Word: beckers
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...OUTCASTS by Stephen Becker. 240 pages. Atheneum...
Harvard-educated Stephen Becker, 39, is a fiddle-footed traveler with a facile pen. He has lived in China, France, Alaska and the Guianas and supported himself as a translator, biographer, historian, and novelist (A Covenant with Death). Recently he has shown signs of settling down-near Katonah, N.Y., and as a novelist. In this newest and best of his books, he handles a Conradian theme with commendable assurance...
...Becker's hero is Engineer Bernard Morrison, who has built many things but never a bridge. At 43, he finally gets his chance. His bridge must span a gorge at the end of an unbuilt road in the South American Guianas. Morrison is vexed that neither bridge nor road seems to go anywhere. "Never mind," says his American boss. "Just build a bridge...
Like Conrad, Becker is fascinated by the tactical struggles of daily life, the strategic deployments that bring one man success and another failure. Philips will go far in his nation, but he remains a man without friends. Morrison wants passionately the pastoral simplicity he sees in the Lani, but it is almost his undoing when he learns the hard way that syphilis is endemic among the bush people. Becker has filled his story with lush scenery and pungent characters and built it as solidly as Morrison's bridge...
Quietly pleased by his classroom support, Becker is weighing the unusual offer against bids for his services from other schools around the country. Although impressed by such overwhelming student support for a good teacher, Berkeley officials are reluctant to interfere with the faculty's exclusive right to select members of its staff. If no room for Becker can be found in any of Cal's departments, the university apparently has no objection to his staying on to give noncredit courses, as what one official calls "an educational consultant" to the students...