His Beat the Globe
Levi, Werner
His Beat the Globe Journey to the Beginning, by Edgar Snow. Random House. 434 pp. $5. Reviewed by Werner Levi What happens when a great reporter, whose beat is the globe, goes through his notes...
...For the rest of the globe trotted over by Snow, some of its sections seemed pleasant, most of them not...
...Snow spent most of his professional years in China or thereabouts...
...China's past and culture, and the men in control—on both sides of the fence—made it so...
...He makes it come alive and he reveals its significance for the shaping of a better future...
...Neither traitors nor patriots in the U.S...
...an administration rotten to the core...
...He found Russia dynamic and the Russians human...
...Where Snow engages in a bit of analysis or philosophy, he is stimulating, incisive, and outspoken...
...And Snow knows how to report history...
...There, men lived by ideals and had a vision of a brighter future which enabled them, first, to turn physical defeats into moral victories and, later, to gain the confidence of the people...
...Where he talks about himself, he is inoffensively pleased...
...What he reports is, of course, history today...
...Reviewed by Werner Levi What happens when a great reporter, whose beat is the globe, goes through his notes and thoughts collected over a period of three decades...
...The course of events was inevitable...
...Max, as he called him—Litvi-nov to you and me—appeared almost more pro-Western than pro-Russian...
...Snow shows the scene through individuals he met and incidents he witnessed...
...Had the United States followed some of the suggestions Max made to Ed, and perhaps to the State Department, America might have been better off today—though Snow seems overly optimistic when he thinks that American-Russian differences result from some warped shape in which the two antagonists see each other, which could be straightened out by some "slight adjustments to clear up the view...
...Snow spent some of the late war years in the Soviet Union...
...But he (Gandhi) and Nehru had a few interesting and worthwhile things to say too...
...Sun Yat-sen, F.D.R., Mao Tse-tung, Ibn Saud, Gandhi, Nehru, Stalin et al—reveal nothing strikingly new, though they have retained their fascination...
...They are presumably typical...
...Before 1949, in Kuomintang territory, he saw nothing but cruelty and corruption...
...officials who considered the country a domain to be exploited for their personal benefit...
...Some of the conversations he has had with important persons— Mme...
...As Snow describes it and as historical evidence confirms, there could be no doubt which China would triumph in the end...
...Where he expresses opinion, he backs it up with the facts he saw, and as he saw them...
...But conclusions and evaluations are mostly left to the reader...
...State Department could have altered it...
...When Snow was in India, the reader gains the impression that Gandhi was more impressed with Snow than vice versa...
...A book results which tells us that our world is a vale of tears where hope keeps men going and occasional romance makes life worth while...
...a people beaten down and demoralized by misery and despair...
...By contrast, the Communist areas were inspiring...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
