Preview of The Call Summary:

The title of this novel, The Call, indicates one of its themes. Many young Americans like David Treadup were convinced that God was directing them to go to China. Once in the place where God had sent them, many must have wondered why their work was so unrewarding. Treadup, late in his life, interred by the Japanese and separated from his vocation decided that he had not really been serving God. He was not even certain any longer that God existed.

Treadup became an educator, and like Hersey himself, this became a lifelong concern. Hersey attended private schools, but became convinced that unless that great reservoir of intelligence in the American population was somehow tapped, the progress of the country would suffer. Everywhere the needs of bright students were slighted. In 1959 Hersey wrote a twenty-eight-page pamphlet for the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Intelligence, Choice, and Consent, in which he...