Mary McCarthy went to North Vietnam for two-&-a-half weeks in March to report, &, like Harrison Salisbury, to reveal & verify; she saw the manhole shelters in the sidewalk (tho no one acknowledged using them, preferring communal facilities), a remote Catholic hamlet in ruins, victims of zigzag pellets from cluster bombs; she saw everywhere determination to endure the shelters, the prominence given to growth statistics, the dispersal of schools, hospitals, plants; she saw moreover a return to 1st principles (folk medicine, bamboo); she saw, in substance, what she expected to see. Except in herself; the scrupulous observer was working at her own salvation, trying to assuage her discomfiture with the war but in assuming the role of witness, & implicitly of judge, she had found a further discomfiture--the North Vietnamese value formulation, both guileless & jargon-ridden. (A fascinating interview with Prime Minister Pham Ban Dong substantiates the determination to preserve Vietnamese traditions & the traditions of socialism.) McCarthy has, as always, a sharp eye for the tangible, an astute awareness of the nuances of speech, a wide field of historic referral; she has also, here, no comfort for those who take comfort in certitudes.--Kirkus