Into the Storm

In an issue of Life an American airline pilot suggested that any novelist who wanted to produce a best seller should write about air turbulence, the mysterious menace of the skies that has sent many a passenger-filled jet crashing to its doom. Best seller or no, Soviet novelist Daniil Granin's Into the Storm has sold almost a million copies in his own country. It has appeared in French in Oeuvres et Opinions and been translated into many other languages. Its vivid pages describe not only a daring scientific attempt to control thunderstorms. They also give us an insight into the turbulent lives of Soviet scientists themselves, their enthusiasms, their rivalries, their loves and hates. Granin, who was 46 at the time he wrote this novel in 1965, has written before about scientists (Argument Across Ocean and Those Who Seek). He knows what barriers and pitfalls are encountered in the search for truth and he writes in the conviction that the only way to overcome them is to be outspoken. This is a book that should be read by everyone who wishes to understand the younger Soviet generation.