Word: books
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...craftswomanly short story writer, Miss Arkin in this book has not so much composed a novel as arranged a tableau, then methodically violated it with sudden disasters. Give Miss Arkin a road and she'll give you an accident. Give her a decent storm and she'll burn at least one house down. Give her a lovable set of old bones and bingo, bango, she'll supply a fatal disease and buy the funeral...
...years ago, an unheralded novel called Night Falls on the City became a surprise bestseller in England and America. The city was Vienna during its long eclipse from the Anschluss to the Russian occupation in 1945. The book's scenes shifted with enough suspense to satisfy Dickens himself; its characters were successful artists, intellectuals, politicians. Yet much of the novel's appeal came from Sarah Gainham's portrait of the city itself and a settled, civilized society slowly being corrupted, within and without, by the poisonous fear and protective selfishness unleashed by the Nazi presence...
Night Falls on the City, it turns out, was the first part of an intended trilogy. Gainham's new book covers the postwar years until 1951. This time, unfortunately, she has broken the narrative rules she seemed to have mastered in the first book. She picks up two of her best characters, Actress Julia Homburg and Newspaper Editor Georg Kerenyi. But as if no longer trusting them to carry the story, she has invented a tepid narrator, a British security officer named Robert Inglis, and laid on a mystery-writer's plot that turns...
Early in the book, Inglis witnesses enough questionable behavior in a colleague to warrant an urgent report. Instead, by vacillating and torturing his conscience, he manages to avoid any action until after page 300. "You're so bloody subtle, Robert," grumbles another character. But Robert, for all his interlocking scruples, is like one of Jane Austen's sensibility-struck young girls, finally a figure...
Veteran New York Times Reporter Joseph Durso has written a literate book full of the deeds and diamond-in-the-rough doings of his hero. Sometimes he threatens to drown the baseball legend in cultural asides and long swatches of Americana. McGraw himself, however, proves a hard man to put down...