true conservative, as Bradford depictsnhim, teaches imperfect men to make donin a necessarily imperfect world. In thenOld South statesmen like the Delawarenplanter, John Dickinson, defended ansociety founded on the realistic politicalngoals of ensuring tranquility and protectingnproperty. According to Bradford,nthe modern state would justify itsnexistence by returning to similar pursuits.n(PG) nnWho Did What?nVotjech Mastny: Russia’s Road tonthe Cold War; Columbia UniversitynPress; New York.nThis is an excellent study of Sovietnforeign policy from the German attacknin June 1941 through the PotsdamnConference of July 1945, with a finenintroduction dealing with Soviet policynbetween the World Wars, and Tsaristnpolicy before 1917. Mastny s principalncontribution is his use of recently availablenEastern European communistnsources. While it is not always easy tonagree with his interpretations, they areninvariably well argued.nMastny stresses, perhaps overstresses,nthe uncertainty of Stalin’s policy beforenthe Normandy invasion and to a lessernextent until the end of the Europeannwar. Though Stalin’s intentions werenbasically aggressive, Mastny thinks thatnhe found it hard to gauge the amount ofnresistance to be expected from thenWestern powers. Mastny thinks he alsonfeared that the West would not carrynout its promise to invade France. For anperiod in 1943 he toyed with the possibilitynof reaching a separate peace withnGermany. Ironically, the West’snattempts to reach a modus vivendi withnStalin merely provoked him to gonfurther.nMastny’s accounts of the role ofn”sphere-of-influence” concepts, relationsnbetween the Czechoslovak government-in-exilenand the Soviets, and thenYalta conference are particularly ad­nmirable. This reviewer doubts thatnStalin was as fearful of a Western refusalnto invade France as Mastny believes,nor that Stalin’s peace feelers tonthe nazis were really very serious. ButnNahas’s WarningnGabriel G. Nahas: Keep Off thenGrass; Pergamon Press; New York.nThis book will tell you everythingnyou need to know about marijuana, andn—if you like to get high—more thannyou want to hear. Dr. Nahas, a researchnpharmacologist at Columbia University,nexplains the history of marijuananand tells how the weed really works:nand the results bode ill for any user whontreasures his brain, DNA or futurenprogeny.nNahas presents a well-written narrativenof his journeys to Morocco, hisnwork with world-class scientists, andnthe continual brush-off which theirnDefying HistorynMircea Eliade: The forbidden Forest;ntranslated from Romanian bynMac Linscott Rickettsand Mary ParknStevenson; University of Notre DamenPress; Notre Dame, Indiana and London.nBoth fiction and epic, The ForbiddennForest is an exceptional book about warnand peace. Not unlike the Russian masterpiecenbearing that title, Eliade’s novelntranscends the particulars of its subjectnmatter—in this case, Romania at thenoutset of the Second World War—tonexplore the agonies of man’s condition,nhis inevitable recourse to violence as henfails to understand others and, above all,nhimself. At once myth and reality. ThenForbidden Forest sets out to “found annew world”—which is yet the world asnwe know it but also the world beyondnappearance, the much more permanentnworld of dream and symbol. The centralncharacter of the novel, Stefan Viziru,nnnRussia’s Road to the Cold War is undoubtedlyna major contribution to thenliterature of wartime diplomacy and thenCold War, one that future researchersnwill find indispensable. (AJL) Dnresearch got from the social scientistsnand media types who were looking fornbetter news for the dopers in their entourage.nAgain and again, “only thosensections of the reports favorable to thennotion that marijuana is a harmless drugnwere emphasized.” The rest will be ignorednby a good portion of the populationnof the Western world, who seemnintent on blowing their minds to thentune of the “good news” manufacturednby pseudointellectual hustlers whonshape the American popular culture accordingnto the principle that if the factsnprove them wrong—the worse for thenfacts. (CM) Dninhabits them both, painfully consciousnof his inability to attain a cosmos ofngenuine serenity. The result, evidently,nis a paradox: desiring to escape desire,nViziru succumbs to it by loving passionatelyntwo women, hurting them bothneven as he wants nothing so much as tonmake them both supremely happy;nyearning to escape history he is doomednto live it fully—jailed on mistakenncharges, caught in the flames of London,nand finally losing his wife and babynwithout a trace in a bombardment ofnBucharest. Viziru, an existential herontoo keenly alive to opt for nihilism, isnyet hopelessly aware of his need tonescape hopelessness itself, to surrenderncircumstances and contingency for ancorner of infinity. Except that infinitynmust come in finite packages: a secretnroom, colors on an unfinished painting,na car that might transport him and hisnlady into another universe but is stillnMMHHHHiainMarch April 1980n