SOURCE: "Pearl Buck's New Novel a Tour de Force," in Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books, May 3, 1959, p. 1.

In the following review, Butcher calls Buck's Command the Morning "one of the most memorable and rewarding reading experiences of our day."

The title of this commanding novel [Command the Morning] by our country's first woman to receive the Nobel award in literature, comes from the Bible: "The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said … 'Hast thou commanded the morning?'" The question implied in these unforgettable pages is one which every thinking human being must be asking: Did the discovery of atomic power command the morning or the night of mankind?

This is a novel about the most past-shattering and future-building period of modern times, the months of secret research which culminated in the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Were those months to destroy or...