Word: chadness
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After Hitler, in June 1940, created the fiction of an Unoccupied France and headed off French resistance from North Africa, one-third of Africa was at best neutralized, at worst pulled into the Axis orbit. The rest was saved for the United Nations: France's middle African colonies (Chad, Cameroun, Gabon), the rich Belgian Congo, onetime Italian East Africa. From Cape-Town to Cairo and west to Sierra Leone, Africa was preserved for Allied communications...
...Free French at Lake Chad were spoiling for action. Some 1,200 miles to the north, in Libya's Fezzan Desert, the Italians were sitting in fortified strongholds. Over that long trail of rocks and sand the Free French moved to attack. The sun was broiling hot. Sometimes their trucks got stuck in the sand a dozen times in a hundred yards. Cattle driven ahead for fresh meat fell lame, had to be slaughtered...
This is the first novel since Chad Hanna by one of America's better historical novelists, Walter D. Edmonds. In it he puts that immortal American, the Horatio Alger hero, into period pants. The period: the 1830s, in Manhattan...
Heretofore Edmonds' novels have rambled through the past of his native upstate New York, chiefly along the towpaths of the Erie Canal. He put the canal and its folkways into Rome Haul, Erie Water, Chad Hanna. He deserted the ditch only long enough to write his most successful novel, Drums Along the Mohawk. New York State's No. 1 regional historical novelist, he has an ability to bathe his restorations in a bright, bucolic, pre-New York Central freshness...
...such methods Edmonds has secured a following of some 250,000 devoted readers ; a successful Marc Connelly dramatization of Rome Haul (The Farmer Takes a Wife, with Henry Fonda); three Henry Fonda movies (The Farmer Takes a Wife, Chad Hanna, Drums Along the Mohawk). Young Ames, too, looks as if he might some day find himself metamorphosed into Young Fonda. Author Edmonds hopes not. He is worried about the recurrence of Fonda in cinematizations of Edmonds books. "One more," says he, "might make him think he had written them...