MR. SHEEAN has written one of the most important books in post-war journalism. Commencing with remarkably incisive comments on his career in Chicago University, and concluding with his flight from Russia and Communism, he holds his reader fascinated; treating him the while to a display of such intellectual honesty as does one's soul good in these jingoistic, nationalistic, patriotic days.

More through circumstance than anything else, Mr. Sheean early acquired a reputation as a dare-devil newshawk, in the best Floyd Gibbons manner. He was in Morocco during the uprisings of the 1920's, and managed several times to slip through the frontier between the French and the native troops. He had escapades in Spain which gave him an insight into the Rivera revolution. While a correspondent in Paris, he observed Poincare at close range; the only mental conception he retained was one of contempt. He was in Geneva when the ill-fated Protocol was introduced; his cynicism regarding the League of Nations does him less credit than the remainder of his opinions.

Most significant of all Mr. Sheean's descriptions and comments are those on the Kuomintang, and the attempted Communist Revolutions in China between 1927 and 1930. The figure of Borodin looms large as the greatest man, to Sheean's mind, in the whole decade, Lenin excepted. Then there are Mme. Sun-Yat-Sen, widow of the Chinese hero, Eugene Chen, and the fiery, red-haired Rayna Prohme, all of whom Sheean knew with varying degrees of intimacy. Their failure to put through the revolution Sheean ascribes to the strength of foreign imperialism, British and American in particular.

"Personal History" should be read by anyone desiring an objective picture of the post-war decade, with its cant, its hypocrisy, its lack of any workable standard, its deification of Mammon, and its half-hearted efforts to achieve peace. The picture is doubly effective when drawn with Mr. Sheean's clarity, and thrown into bold relief by his painstaking and often courageous search for truth.

Throughout, Mr. Sheean is in search of some means of solving the ago-old problem of the relation of the one to the many, of the individual to society. He tries in vain to find a hitching post to which he can hook his personality beyond all danger of becoming loosened. The reader, reflecting on the author's self-contempt at being unable to espouse and realizes what Mr. Sheean could not that, as shown in "Personal History." Communism is in the last analysis but another extreme, another Utopia. One leaves Mr. Sheean convinced of the significance in the fact that so honest a man, striving as he did to achieve Boredin's "long view," turned away from Russia when forced to choose between it and the western civilization of his birth.