John Hersey suffered from the lack of serious critical attention through much of his career, and the quality of his work is uneven. Some of his books do repay careful study, however. The Call is possibly the best of his fictional works. He brings to it the same interests in contemporary history that characterize most of his books. It also shows his prose style at its best. It is about Christian workers in a foreign land, but is never preachy, a charge frequently made against Hersey's books. Possibly, he was in certain ways a sort of lay preacher. Like many contemporary writers he found much in twentieth-century history repellent. A discussion might pursue the question: Do strong moral concerns make a book less valuable than a work which remains neutral to such considerations?

Another approach might be: Was the presence in foreign countries of men and...