Short Notices

THE WHOOPING CRANE by Faith McNulty. 190 pages. Duffon. $4.95.

In a time of Viet Nam, the Red Guards, LSD and a bear market, it may come as some surprise to learn that somebody out there is worried about the whooping crane. Well, somebody has to worry. Nobody cared enough about the great auk and the passenger pigeon, and look what happened to them.

Faith McNulty argues that the whooping crane is well worth the concern. Despite the efforts of conservationists, the tallest (over 4 ft.) and by far the most impressive-looking North American bird is fluttering perilously toward extinction. At the last annual count, there were only 51 of the great birds left on earth (seven are in captivity). That they have survived at all, as Author McNulty shows in this splendidly indignant book, is probably due more to their tenacity than to much publicized efforts to save them. Now the Federal

Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife has placed the whooping crane on its "Rare and Endangered" list and is studying ways of breeding it in captivity. Mrs. McNulty, a freelance writer and the widow of Novelist John McNulty (Third Avenue, New York), avoids polemics but not passion as she examines the history of human indifference and hostility that conspired for so long against the whooping crane. She adds suspense to the story, too, as she traces the efforts of conservationists to locate the big birds' nesting regions in the Canadian far north and provide them with wintering grounds on the Texas Gulf Coast 2,500 miles away. Readable and painstakingly detailed, this is a rare book on a rare bird.

WHEN EIGHT BELLS TOLL by Alistair MacLean. 288 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

When Alistair MacLean temporarily retired from writing three years ago, he settled down to running a couple of restaurant-bars in the south of England. That is probably just what the heroes of MacLean's The Guns of Navarone and H.M.S. Ulysses would have done. They were tightlipped, quietly efficient men who were repelled by heroics, and obviously wanted nothing more than peace and quiet after their hazardous call to duty ended. In this book, however, MacLean has smashed the mold. Secret Agent Philip Calvert, his new hero, must have got his basic training by watching James Bond movies. Calvert is simply too incredibly dumb to be taken seriously. Assigned to track down pirates in the Irish Sea, Calvert stumbles on the gang right away. But instead of sensibly going for help, he hangs around long enough to be shot down in a helicopter, and endures so many beatings, near stranglings and near drownings that the reader loses count as well as interest.

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