A HOLE IN THE WORLD; An American Boyhood <i> By Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster: $19.95.; 224 pp.) </i>

” . . . must be read through tears--the reader’s and the writer’s--and it must be acknowledged as as powerful a bearing of witness, as dark a story of cruelty, as redemptive a proclamation of the soul’s strength as we have been given in a long time.”