Short Notices

THE TRIUMPH by John Kenneth Galbraith. 239 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

Economics, diplomacy, statecraft, teaching, autobiography, satire and book reviewing are areas on which John Kenneth Galbraith has imposed his imperious rationality (TIME cover, Feb. 16). The Triumph, his first novel, is one of his less successful impositions. Strictly speaking, it is not a novel at all; it is an awkward attempt to put a fictional frame around a critique of U.S. foreign policy, which Galbraith feels is based on an indiscriminate fear of Communism. His characters are hardly more than clothespins colored to represent bureaucratic types. His locale is Puerto Santos, a banana republic where a moderate liberal ousts an overripe dictator. This causes a Washington minicrisis, which Galbraith examines in intimate and knowing detail.

Galbraith's humor usually registers somewhat below Swiftian satire, as when he writes that the Air Force's contingency plans for Puerto Santos calls for bombing "with maximum emphasis on winning the hearts and minds of the people." Much of the novel bears this slightly self-satisfied straining for effect. As a glimpse of Foggy Bottom, The Triumph has its uses; but its tone begins to grate under the suspicion that the author is enjoying himself more than his performance justifies.

THE JOHNSTOWN FLOOD by David G. McCullough. 302 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

In just ten minutes, on May 31, 1889, a busy mountain-valley Pennsylvania steel town was wiped out, with 2,209 dead. A soaking rain had begun to fall a day earlier, turning the Little Conemaugh River into a spillway. Flooded streets were commonplace in Johnstown, but the big worry was a huge earth dam, 15 miles away, that held back Lake Conemaugh and its 20 million tons of water. Both lake and dam belonged to a club where Pittsburgh's most powerful families "roughed it." The dam was in bad shape; every time there was a hard rain, some local wag was sure to say: 'Well, this is the day the old dam is going to break." And break it finally did, unleashing a wall of water at times 70 feet high. Within an hour, there was nothing left of Johnstown except a mountain of debris and a handful of scattered houses. It took five years to rebuild the town, and corpses were found as long as seven years afterward. This 500k is a meticulously researched, vivid account of one of the most stunning disasters in U.S. history.

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