Zero Hour
$1.00 By , , , , , FARRAR & RINEHART
DESCRIBED as a ‘summons to the free,’ this is a composite work of six authors who agree on the proposition that the present world crisis demands from America the maximum in moral and material preparedness. Of most enduring value is Erika Mann’s story, at once simple and vivid and moving, of what happened to a group of German radicals and liberals who, for various reasons, believed that there was no need to put up a hard fight against the Nazis in the last years of the Weimar Republic. One is in exile, one was tortured to death, one committed suicide, and two have gone over to the Nazis. An argument couched in terms of such intimate personal drama is naturally more gripping than the more abstract considerations of the other contributors. McGeorge Bundy presents the forceful yet temperate and discriminating reaction of a college student against the spiritual and intellectual nihilism of much of the teaching during the last decades. And Walter Millis tells of his personal evolution from the implied isolationism of Road to War to his present attitude, which he sums up in the phrase: ‘If war can only be fought by making war upon it, then I am prepared to make war upon it.’