SOURCE: "Modern Mind," in New York Herald Tribune Book Review, June 3, 1951, p. 11.

Morton is an Austrian-born American novelist, historian, biographer, critic, and educator. In the following mixed review, he finds that while The World Above is rich in evocative details and acute observations, Polonsky's characters become conduits for a dogmatic political philosophy that he feels overshadows the literary merits of the novel.

[The World Above] is a huge, restless book attempting to give scope to the spiritual bafflement which has overtaken Western civilization today. Mr. Polonsky has charged—and partially smothered—his second novel with much of the modern mind's burden.

The central figure is a young psychiatrist named Carl Myers. From the very outset we find him in an intensely up-to-date dilemma: brilliant but impoverished, he strives for the objectivity and humanitarianism of science in a ferociously competitive climate. The story of his double-edged fight—for worldly...