A World to Win

[Spoiler Alert: transcribed from this edition's original dust jacket] At the opening of this story—in Vichy in 1940—Lanny Budd has been the intimate of the world's great—famous and notorious—for more than twenty years. Outwardly the friend and confidant of the Nazi and fascist gangsters, this secret agent of Franklin D. Roosevelt is one of the most amazing figures in modern fiction. Between his visit to Laval in 1940 and his interview with Stalin in 1942, his encounters with history in this book involve him in a series of unparalleled adventures. He is captured by French patriots who think him a Nazi agent, and has a narrow escape. He is thrown out of England because of his involvement in Hess's flight to Scotland. In America, too, he ferrets out fascist activities and even uncovers a plot against the life of the President, a plot which came ominously close to fulfillment.

A high spot in A World to Win is Lanny's concern with the beginnings of the atomic bomb. After preliminary study with Einstein himself—including some delightful interludes of Mozart duets with the physicist—he departs on his most dangerous mission, which ends in the icy waters of the Arctic. A fabulous cruise through the Pacific on a luxury yacht brings him to Hong Kong on December 7, 1941, where he is once more in the center of the whirlwind. There follows a laborious journey through China, a stay in war-torn Yenan, and refuge in friendly Russia. The book concludes with a vivid personality sketch of Stalin, and with Lanny's audience with that not-so-inscrutable leader.

Here is more than mere plotting; here is history coming to life, the dramatic days through which we have just lived made even more memorable in Sinclair's epic narrative of our own time, of which this is the seventh novel. As with each book in the series, this one can be enjoyed for its own separate story, or as part of the sweeping account of an era.