One of the most difficult tasks any author can perform is to write a book that cannot be put down once one has started reading it—particularly when its theme is a pitiable cry in a wilderness. Farley Mowat has succeeded in achieving this with "The Desperate People,"… a well-written, sensitive, and lucid account of one of the most horrible sidelights of modern history.

It is hard, if not impossible, even to attempt to review a book when its contents raise your most elemental passions to such a white heat that you find tears in your eyes over and over again—tears as much of frustration as of horror and fury. Yet this book was never by the wildest stretch of imagination intended as a tear-jerker. To the contrary, it is a straightforward report and documented by the author with tape-recordings of the accounts of those persons whose...