Word: figs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stop the Mau Mau, but his own arrest had unleashed the bloody uprisings. Like Archbishop Makarios on Cyprus, he disowned but failed to condemn terror. "I did as much as I could," said he. "I told my people to let the Mau Mau disappear like the roots of the fig tree...
...nervous government seized 34 nationalists, banned an extremist white-settler newspaper as well as Tom Mboya's Uhuru (Freedom), which has been playing up Kenyatta as a national hero. The government insists that Kenyatta's simile was not meant to be innocent: the roots of the fig tree seem to disappear only because they go so deep...
...really quiet American. Joe Bellman, who looks like "Edward Gibbon, parboiled," has not opened a book in 20 years, simply lolls in the sea and sun, and only worries how his next meal is coming, culinarily speaking. When the doctored fruit reaches grapefruit-size, Gourmet Joe poaches a fig. "This is how things tasted to Adam," he tells his maid delightedly, "before Eve introduced him to ignobler pleasures and spoiled his palate for ever more...
...like Adam's apple, Wesley's fig has an unforeseen side effect: it is an aphrodisiac. The late naughty-witted Thorne (Turnabout) Smith might have fashioned some of the priapic victories that follow. Countesses, nurses and simple country girls are figtimized. When the secret gets out, it is an affair of church and state. Charges of scandal and nepotism rock the Vatican. After a sly display of irreverence, Author Menen turns soberside to point an improbably tedious moral: "Scientists are, by and large, up to no good . . . We stand in danger of having our lives twisted, our souls...
Except for this flatulent postscript, Author Menen's sprightly wit and stylish prose make The Fig Tree the choicest summer reading of the winter...