Adel Hitro

New York: Vantage Press. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. (c.1962). First Edition. Hardcover. NOISBN . [light wear to extremities, a little browning to page edges; jacket shows a little wear along top and bottom edges, a few tiny nicks and tears, one itty-bitty chip at top of front panel, fading to spine]. "A challenging social critique of our times," couched as a tale of an American newspaperman who is sent to a small (fictional) Pacific island ruled by the eponymous dictator. Hitro, an "inspiring orator with the eyes of a saint," promises his people that their island nation will become "a model of kindness in action" -- but at the same time, he uses the threat of "Redheadism" to throw all the red-haired people into internment camps, while secretly developing a bio-weapon (caused by laser beams) called "Rabid Amnesia," with which he plots to -- wait for it -- conquer the world! Nothing about the author's jacket bio or his photo suggests he's a crank, although I do note that he was a Past Master of the French Masonic Lodge, No. 329, of Los Angeles. (It should also be noted that this Mr. Haas is completely unrelated to either Charles F. Haas, who directed a lot of genre TV in the 1950s and 1960s, or to screenwriter-turned-novelist Charlie Haas, who had some pretty good credits from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, among them the sublime GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH.) .