Word: buchan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lore of Middle-earth into a way of life. In 1966, the first paperback edition of the three volumes of the Ring sold close to 500,000 copies in the U.S. Scholars and critics had at first admired his books, while tracing down literary influences that ranged from Buchan (the chases, the praise of friendship) to Beowulf. Then, with such popularity, the story was denounced as escapist fantasy, its success owlishly attributed to "irrational adulation" and "nonliterary cultural and social phenomena." Attempts to straitjacket Tolkien's story as contemporary allegory were updated too. In the '50s, critics averred...
Still, British Strategic Analyst Alistair Buchan argues: "The U.S. is still the world's great experimental society and it does not behoove Europeans to look down their noses at it because we, for the time being, have more successfully solved some problems of crime and environment. This is simply because American problems are on a much, much larger scale." Echoing Tocqueville, Revel and countless other fascinated tourists to the New World, Switzerland's Georges-Henri Martin, editor of La Tribune de Geneve, notes: "America is still our model, for better or worse. What happens there, we find, comes...
...less equestrian suspense stories that are also novels of métier and manners. His best books are Dead Cert (the first, written in 1962), Nerve (1964), For Kicks (1965), Odds Against (1966) and Forfeit (1969). At that level he belongs in the company of writers like John Buchan, who created a highly personal genre and then used it, beyond sheer entertainment, to express a lifetime's accumulation of knowledge and affection...
...ride-for-life, of course, is a horsebound version of those great chases across the English countryside in which Buchan heroes, and their heirs and assigns, foiled pursuit in everything from Bentleys to borrowed bicycles. The true Francis classic (Dead Cert), pitted the jockey hero, up on a splendid horse named Admiral, against the forces of darkness who chivvied him about in a swarm of radio taxis. By contrast, Bonecrack's ride is modest. The trainer, galloping prodigally crosscountry on his best racer, tries to head off the sulky boy-jockey from inadvertent assassination by one of his Mafia...