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before President Kennedys assassination the poor record of the Alliance (thefantastic succession of right wing coups, a flight of North American capital fromLatin America etc) had caused such prominent officials as former presidents AlbertoLleras Camargo and Juscelino Kubitschek to resign. In fact Needler appearsconvinced that the huge continent is convenient pasture for economic colonization,provided sufficient guarantees can be provided by United States Foreign Policy.Nevertheless, Needier makes some interesting comments on aspects of LatinAmerica that are frequently omitted by foreign authors; e.g. the legitimacy vacuum,(pp. 3739), the university students movement a very interesting phenomenon (pp.5963), the army and political violence (pp. 6488); unfortunately Needler fails tomake a clear distinction on this latter topic between real revolutions and mere coupsdtats. The author calls the Cuban revolutionary rgime a single-party dictatorship(pp. 120) and that is all. He also displays an understandable reticence about theUnited States rle in overthrowing the freely elected left wing government ofArbenz in Guatemala in 1954. Alberto Ciria

The Communist Foreign Trade System. F. L. Pryor. Allen & Unwin,293 pp, 40s.

This scholarly and painstaking work on the structures and evolution of the othercommon market shows how far the Comecon countries have to go in order toevolve a common strategy which takes account of the individual interests of eachcountry. Well into the mid-1950s the incompetence of Communist planning re-mained its most striking characteristic. An imprortant point which arises from thework are fears of countries like Rumania that Russian-dominated planning works tokeep under-developed Communist countries as under-developed suppliers of rawmaterials to the more advanced Communist countries in a sort of Soviet tutelageexpressed by a pricing system based on capitalist world prices which notoriouslydisfavour primary producers. One point which is made is that the position of theweaker Communist countries is strengthened to the extent that they manage todiversify their trading relations outside the Comecon area. A basic work for thoseinterested in the economic development and relations of the Communist bloc. T.w.

Corruption in Developing Countries. Ronald Wraith and Edgar Simpkins.Allen & Unwin, 208 pp, 30s.

The authors of this interesting work on a delicate subject are concerned to avoideasy moralizing on the subject of the scarlet thread of bribery and corruption thatruns through the fabric of public life in newly independent States. To do this, thebulk of their work is, in fact, not concerned with contemporary developing nationsbut with one of the earliest developing nationsBritain up to the 1880sin orderto discuss the lessons which British development towards an uncorrupt societyhas for countries like Nigeriato which the other part of their book is devoted.Understandably enough, their recommendations remain at the level of bourgeois

commonsense and within the perspective of British (i.e. capitalist) development. Ina list of cures for corruption at the end of the book, we find, apart from thepassage of time, and the spread of education, the further growth of the professionalclass and the strengthening of elements in the middle class. Apart from the fact thatdemographic pressure makes a slow capitalist solution economically unviable andpolitically impossible, one should point out the very rapid and very radical elimina-tion of corruption in what was one of the most corrupt societies on recordChina.Fixing their eyes on Britain, the authors are incapable of this. They have producedvaluable descriptions of corrupt societies but the scope of their political and socio-logical imagination by no means measures up to Dumonts Afrique Noire est Mal

Partie (reviewed NLR 19) to which it provide a useful (Anglophone) supplement.Students of English history will find it perhaps more useful than will students of

contemporary Third World history. T.w.

Dickens and Crime. Philip Collins. Macmillan, 258 pp, 40s.Dickens and Kafka. Mark Spilka. Dennis Dobson, 308 pp, 45s.

These two books more or less representliterally and metaphoricallytwo con-

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tinents of criticism, linked only by the English language. In their different ways, bothare valuable. Collins documents with extreme thoroughness Dickens attitude aswriter and father towards children and their education. He examines the actual stateof 19th century education and convincingly depicts both the fullness of Dickensinterest and the limitations of his reformist schemes. At the same time, despite thewelcome conjunction of litterary and sociological interest, the book reveals a certainlack of imagination. Spilkas book, by contrast, is an original tour de force. Biographyfor Collins is simply an integral part of his documentation; for Spilka it is an (oftenaudacious) method of critical substantiation. The child is the theme of Collinsresearch; for Spilka too it is the bridge between Kafka and Dickens. But where itremains object for Collins, childhood is seen by Spilka as a dynamic determinant ofboth Dickens and Kafkas vision as novelists. Dickens and Kafka write from thearrested sensibilities of childhood; this at the origin of their preoccupation with thegrotesque (the world is seen by the child from a literally oblique perspective), theirevasion of sexuality and their view (covert or overt) of the differing nature of sin andguilt. Spilkas analysis of Dickens benefits dramatically from being worked in termsof the later, conscious methods of Kafka, and the post-Freudian Kafka only losesmarginally from fitting the Dickensian pattern. Spilka successfully establishesKafkas debt and similarity to Dickens; the only weakness of his statement of thecrucial Kafka themes is his failure to allow that Kafka may present the reader

simultaneously with several possible values for his symbols.

The divergent currents of criticism that these books represent is neatly illustrated intheir respective prefaces. Collins, author of a book on Dickens and Crime, disclaimsany intention of writing an infinite series of books on Dickens and. . . Spilkaunderlines the apparent incongruity of his mutual interpretation. The Englishcritic is nervous of the weight of his documentation, the American of the explosivecharacter of his scheme. . . J.M.

The Car Makers. Graham Turner. Eyre & Spottiswoode, 25s.

This survey covers most aspects of the motor industry: history, organization, em-ployment conditions, Union action, technical advance, place in the world market,expansion plans. Turner is critical of managements for not creating conditions forworkers loyalty and critical of the workers for being materialistic. He is rathernaivefor instance, his worried description of Communist strength at Fords ends:Perhaps widespread lack of interest in religion has something to do with the mildassessment of Communism at Dagenhambut his book contains willy-nilly muchof interest to socialists. Among the points that come out clearly are: 1. The advancedstage of integration between component producers and car manufacturers; 2. Theappalling work conditions on the assembly line (Its just another form of Yogismthey automate your mind as well.) 3. The expansionism of the industry, with all thatentails vis-a-vis the need for overseas markets, the grave danger of over-production,

the likelihood of still further integration. There are many odd snips of information:half the cars sold in Britain go to company fleets and these fleets are disposed ofregularly by large second-hand dealers who disperse them round the country;collaboration is in embryo between car and oil companiesbranded oil is advertisedon filler caps, etc. The Car Makers is exactly the kind of book which ought to bewritten by socialist journalists. We badly need lucid accounts of Britains keyindustries. Meanwhile, socialists would do well to read this book. Henry Lester

Genghis Khan. Ralph Fox Background Books, 10s. 6d.The Builders of the Mogul Empire. Michael Prawdin. Allen & Unwin, 32s.

There is a picture, in Prawdins book, of Babur, the founder of the Mogul dynasty,sprinkling the Mongolian horse-tail standards with Kumiss. He was saluting a pastwhich was still very much with him. Fox describes how the sweep of the Mongolarmies throughout Asia cleared the way for an immense series of revolutions.Mogul rule in India, inaugurated two-and-a-half centuries after Genghis Khan, wasthe last of the series. For, as Fox emphasizes, the Mongol achievements which thedecaying feudalism of the East failed to profit by (and here the Mongols themselvesmust bear the responsibility for their own devastations) . . . gave the impulse to a