When the body of CBS newsman George Polk was found floating in Salonika Bay on May 16, 1948, the Greek government, fearing loss of U.S. aid in the civil war between the Greek Army and Communist-led guerrillas, went to great lengths to divert suspicion from the rightist regime and lay the blame on the left. Several investigations were launched, including one led by former OSS chief General William ``Wild Bill'' Donovan. Eventually the government in Athens produced a suspect, Salonika journalist Gregory Slaktopoulos, whose confession led to his trial and conviction and placed the blame for the murder squarely on the Communists. Marton's ( Wallenberg ) captivating, solidly researched inquiry presents three major arguments. First, she contends, the ``confession,'' obtained under torture, was false. Second, Polk, an outspoken critic of the royalist regime, probably doomed himself by threatening to expose its corruption. Third, investigators, including Donovan, conspired to cover up rightist sanction of the murder. The royalist regime, she concludes, in fact arranged Polk's death. Illustrations. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

This is the second recent book about the murder of George Polk in Greece in 1948. Marton's agrees with Edmund Keeley's The Salonika Bay Murder (LJ 6/1/89) that journalists and the U.S., British, and Greek governments--anxious to bolster the unstable Greek government against a Communist takeover--engineered a cover-up implicating Communist guerrillas, which led to the deliberate conviction of an innocent man. Marton's more emotional account gives greater attention to Polk's own history and less to the internal Greek picture. Because the two accounts are quite different in emphasis and style and each contains some unique material, large research collections need both. But Marton's version is much more readable and clear (perhaps clearer than the internal Greek picture ever was) and is a much better choice for the general reader. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/90.-- Nancy C. Cridland, Indiana Univ. Libs., Bloomington (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.