Contrary to the impression given of his organization by the New York Times and

the President of Yale University, Mr. Thomas avers that he wants not to burn books. However, he also wants the New York Times to stop maintaining its more genteel memory hole: "A book by [the Christian evangelist] Dr. Francis Schaeffer... outsold Jane Fonda's Workout Book by two to one, by 300,000 to 150,000, in March of 1982, and yet Miss Fonda's book was number one in the New York Times best-seller list, and Schaeffer's book was relegated to ignominious oblivion ... If you are going to call this thing a best-seller list, then you ought to have best-sellers on it." He and Mrs. Pilpel--although she also wants not to burn books--tend to talk past each other, but there are good moments: WFB: "The Black Plague destroyed a higher percentage of the population of Europe than both world wars, but there we were dealing with a natural menace over which we had no control. But when you get a Hitler, a Stalin, and a Mao Tse-tung, [who] create three societies which between them managed to slaughter people in the tens of millions, you can say that a world that permitted this is a world that's lost

its essential sense of gravity."