EVE CURIE'S FRUITLESS JOURNEY

...When she meets Nehru, she herself remarks: "When he and I mentioned 'the War' we simply did not mean the same thing...

...The trouble with Willkie is that he is politically too immature to realize that the world's ills, and the causes of war, cannot be cured in any simple fashion...

...In India she stayed in the home of both Wavell and Nehru and even in Russia she was treated, as one irritated American correspondent remarked, like a Crown Princess, for she was afforded all 'the facilities, amenities, and privileges denied to those without famous names...

...Reviewed by Freda Utley RARELY has a young woman made so little of such great opportunities as Eve Curie...

...men and women of all shades of political opinion were glad to receive her and she was given unique opportunities to see and hear and observe in Africa and India, in the Near East and the Far East and even in Russia...

...To her, the war is simply a war to crush Germany and incidentally Japan, while to Nehru it is a war against fascism and imperialism...

...Thanks to being the daughter of a famous mother all doors in all countries were open to her...

...Of course Willkie's naivete could be only a clever blind for belief in American imperialism, but in any case he does realize that not everything wrong with the world stems from Berlin and Tokyo...

...To him the sufferings of the non-white Chinese are at least as real as those of Europeans and he has no superior nation or superior race complex...

...Her reactions to both the heroism and the bestiality of war, to death and wounds, starvation, cold, agony, and destruction are melodramatic or shallow, so that the reader is rarely if ever moved by pity or fear...

...She may irritate or anger those who have experienced the filth and weariness and horror of war, or whose sons and husbands are in it, but it apparently suits the mood of the many who are not personally involved, who want to believe that war is glorious without being troubled by doubts or disturbed by terror, and who like to have the conflict represented as a simple issue of Right against Wrong...

...It had never occurred to her that Russians could not buy necessary articles of clothing...

...Eve Curie's attitude toward the war is as simple and as narrow as that of Gen...

...While living in one of the best hotels in Moscow reserved for high ranking officials and officers she kids herself that she is suffering the same privations as the "Russian people...

...Proudly she claims that France in contrast to Germany long ago "lost the desire to expand in Europe," as if expansion outside of Europe were not aggression...

...After journeying so long among so many warriors, the author has no message to give the world save hatred of the enemy and admonitions "never to forgive...

...According to her all we need to do is ecraser I'infame in the shape of Germany...

...She writes well and since she went to so many places and talked to so many people her book is interesting and easy to read...

...We never met...

...And yet she seems to have learned little of value to an understanding of the problems of our time...

...In her case it is the fate of France which is of paramount importance...

...At the end of her long talk with Gandhi it is possible to hope that Eve Curie had a momentary realization that patriotism is not enough, for she writes: "I felt as if he and I were moving on different floors of the same house, he on the top floor and I on the ground floor...

...After describing the heroism of the Russian people, their endurance and their privations, she is astonished to find that she cannot go out in Moscow and purchase the felt boots and the wool which she felt she needed in addition to the six pairs of woolen socks she had brought with her...

...Willkie may have been an "Innocent Abroad" but at least he was not blinded by national and racial prejudices...

...But there is a movie quality about it...

...Such ideas have never even occurred to Eve Curie who, when she sees Nazi corpses in the Russian snow merely remarks: "Why did you come to die so far from your homes that nobody threatened...

...Compared with Eve Curie even Wendell Willkie's One World is enlightened and broad-minded...

...All through her book she implicitly assumes that colonial wars and the forcible occupation of Asiatic countries is within the natural order of things, and the holding of subject empires outside Europe by Britain and France legitimate...

...Willkie perceives that freedom in the world entails "the orderly but scheduled abolition of the colonial system," and he is aware of the fact that the reestablishment of the status quo cannot produce security...

...Nowhere will the reader find evidence of the understanding and imagination which makes the sufferings of others real, or be awakened to "the giant agony of the world...

...She is too much of a national egotist, at once too sentimental and too cold, and above all too completely unaware of the problems which victory alone cannot solve for her book to have much more than the passing value of a newspaper report.' One cannot avoid the conclusion that the popularity of this book, in so far as it is not due simply to the world's hunger for news, is to be explained in part at least by the author's superficiality and complacency...

...There was no staircase I could find to join him...

...Eve Curie, however, does not see that there is any problem...

...Even Gandhi's patience was clearly tried to the limit by Eve Curie's narrowly nationalist outlook, by her ignorance of history and lack of any understanding of fundamental political and philosophical problems...

...Sikorski whom she quotes as saying: "Only one thing matters, the victory which will liberate Poland...