Books: After Victory

A BELL FOR ADANO—John Hersey— Knopf ($2.50).

This is a first novel. Angry and intense, it is half sharp-eyed, unsparing war reporting and half fast-moving, self-consciously hard-boiled fiction. It is the story of what happens behind the lines of a typical Italian town in the confused interlude between war and reconstruction— when the Germans have been driven out and the Allies have come in, when the fascists are out of office but the civilian governments have not yet been set up, and when the high aims for which the war was fought disappear...