[Romain Gary's] books ring with the echo of a profoundly Russian, if not Manichean, bafflement before the spectacle of a world bristling with new satanic inventions—atomic bombs, brain washing, concentration camps.

This deep sense of protest is as evident as ever in his latest book, "Promise at Dawn," which opens with an imaginary evocation of the grinning gods of stupidity, dogmatic truth, mediocrity and servility. Its original title was to have been "La Lutte Pour l'Honneur"—"the struggle for honor"—but no one needs to know it to realize that this romanticized autobiography is something more than a "life with mother" story. It is the story of a young boy's endeavor to achieve manhood in an age of crumbling values and revolutionary upheaval, and it explains, more explicitly and movingly than Gary has ever done before, why his books are so haunted by a sense of solitude...