but which, so runs her implication, may be forgotten in a future peace.