Word: fatherly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Layers of Fat. Ralph Cordiner has always made good use of his time. He was born in 1900 on his father's 1,280-acre wheat farm near Walla Walla, Wash., just eight years after a genial Quaker named Charles A. Coffin merged two electrical firms to found General Electric. Cordiner went to small Whitman College, where he worked his way through school by doing odd jobs and selling wooden-paddle washing machines for the Pacific Power & Light Co. He went to work for Pacific Power after graduation, became such a star salesman that he was soon lured away...
...Boris Morros had an advantage in Soviet eyes: his family was still in Russia. Morros would have liked to spring his father from the "frozen prison" of the Soviet Union, but as it was, he could not even get food packages through to him. All this changed one day in 1936 when a seedy character who called himself Edward Herbert sidled backstage at Paramount and said he could fix things so that Morros Sr. would get his hampers. After the wheedling and finagling came the bullying, and Morros found himself being hectored by "Herbert," now a foul-mouthed drunken...
...barred by wire and empty oil drums, with Indian pickets waving slogans -MISSIONARIES GO HOME. Her sister and brother-in-law tell the story behind the commotion. Eight years before, they adopted an unwanted, illegitimate Indian infant and raised him as one of their own family. Now the Indian father, a merchant, is demanding him back, and missionaries and merchants are grappling in a legal battle that dredges up the deepest, ugliest emotions...
...story of this battle is not only the $10,000 Harper Prize Novel of 1959 but something of a prize in itself. Author White was born on an Indian hill station, where his American father was a missionary; as a result, he speaks with the tongues of both Indians and Americans. Elephant Hill's interest and readability come partly from White's clear, simple style and partly from his understanding of just what the conflict means in the minds and hearts of the antagonists...
...missionaries' case is short and plain: they have every moral right, as well as a good legal one, to keep the child. But Author White sympathetically presents the Indian father's case. Alagarsami, the merchant, is not an independent man but an obligated member of a tradition-bound family. Eight years before, he was uninterested in the fruit of his night out with a servant girl; since then his wife has died childless, and Alagarsami must get himself an heir or see his birthright handed to a relative. In his own mind Alagarsami is battling for Mother India...