Postwar Commonwealth

WORLDS BEGINNING--Robert Ardrey --Duell, Sloan & Pearce ($2.50).

Fifteen years after World War II, the U.S. was bankrupt. Industry had not exported so much as a mousetrap since the rest of the world had gone all out for synthetics and self-sufficiency. Unemployment and race riots swept the country. A terrible apathy descended upon the people of America ("Yes," sighed a visiting Chinese, "that's how my people were for 1,000 years"). No one guessed that a new world was just around the corner.

The Davis brothers were its founders. Ben Davis invented a synthetic wire that could replace copper wire. George Davis figured a way to produce it at one-fifth the current price. But their most novel creation was the Trans-Pecos Chemical Com., which was not a company or a corporation but a "commonwealth."

Trans-Pecos "participation ownership" was a sensation. Labor called it an N.A.M. plot to smash the unions. Business called it a communist revolution. Communists denounced it as a bourgeois counterrevolution. Goons and saboteurs beat up the workers and tried to wreck the plant. But "in the nick of time, like the U.S. cavalry in an oldtime Western film, the common wealth idea . . . storm[ed] the national scene and . . . rescued a civilization from the running clutch of death." Young (35) Author Ardrey 's first novel (his play Thunder Rock has just appeared as a British cinema -- TIME, Sept. 25) is crowded with cliches ("I get out the old and battered typewriter") and gilt-edged platitudes ("There are things of beauty in the world of a child that cannot be carried on into man's estate"). But it has enough drama and sparkle to be entertaining in spite of its lurid economics.

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