The Black and White Book, by Sydney Cook and Garth Lean. ( Biandford. Paperback, 20p) 1\TOT long ago a priest who is also a schoolmaster came on supply to my parish church and lost his cool in the pulpit over that notorious "Little Red School Book." Most of the congregation. I imagine, were amused to hear him indulge himself in this way, but he completely missed the point that, given its premises, the Little Red Book is really quite a sensible document.
If life has no meaning
beyond that which humanists can extract from their complacent view of the nature of man. it would seem reasonable enough to challenge some of the traditional authority of parents and teachers and
demand that there should be "one or several contraceptive machines in every school."
The Black and White Book, produced in the same format as the Red one, is intended as Moral Rearmament's antidote to it. This too, is a sensible document in many ways, but it does not quite carry enough guns to meet the challenge.
MRA's well known assumption is that "people can be changed," and its well known technique is to prove this from innumerable glib examples taken from all walks of life. But a child seduced by the Red book is unlikely to want to be "changed" except as part of a deeply religious experience. He might find The Black and White Book helpful, but only if he had studied the Catechism first. Douglas Brown
Too many facts, not enough thought
The Patriotic Traitors by David Littlejohn (Wm. Heinemann Ltd., £3.90) MR. LITTLEJOHN'S book is a valuable history of Nazi military and quasimilitary organisations but it is not, except superficially, a study of the motives, ideals or aims of the collaborators.
Although at the end of the book one is left amazed by the arcane and recondite knowledge the author has mustered one is also stunned by the little use he has made of it. Where one had hoped for an insight into why honest, godfearing men turned traitor one is left with an encyclopaedic knowledge of cap badges of the twenty odd different kinds of police forces in Holland.
It is, on the whole, a book to