DURING ten years abroad for TIME, Hong Kong Bureau Chief Stanley Karnow has done the basic reporting for cover stories all over the globe (most recently: Ferhat Abbas, Liu Shao-chi, Robert Menzies, Hong Kong). He rates his latest -- this week's biography of Laos' King Savang Vatthana and his beleaguered country -- as "undoubtedly the most difficult." The task, says Karnow, was "to create literary order out of an anarchy of anthropological detail, history and legend, incongruous economics, fanciful military information, and political developments that are really complex regional and family rivalries. Trying to put Laos into intelligible language is trying to rationalize the irrational." The rational order came only after a three-man, seven-month job of covering the running story on Laos' little war. TIME Correspondent Jerry Schecter bounced about the front in single-engined planes. Correspondent James Wilde narrowly escaped death when mortar fragments riddled his MG during the battle for Vientiane last December. Fortnight ago he wangled his way into the rebel-held Plaine des Jarres for a startling report on the Communist arms buildup there (TIME, March 10). Karnow himself talked to a vast collection of sources: princes, diplomats, generals, former Viet Minh officers and Pathet Lao guerrillas.

By the time Karnow, Schecter and Wilde put their files together, they had 135 pages of research--and probably the only comprehensive story of Laos' history and current crisis that exists anywhere in the world.

AND time," writes Book Reviewer Ted Kalem on page 100 of this issue, is "a metronome of disaster." Small t, of course. His discussion concerns the savagely humorous themes of the late German playwright Bertolt Brecht, and the entire Books section this week consists of his report on a new edition of seven Brecht plays. Although he has been reviewing books for 13 years, including TIME cover stories on Shakespeare, Boris Pasternak and James Gould Cozzens, 41-year-old, Harvard-educated Ted Kalem is equally comfortable writing about playwrights, the theater and the stock market (he once did a financial advisory letter). He is the author of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's article on Eugene O'Neill. Kalem joined TIME at Christmastime in 1950, same night at a party met Books Researcher Helen Newlin, whom he married in 1953.

With their two children, the Kalems live in "Mark Twain and Henry James country" in Greenwich Village.

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