Books: Short Notices: Mar. 29, 1968

END OF A MISSION by Heinrich Boll. 207 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.95.

Postwar German fiction has its mea culpa school, its black-humor crowd and its how-did-it-happen-to-us hand wringers. Heinrich Boll (Billiards at Half-Past Nine) constitutes a school of his own. His writing skills seem at first oldfashioned, but they always turn out to be just right for hitting his targets: hypocrisy, his countrymen's haste to forget the Hitlerite period, the greed of the fat-cat crowd. In this short caper, set in today's Rhineland, a German army Jeep is burned by an intelligent young soldier with the active help of his equally intelligent father. The act is deliberate and they offer no defense at their trial. German courtroom justice, the army, the press and small-town morality are all lethally and satirically observed. The criminals come off well because even their apparently senseless act makes more sense than the system. Burning the Jeep is a Happening, a symbolic work of art. Their point, and Boll's, is plain: sane men are beginning to find their bureaucratic world intolerable.

UFOs-IDENTIFIED by Philip J. Klass. 290 pages. Random House. $6.95.

To most flying-saucer buffs, the frequent appearance of Unidentified Flying Objects near power lines is only natural; the UFOs, so the stories go, are either attempting to sabotage the power system or are merely recharging their batteries. To Author Klass, a former electrical engineer who is now an editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology, there is a more logical answer: the power lines themselves may actually create UFOs in the form of coronas—clouds of glowing, ionized air that can form in intense electrical fields.

In this intelligently written and rational book (a rare phenomenon in UFO literature), Klass describes the scientific detective work that led him to decide on the probable cause of most previously unexplained UFO sightings. The enigmatic, incandescent objects, he concludes, are really a family of atmospheric phenomena that include not only coronas but ball lightning, St. Elmo's fire and "Foo Fighters," the same luminous globs that tailed World War II military aircraft. Klass seems resigned to the fact that it will take more than his well-documented evidence to shake dedicated saucer believers out of their state of UFOria.

THE THREE SUITORS by Richard Jones. 312 pages. Little, Brown. $6.