Brian Inglis's Roger Casement (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $8.95) is an engrossing life of the Irish patriot who perished on the scaffold in 1916. An Ulsterman in the British Foreign Service, Casement was knighted for his exposure of King Leopold's nefarious

the cause of Irish indebecame, as

pendence

Inglis calls it, “an absorbing passion."

When the war came, he saw an opportunity for the "cause,” but his attempt to get help from the Germans, who had other irons in the fire, failed, and when he tried to get back to Ireland to stop the planned uprising, he was caught. The British staged a full-dress trial to make an example of him. Bernard Shaw and others pointed out that they would only make him a hero and martyr, but they went ahead anyway and did exactly that.

This is a temperate, wellbalanced book. The notorious homosexual entries in Casement's diaries are treated unsensationally and in proper perspective. His proclivity, successfully concealed until passages from the diaries were leaked at the time of the trial, had nothing to do with what makes him important in history.

Roger Casement (1915) program of forced labor in the Belgian Congo. When the Foreign Office failed to act as vigorously as he thought it should, his frustrated idealism and sincere involvement in the cause of the natives led to disillusionment. Then the "incorrigible Irishman" in him took over and what had been a "congenial hobby"