The Stockade
by .Little, Brown, $3.00.
The setting of this taut, tough first novel is a Pacific island at the end of World War II. A platoon of Marines commanded by a hard-bitten, unthinking Lieutenant is guarding some 5000 Okinawans and Koreans, impressed into labor battalions by the defeated enemy, and now packed into a stockade. Only the platoon’s doctor senses that Lieutenant Rossi’s callous handling of “the gooks” is breeding a sinister situation in the stockade; ami he cannot avert the eventual disaster. Lamott’s fast-moving story is a timely minor drama symbolizing the nemesis that the white man’s color prejudice invites in Asia.