Word: deere
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...BARKING DEER by JONATHAN RUBIN 335 pages. George Braziller...
...Lumley: "The discovery of such pebble tools-man's oldest, most primitive tools-establishes for the first time the existence of a 'pebble culture' in Europe." He and his wife also discovered the teeth and bones of elephants, lions, panthers, bears, cheetahs, hyenas, wolves, porcupines, deer and antelope, rhinos, hippos, even seals and whales, and those animals had obviously been brought to the cave by its manlike inhabitants. De Lumley doubts that the cave dwellers were good hunters or fishermen; the condition of the animals' teeth and jaws indicates that they were very old. Says...
...beaches near by, where thousands once stood to cheer man's reach to the moon, loggerhead turtles have taken over again. Rattlesnakes sun themselves on the empty launching pads lining the cape. Small white-tailed deer dart into clearings to feed, and bull alligators bellow in vain for the battalions of space workers who used to feed them marshmallows and jelly doughnuts. On Pad 19, from which Gemini astronauts rose on ten missions to perfect the techniques of rendezvous and docking, the bright orange tower lies useless, flat on its back. The once-gleaming white room where Gemini spacemen...
...Barking Deer isn't a good novel. The completeness of the catastrophe seems a little contrived, and so does a lot of the rest of the plot. The whole book is fairly badly written, with uniformly short, monotonous sentences that often lack verbs. Sometimes this seems to be an attempt at ironic distancing--for instance, Rubin sometimes tries without success to tell us what Vietnamese think Americans think Vietnamese are thinking--but most times it seems to be just the way Rubin writes. Partly as a result of his syntax and partly because of the childish-sounding exclamations with which...
HADEO'S LEGEND SUGGESTS possible inadequacy in Rubin's idea of Vietnam as a whole, too. He carefully draws parallels between the two sides in the conflict: the legendary barking deer of the title, for instance, was torn apart by an eagle and a tiger; and in two scenes that frame Rubin's main story, a North Vietnamese and an American colonel seek reassurance against overly callous commanding officers from photographs of their countries' faraway presidents. But Rubin's own account undercuts the parallelism--it's hard to imagine anyone saying of Lyndon Johnson, as he says...